Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing

by Lord, Gabrielle

  Gemma considered this information. Arsonists as a rule are not particularly professional or sophisticated. A tin of kero or petrol and some sort of wick device was usually as complicated as they got. Some of the clever dicks, she remembered, often tried out some sort of delaying technique, a candle, or a mosquito coil in a bucket of primed kindling, so that they could be safe at home miles away in bed when the fire broke out. But quite a few of them were easily scooped up at the local Casualty section, where they were being treated for the burns they’d received setting their own fires. This was in a different league. Sophisticated electronic detonation. Rocket fuel. This was classy.

  ‘Have you checked with the Securities Commission?’ Gemma asked, ‘in case there’s a relationship between the companies who own the other buildings? After all, there were two other identical fires.’

  ‘Of course I checked,’ said Sean irritably. ‘That was the first thing I did.’

  ‘And?’ Gemma asked.

  But he saw it coming and shook his head. ‘Not telling,’ he said. ‘You do the leg work if you want to know whether there’s a connection.’

  Gemma felt her anger rising at this blatant power game, but then she caught sight of Angie, signalling her from behind Sean, shaking her head and mouthing ‘There weren’t any’. Gemma smiled. In that moment, she loved Angie with all her heart.

  ‘I already know, Sean,’ she lied. ‘And there isn’t. Just checking up on you.’ She spoke in exactly the same superior tone Sean had used to her and saw with satisfaction that she’d scored.

  ‘Okay, you two,’ said Angie. ‘That call I just had was from the morgue. The doc’s finished with Shelly. He’ll be faxing up his report. It’s probably coming through to your office right now, Sean.’

  Gemma brought her imagination back from the blue-white heat of the fire and concrete slabs melted into igneous turquoise and applied it to a body stuffed into a rubbish bin. Shelly. She imagined her friend’s body stitched up again on the table, a tag hanging off her toe, all her physical secrets laid bare by the scalpel and the unflinching eye of the medical examiner.

  ‘The Kings Cross police are trying to get in touch with her last client,’ said Angie.

  ‘But she told me she hasn’t been working for years,’ Gemma said.

  Sean snorted in derision. ‘That’s what she tells you. You know what the girls are like,’ he said. ‘They say they always use condoms and they don’t. They say it’s really quiet when they’re making a big quid. They live in another world.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Gemma, coming to her dead friend’s defence. ‘Shelly had no reason to lie to me. She told me last time I saw her that she was working as a sex surrogate on behalf of some local therapists. Working with a man to improve his basic performance skills which, according to her were pretty woeful.’ She glared at Sean, raising an eyebrow, and he turned to leave.

  ‘What’s up, Sean?’ Angie couldn’t resist calling after him. ‘Wasn’t you, was it?’ Then she pulled out her notebook and leaned her neat backside against the desk. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Our girl Shelly turned to good works in her later years.’ She flicked through her notes. ‘You don’t happen to have the name of these counsellors, do you?’

  Gemma shook her head. ‘No, but Shelly said their office was down the street from where she lived.’

  Angie rolled her eyes. ‘Bourke Street has a few houses in it, Gemster. If you do find out the names of the sex therapists, please let me know. And in the meantime, if you come across—forgive the expression in this context—the man who was her last booking, tell me or Kings Cross police. We’re still looking for Shelly’s diary.’

  ‘If she kept one,’ said Gemma.

  ‘According to that fat Greek she hangs out with, she did,’ said Angie. ‘She liked things nice and orderly.’

  Gemma felt tears fill her eyes at the thought of her friend. This will never do. Pull yourself together, girl, she told herself. I’ll find that diary, she promised Shelly. I’ll find out who did this to you.

  •

  Gemma drove to the Vaucluse mansion again, using the handbrake as much as possible to spare her leg, an awkward movement with bandaged fingers. It was a relief to be back on the fire investigation. This was impersonal business, just doing her job, gathering and recording information, assessing the characters of the people she interviewed, forming conclusions as to what made these people tick. This wasn’t like the work she’d undertaken for Shelly. She had a very clear sense that last night she’d crossed over a boundary and into no-man’s land where she’d left her detachment behind. Last night she’d exposed herself as a target. The next attack could maim her, or worse.

  Her mobile rang. It was Angie. ‘I’m passing this info on to you,’ she said, ‘because us girls have to stick together. Guess what I’ve just heard about the Nelson Bay fire?’

  Gemma listened and her mouth set in an angry line. Right, Minkie bloody Montreau, she thought, as she rang off. You’re in big trouble.

  She parked her car and hobbled up to the door, composed herself and pressed the intercom.

  ‘Who is it?’ Minkie’s voice, breathless, hurried.

  ‘Gemma Lincoln.’

  ‘Come in, please.’ Gemma heard the faint electronic hum as the outer gate released and she opened it and stepped onto the tiled front door area. In a moment or two, the large doors opened, and Minkie, glamorous in a dark red woollen sheath, the pearls shining like moons around her neck, stepped aside to let her in.

  ‘I hope you have some good news for me?’ she asked, ushering Gemma into the large drawing room with the french windows. ‘I’ve just heard from the insurance company. They’re refusing to pay up. God knows what will happen when I try and wind up the estate without a body.’ She swung around, waiting for Gemma’s response.

  Gemma let her stew for a moment, noticing that the red rose in front of Benjamin Glass’s framed portrait was already dead in its vase. She kept her voice soft and low. ‘Miss Montreau, you’ve been lying to me. You’ve lied to me right from the start. I’m giving you one more chance to tell me what’s really going on, or I’m walking out the door.’

  Minkie’s face went ashen. ‘I don’t know what you mean!’ The cat eyes flickered away and back. ‘What on earth are you saying?’

  ‘Who is he?’ Gemma went on. ‘What’s his name? Before you make a fool of yourself any further, I have to tell you I saw you together in the coffee lounge in the mall at Double Bay and then necking in your car.’

  For a second, Minkie Montreau stood straight, but then all the stuffing suddenly seemed to leave her. She backed against the lounge and almost fell on it, covering her face with her hands. ‘Please,’ she begged, ‘don’t bring’—she paused before saying the name—‘my darling Anthony into it. Please. He’s got nothing to do with anything in my life except me.’ She took her hands away and Gemma could see the tears in her eyes.

  ‘That’s not just naive,’ Gemma said. ‘It’s a completely stupid thing to say.’ Minkie stood up, walked to the cigarette box and stood uncertainly next to the table. Then she took the lid off and Gemma saw it had been filled with fresh cigarettes. Minkie took one and lit it. Standards are falling all over the place, Gemma thought, looking past the puff of smoke to the dead rose. This woman is under a lot of pressure.

  ‘I also had a call on the way here from a colleague,’ she continued in the same quiet manner. ‘A Nelson Bay security firm has a record of a back-to-base burglar alarm going off at the house only minutes before the fire. Then it stopped because whoever went inside the house disarmed it. Someone had to know the security code to do that.’

  ‘But that’s impossible!’

  ‘Not if that person knew the code.’ Gemma used the standard non-leading question: ‘What can you tell me about that?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Minkie said, the edge in her voice be
traying her stress. ‘Who is doing this? Why is this happening?’ She looked at the cigarette in her hand and frowned, as if wondering how it had got there.

  ‘How many people know the code at the house?’

  Gemma waited.

  Minkie put the cigarette down in an ashtray that looked as if it had been hewn from solid amethyst. ‘I can’t give you an answer to that because I simply don’t know. Of course, it would have been kept strictly private. But Benjamin might have given it to Rosalie.’

  ‘Rosalie?’

  ‘His secretary. Sometimes staff members used the house,’ said Minkie and her voice was edged with anger. ‘They’re like family to him. Some of them have been with him for years.’ Gemma remembered the letter of introduction she had in her briefcase.

  ‘You’re thinking,’ said Minkie, ‘I can tell, that Benjamin might have had a thing with Rosalie? No?’ She had picked up that little European habit, Gemma thought, of adding the negative to the end of a question.

  ‘I’m not thinking that,’ Gemma echoed, ‘no.’

  ‘When you meet her, you’ll realise how impossibile that would be!’ Minkie sniffed.

  Gemma lowered her voice, keeping the annoyance out of it as best she could, readying herself to leave. ‘I’ve learned that nothing’s impossible in my game, Miss Montreau. But I doubt very much if I’ll ever meet her now.’ She saw the puzzled frown shaping between Minkie’s manicured eyebrows. ‘I’m taking myself off this case. I can’t deal with someone who withholds information and misleads me. It’s a waste of my time. And yours too, although that’s your business.’

  ‘But you can’t just walk out on me like this!’ Minkie Montreau said, hands clawing at the pearls.

  Indeed I can, lady, Gemma thought. I’ve got enough problems of my own. A hostile cyber dickhead, my boyfriend in a dangerous operation, a fight with my sister, an old friend murdered, not to mention an injured body. I don’t need your crap as well. She turned to go and in doing so, twisted her left leg so that pain shot through from thigh to instep, making her wince in shock. She came to a sudden halt. She recovered quickly, but tears of pain jumped to her eyes. There was no way she could take another step. Her dramatic exit was completely undermined.

  Minkie was suddenly beside her, helping her to a seat. ‘You poor thing. You’ve really hurt yourself,’ she said. ‘Sit here for a minute. Let me make you a cup of tea.’

  •

  So now they were sitting together, Gemma’s left leg propped up on a beautiful hand-embroidered cushion, having tea from exquisite bone china.

  ‘My friend’s name is Anthony Love,’ confided Minkie, looking away, stirring in sugar with a silver apostle spoon.

  Was the woman laughing at her? Gemma wondered. But her face seemed composed enough when she turned back to Gemma, placing the spoon on the saucer. ‘I met him’—again, a tiny smile around Minkie’s glossy lips irritated Gemma afresh, with its implications of a lover’s secret memories—‘when he helped me choose the paintings for the beach house.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘He’s an artist and a very gifted one. He does installations, wonderful things, hangings, tapestries, huge, fabulous paintings. He’s trembling on the brink of success. One of his hangings sold last week for the same price as a Sisley sketch.’ Her voice had the unmistakable awestruck tones of one in love with both the art and the artist.

  Gemma thought of her lions of Delos stretching away in the distance, spotless against Aegean skies, roaring an eternal silence, an offering for the gods, not objects with a price.

  ‘We started seeing each other about a year ago,’ Minkie was saying, talkative now on the subject of her lover, ‘when I went to the gallery where his work was showing.’ She paused, stubbing out the cigarette, again with that puzzled look, as if she couldn’t believe she was doing this again. ‘ Look,’ she said, ‘I know what you’re thinking. I’m a woman of a certain age and Anthony’s’—again that infuriating smile—‘younger. You’re probably thinking I’m fooling myself. But you see, Gemma, it’s not like that. I have influential friends. I can help him further his career. I want to do that so much.’

  ‘What does he do for you?’ Gemma couldn’t help asking.

  ‘He makes me feel alive again,’ she said, with a half-smile. ‘You’re young. You don’t know about that yet. I thought that part of my life had finished. We do all those crazy things young lovers do. Run through rain together. We kick autumn leaves in the gutters. We wash each others’ back. He cooks for me. He gives me massages. We book into funny old hotels under silly names. We stay in bed till late and order room service banquets.’

  Gemma interrupted the rhapsody. ‘Did your husband know about your lover?’

  Minkie shook her head. ‘If Benjamin knew—which I doubt very much because I’ve been very careful not to embarrass him in any way—I doubt if he’d have cared anyway.’

  Gemma looked sceptical and Minkie noticed. She made a little dismissive wave and a fortune in diamonds and rubies flashed. ‘He was past all that business. He was impotent,’ said Minkie, looking her straight in the eye. ‘He couldn’t get it up. For a while he tried those dreadful injections and then Viagra came on the scene. But he developed the most terrible headaches.’ She laughed. ‘It was a change for the man to have the headache. I must say I found that quite amusing.’ Her green eyes half-closed in laughter.

  But that doesn’t mean that he was impotent with everyone, Gemma thought. He might have been quite active with another partner. This interview was going quite well, she realised. She was gaining a lot of information, despite the ruination of her dramatic, sweeping exit. Now she was getting to play good cop, bad cop all by herself. She nodded encouragingly, but Minkie was fiddling with her pearls, lost in her thoughts.

  ‘I’ll have to talk to Anthony Love,’ Gemma told her. ‘If I know about him, you can be pretty sure other investigators will.’

  ‘But he’s got nothing to do with the fire. Or Benjamin’s disappearance,’ said Minkie. ‘He’s as gentle as a lamb. Anthony’s an artist.’

  As if, Gemma thought, that immediately puts him above the affairs of the world.

  ‘Listen to me, Miss Montreau,’ she said severely, ‘if you are the subject of an insurance investigation—and if they’ve decided not to pay you yet, you can be absolutely sure that you are’—she paused to let that sink in—‘you have no idea of the degree of surveillance you’re probably under already. That’s why,’ she continued, ‘it’s essential that you tell me the truth. Insurance companies have cameras with infra-red capabilities that can catch you in your house here. In this room if you’ve got the curtains open like this. Or his. Or anyone’s. They can pick up conversations hundreds of metres away. And be filming you all the while. You wouldn’t know if the kid sitting a few tables away in a café with a Walkman and the newspapers in front of him was actually taking photographs of you and your boyfriend and recording every word you say because you’d never see a camera or a recording device. These insurers have a big pay-out to protect and they don’t mind investing money to avoid it if they can. Don’t you realise that there’s already someone like me out there doing all this already for the other side, watching every move you make?’

  Minkie Montreau clearly hadn’t. She went ashen at the words. ‘You don’t think that they know already? About Anthony?’

  ‘I most certainly do, ma’am,’ she said, relishing the moment. But Gemma’s own words had affected her, too. She hadn’t actually given the subject of her shadow self, the insurer’s investigator, much thought up to now. She tried to dismiss it, but for some reason this doppelgänger grew larger in her mind. She experienced a deeper level of the dread that had lately chilled her, as if she’d walked through a deadly mist of toxic spores or the cold air of an ancient tomb. She found herself thinking of the freezing barren atmosphere of outer space where the meteorite hurtled. And then just as suddenly, the dread
was gone.

  She struggled to get back on track, giving herself a cue she could easily follow. ‘So if you didn’t start that fire—’

  ‘I didn’t. I swear I had nothing to do with it! Why would I want to destroy my own beautiful house, burn the paintings that Anthony and I had chosen together? Why would I want to harm Benjamin?’

  ‘Try this for size,’ said Gemma drily, setting her cup down and struggling to sit up straighter. ‘It’s an old one but it’s a good one. You stand to gain a fortune from the insurance and from the estate. Kill your impotent husband and you can marry your lover and live in luxury for the rest of your lives.’

  Minkie looked shocked. And then burst out laughing. ‘Marry him? Oh, I don’t think so.’

  It wasn’t quite the response Gemma had been expecting. Minkie’s green eyes were soft now with good humour.

  ‘What you said sounds bad, I agree,’ she continued, trying to cover her amusement, ‘but I truly didn’t want anything to change.’ She cocked her head to one side. ‘I need you to believe in me, to continue to work for me. To find out the truth. Even more so now that it’s probably going to look worse and worse.’ She took out a lace handkerchief and dabbed the corner of each green eye. ‘The insurers and the police will never understand that things were just perfect the way they were. Most people are so dull. So conventional.’ She fiddled with the handkerchief. ‘And,’ she said, rather too tartly, ‘you said yourself there were other possible motives. You’re forgetting the card games.’

  ‘Hardly,’ said Gemma. ‘Have you listed the names I asked for?’

  ‘I can do better than that.’

  Minkie went to an ornate gilt and marble table, picked up a book and handed it to Gemma. ‘That’s the gamblers’ club book. All the members. You can keep it.’

  Gemma flicked it open. Names and phone numbers. She put the book in her bag. She’d chase them all up, find out what went on at these card parties, how much was won and lost. Find out if there was a loser, a card-playing rocket scientist angry enough to kill the man who’d cheated him.