Feeding the Demons (31 page)

I went upstairs to get ready for the dinner. There was no food for the girls so I drove to the corner shop and got some eggs and made scrambled eggs for them. Then I got dressed to go out to the dinner and left the house at about seven-thirty. Marianne was up. I stayed at the dinner until about ten-thirty and drove to the house, arriving there at eleven o’clock. I parked my car and went inside. I went into the dining room and found Marianne lying in the
corner near the french doors, which were open. She had severe head injuries and had lost a lot of blood. There was a faint, stringy pulse. I rang Emergency and waited for the ambulance to arrive. They said they would contact the police. I cradled Marianne in my arms and she coughed blood onto me. She was not conscious. Gemma came in and I told her your mother is hurt and to go next door and tell Mrs Moresby to come over. I went with Marianne in the ambulance and stayed until the surgeon came out and said my wife had died. I came home and Mrs Moresby is here staying the night with us. The police have just been and taken my clothes. I don’t know anyone who would want to kill my wife and that is what I told them.

Steve put the statement down flat on the table. ‘Notice that Marianne only becomes his wife when she’s dead. And also notice how in the last few sentences he has moved away from the past tense—the tense of commitment.’

Kit said nothing. She had heard enough to work it out. She stood up and walked to the large sliding glass doors. It wasn’t possible to see anything outside. Rain slanted against the glass and she remembered a terrible storm after their mother’s death and trying to comfort Gemma with a game of watching raindrops race each other down a casement window. Steve picked up a letter that was with the report. ‘I’ll read you what Locky wrote to Gemma.’

Taken as a whole, there are so many signals of deception that the statement is very doubtful. There are no
emotions
in this statement. In a statement that reflects the truth, we expect that emotions will show up because language reflects reality. I am sorry to have to tell you that your father’s statement reveals considerable involvement in the death of your mother. If I had been in a position to interview this man, I would have taken certain directions in my questioning.

‘It must be hard for you to hear this,’ said Steve.

‘I always thought he did it,’ she said. ‘I remember the terrible fights.’

‘Do you want me to read the rest of Locky’s letter?’ Kit nodded. Steve read:

It is certainly not my job to interpret anything other than the language of this statement. But here I’m going to conjecture. I wonder if the subject somehow induced that patient to kill his wife, perhaps by money, perhaps in some other, subtler way while he was away at the university dinner. Then he could say quite truthfully that he came home and found her dying. And I’m convinced that the decision to have her killed happened during that phone call to his wife. Because that’s the point, in his mind at least, that the events of the night started. Which is why he unconsciously started his account of her death at that spot.

‘Well,’ said Steve. ‘There it is. I don’t envy you the job of telling Gemma. It was very important to her that her father was innocent.’

‘It was,’ said Kit. ‘She will be terribly hurt. It’s something she’s held on to all her life. And it looked like she was right. Especially after the bloodstain expert had studied the crime scene pictures and said that they supported our father’s account.’ She felt a deep sadness. Now I have to deal with this huge fact about my father. Again. About my family. The bloodstain evidence was true as far as it went. Her father
had
come home to find his wife dying. But her father had also caused her to
be
dying in the first place. ‘It’s not really a shock to me,’ she said. ‘I’m surprised at the depth of the sadness I feel just now.’

‘It must have been a most terrible situation for you and your sister, the events of that night.’ Kit nodded. ‘And the repercussions would have gone on for many years,’ Steve said.

‘Are still going on,’ said Kit. ‘Angry ghosts are still around us.’ She looked up at Steve, who was standing against the sliding doors with rain lashing the glass behind him. ‘Gemma’s been involved in an investigation that very nearly ended up with me dead earlier tonight.’ And she told him what had happened to her and about Larry Hagen’s eventual death.

‘Good on her,’ Steve said, and Kit could read his confusion, his love and his anger with her sister.

•

After he’d gone, Kit sat thinking. I want to confront my father with this, she thought. I want to hear him confirm it. He’s served his time, but he must come clean with his daughters. For Gemma’s sake. For my sake. Somehow, she knew she could let it go if he owned up. She thought of Will and what he’d said. ‘You were honest about your part in it,’ he’d said. ‘And that forced me to look at mine.’ Their father must see the continuing damage he would cause if he refused to admit the truth. She would contact him tomorrow. But at that moment, she stretched out on the lounge bed, too exhausted by the day’s events to do anything but sleep.

Gemma stood in Richard’s apartment watching a huge container vessel eclipse the rainstreaked lights of the harbour. The rain had eased off in the last half hour and she was suddenly exhausted. The wound on her arm throbbed, working its way past the analgesics. I really need to be home, she thought. Get back to Kit, see how she’s coping with coming up against Larry Hagen. Stupid Bruno and his Hogan/Hagen blunder had almost caused Kit’s death. It’s been a big day for a little surveillance operator. Behind her, the red flowers stood dramatically on a low table near the huge oil painting on the western wall of Richard’s unit. They were the perfect choice for his sombre room; a flash of fire in the darkness, Gemma thought, sipping her drink.

A dramatic black and gold candle shed soft light on the meal they’d just eaten together. He’d had a delicious Thai meal delivered and Gemma had eaten hungrily, glad her back was turned to the Melanesian deity of the enormous donger. Richard had changed into a soft linen shirt and dark slacks and wore Japanese-style slippers made of woven straw and cotton. He looked completely relaxed. She’d accepted his invitation to take her shoes off at the door, and now enjoyed the feel of luxurious carpet pile against her bare feet as she sat on the floor, her back and shoulders comfortable against the leather lounge behind her.

‘It was very difficult,’ Richard was saying from where he sat to her left, ‘being the eldest son of migrants. I had to translate everything for them for years. In some ways, I was the man of the house. It made my father very angry. My mother was .
 
.
 
.’ He paused. ‘Things were very difficult at one stage,’ he resumed. ‘Things happened .
 
.
 
.’ His voice trailed away again as if he were lost in some memory of past misery. ‘What about your father?’ he said. ‘Have you definitely decided what you’re going to do about him?’

She considered. ‘I have to try to clear his name,’ she said. ‘Even though he doesn’t want me to.’

‘But surely,’ he said, ‘if it concerns him, he has some rights in the matter.’

‘If I’m honest,’ she said, ‘I have to admit it concerns him more than it concerns me.’ She blinked and her head felt light, her wound painful. ‘And now I have new evidence that proves his innocence,’ she said. The haziness in her head threatened to fog her up completely. ‘I’ll have to go home,’ she said, turning to him. She saw him clearly in his own setting and wondered whether she really wanted to see him again. He represented age and security to her and they were father things, she knew. I need a partner who is right for me, she thought. Someone like Steve.

‘Of course,’ he was saying. ‘I’ll take you now.’ She waited while he disappeared into another room, presumably to get his jacket. Gemma’s eyes wandered to the red flowers that were so perfect in this room. They matched everything exquisitely. There was no doubt that Richard Cross had an artist’s eye. He had a red Japanese bridge over a water lily lake out at his factory just like Monet had in his garden. The flowers in his apartment matched exactly the red in the dark and dominating oil painting. ‘What’s a decor?’ the Ratbag had asked her. The blue and white and gold flowers had been perfect, too. He couldn’t help himself from getting it right.
Except that when he’d sent those anonymous flowers, he hadn’t been to her place, couldn’t have known what her living room looked like.

Gemma’s body suddenly stiffened in automatic defence. How had he known what the inside of her place looked like? Only a few people in the world knew that. He’d chosen her little outfit to secure his warehouses, factory and office, instead of one of the big operations who were local to him at Campbelltown. She’d been flattered. Despite her exhaustion, alarm bells were ringing. He wasn’t interested in her at all. He was a would-be politician and she’d fallen for his charm. He’s going to put something on me, she thought. He’s groomed me and cultivated me and now he’s going to use me. Maybe something illegal in the surveillance line. Getting dirt on a political rival. Gemma, you’re a goose, a vain and foolish goose.

Richard Cross was opening the doors to the balcony, splashing barefoot through the puddles to where his umbrella had blown into the corner. Gemma frowned. Something was wrong. The powerful sensor light should have come on and it hadn’t. Not only had she fallen for the work he’d put in on her, the lights she and Noel had installed weren’t even working properly. She saw Richard through the rainstreaked glass moving back and forwards, trying to activate it. Damn it, she thought. How embarrassing. Flowers and flattery and I walk straight in. Someone was banging on the front door.

‘There’s someone at your door,’ Gemma called out. Richard was standing in front of the sensor unit under the powerful light, waving his hand to and fro around it, trying to activate it. The banging became louder. Richard came back inside, smiling and shaking his head.

‘That light, she no go,’ he said playfully, and Gemma remembered the slight trace of accent. He heard the loud banging on the door. ‘Who could that be?’ he said. She stood there, waiting for him to attend to his visitor while he went to the door and squinted through the spyhole. When he turned back, his face was ashen.

‘What is it?’ she asked. He seemed to be thinking on his feet; she could see the racing of his mind reflected on his face as it moved through a series of strange expressions, the colour coming and going.

Real fear was tightening her chest, interfering with her breathing. And there was something niggling. Suddenly, he vanished into another room and came out again. Gemma stared at what he was holding in his right hand, pointed directly at her. Her mind was refusing to believe what her eyes were seeing.

She saw Richard Cross’s thumb move to push the safety off. The aggressive and distinctive Uzi pistol with its ugly, squashed barrel is a weapon that you never forget. It should be fired two-handed, she remembered, even though it sits firmly in the hand at just a little under two kilos fully loaded.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she said.

‘Open the door,’ he said. ‘Just let him in. Don’t say a word.’ His voice was hard and tight; the charm had dropped right out of it and his face now seemed older and narrower.

‘I don’t understand—’ she started to say.

‘You don’t have to understand. Do as you’re told.’

Gemma felt the terror reach her knees. She couldn’t move. ‘
Do it
!’ he snarled. ‘Let him in.’

As she groped her way to the door, barely able to see for shock, tumblers moved together in her mind and something unlocked. Hogan / Hagen. Wrong names. Changed names. Translated names. ‘Hahndorf sounds so elegant, but it means chook city,’ her father had said. Cross Weld. Kreutzvalt. She fumbled at the door, then opened it. Her jaw dropped when she saw who it was.

‘
Dad? What—
’
Then she screamed.
‘
He’s got a gun
!’

But it was too late, her father had pushed past her and into the room. ‘Put that down, Kreutzvalt,’ he commanded. ‘Put it down at once.’

‘Come out here, doctor,’ the armed man gestured. ‘Out onto the balcony. Do it, or I’ll kill your daughter.’

‘All right, all right,’ Gemma heard her father say from a long way away. Shock and sedation were making her mind waver, so that she seemed to be coming and going in waves. She steeled herself into consciousness. ‘Don’t harm her,’ her father was saying. ‘This is between you and me, Arik.’

‘It was,’ said the man with the Uzi. ‘Then she comes along and wants to reopen the case. I’ve spent thirty years putting the past behind me. I’m not going to let one mistake destroy the rest of my life. If the new evidence cleared him,’ Richard Cross swung around to Gemma, ‘you’d’ve come after me. You leave me no choice.’

‘It was you!’ said Gemma. ‘Mrs Moresby heard you breaking in half an hour before my father returned home.’

‘I was only your father’s agent. I was a patient of his. Unstable, psychotic—they were the labels in those days. I carried out the doctor’s instructions.’

Everything goes in twos, Mrs Moresby had said. Two sisters thirty years ago. Two Perrault girls. Two killers at Liverpool. Two killers thirty years ago. And here they both were. Gemma put her hands over her ears, shaking her head. ‘Tell me it’s not true, Dad,’ Gemma said, her mouth dry with terror. She was afraid she’d wet her pants. ‘Please, Dad.’

But her father said nothing, his face turned away, in some other place of his own just as she’d seen him in her car on the drive home from Silverwater.

‘Outside,’ said Richard Cross. ‘Both of you onto the balcony.’

He ushered them through the doorway. The light drizzle had stopped but the night sky was black and sheet lightning flickered on the horizon over the Heads. A strong wind had come from nowhere and swirled around them, its vortices on the balcony causing dead leaves to stir and whisper. Gemma stood close by her father. My father murdered my mother. And because I clung to the past and I believed him to be innocent, I reactivated all this dormant evil. Some huge energy uncurled itself in her. Mindlessly, she threw herself on her father, hitting him in the face with all her strength. ‘
You did it
!’
she screamed. ‘You did it and I believed you!’ He skidded on the slippery surface of the wet balcony, but regained his balance. ‘I believed you!
You were my father
!’ She kept hitting him; she couldn’t hurt him enough. He didn’t try to stop her, just cowered under her blows, arms up to defend himself from her attack, huddled against the wall.

‘Stop it!’ The hard voice of the man with the Uzi wasn’t the only factor to make her drop her arms. Gemma suddenly slumped in despair. I think my heart will break, she thought to herself, if I don’t die of fear first. He did it just as surely as if he’d wielded the hammer himself. I am the child of a murderer.

She stood still, panting, her breath coming in sobs, aware of the racing of her blood. The wind howled around the tower building and she wanted to howl, too.

‘Go to the light,’ Cross commanded her. ‘Adjust the sensor unit. I paid a lot of money to you and you’ve done a bad job. Make it work.’ She could hear the contempt in his voice.

Gemma blinked, bewildered. Her brain had stopped working. While some primitive part warned of terrible danger, her conscious mind struggled to make sense of the situation. Her father was still slumped against the wall and Gemma took a step away from him and towards the lamp, picked out by the lights from Richard Cross’s apartment. The anaesthetic, the events of the day, her exhaustion, her emotional upheaval all combined to create the blankness in her mind. She kept moving as if in a dream. Go to the light, he’d said. That’s what the dying are instructed to do, she recalled from somewhere. To go towards the light. She kept walking and raised her right hand ready to adjust the sensor unit. In this unreal and heightened state, time slowed to a standstill. She was aware of the coldness of the wet ground beneath her feet.

Just before she touched the small white sensor, she heard her father’s cry behind her, ‘
No, Gemma
!’ Felt something hurtle towards her, then a shocking impact that crashed her painfully to the ground. Instinctively, she’d put out her arm to break the fall and a searing streak of agony shot up into her shoulder as the gash on her arm reopened. She sprawled hard, her head cracking against the eastern wall, crashing into her father, who fell almost on top of her.

The appalling sound of gunshots at close quarters blew her eardrums into deafness. She felt a pressing blackness in her head. She twisted her neck to the side, stunned, to see her father’s wide open mouth close by her and his soundless scream. In perfect silence, he was rolling away from her, his body protecting her from the 9 mm Parabellum cartridges that should have ripped through her chest.

Richard Cross had grabbed the balcony with one hand to steady himself, firing with his right, and the buck of the Uzi kicked his firing hand against the sensor unit of the light. From her position on the ground, Gemma could now see that there was no globe under the cowling of the lamp. It could never have gone on. As his firing arm touched the sensor, she saw his face also contort and his mouth open wide. An incredible tremor surged as some huge power of the air seized him, then his face contorted in a silent scream and hurled him over the balcony rail. Through the deep silence came the whiff of burning.

Gemma scrambled to the railing and knelt there, too weak to stand. She could see through the railings. Fifteen stories down, she could just discern his still form, making a broken little swastika shape on the ground near the greenery. She turned back to her father, whose lips were moving. I can’t hear you, she tried to say. I can’t hear you. His eyes were pleading with her. She knelt beside him, taking his hand in hers because there was nothing else she could do for him now. The tears finally streamed down her face. ‘Oh Daddy, oh Daddy,’ her mouth was saying, but she could only hear the words in her mind. Go towards the light, she told him.

Wet bare feet, electricity, the sensor that Richard Cross must have rewired, disconnecting the earth, running the live wire to the sensor unit so that her touch on the small, white, lethal sensor would complete the circuit and she would die, a victim as it would seem to her own company’s incompetence. But it didn’t happen like that, because at the very last you did what a father should do. You pushed me out of the way and died in the effort. In the light that fell on him from the windows of the unit, she could see that his lips were no longer moving and that his eyes had frozen. Gemma had seen that stillness in too many other eyes to mistake it. Go towards the light, she told him in the huge ringing silence that surrounded them both, shrouding them together as if they were the only two people in the world. She knelt back on her heels, heedless of the slanting drizzle that had started up again. She wondered if her hearing was returning and if she could hear sirens or if it was simply the deep and inner wailing of her grievous sorrow. She remembered it was her birthday.