‘Fancy meeting you here,’ said Gemma.
Nineteen
She took him out for a milkshake and a pizza and they sat in the relative warmth of the pizza joint, away from the scudding winds of the street. As usual, he was hungry and ate a family-sized pizza without showing any signs of struggle.
‘Hugo,’ she said as yet another slice vanished into his mouth, ‘you can’t live in a brothel.’
‘It’s not like that,’ he protested. ‘It’s a live-in job. Kosta said I can have the little back room off the kitchen. I like Naomi. She said she’d look after me.’
‘There’s no way you can do this,’ Gemma said. ‘The minute DOCS finds out, you’ll be sent home to your mother. You should be at school.’
‘But I hate school,’ he said. ‘It’s boring. And anyway,’ he added, ‘how will they find out? Unless you tell on me.’
‘Will you give me your mother’s name and address at least?’ said Gemma. ‘I promise I won’t dob on you. But she’ll be out of her mind with worry.’
‘She’s not,’ he said.
‘Hugo,’ Gemma said, ‘she would be.’
‘Uh-uh.’ He shook his head. ‘I rang her the day before yesterday.’
‘What did she say?’
He shrugged. ‘Nothing much.’
‘Nothing much?’ Gemma repeated, incredulous. ‘Don’t give me that crap.’
‘It’s not crap,’ he said in his mild way, shoving down another triangle of pizza.
‘You told her you were staying at your dad’s place,’ Gemma said on a sudden inspiration and the Ratbag looked away, sheepish.
‘You did, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘You little dog.’
‘But I really might be soon,’ said the Ratbag. ‘So it’s not like a big lie. Dad’s only got a one-bedroom place for him and his girlfriend at the moment. But he said he might be getting another place with enough room for me. If he moves, then I can most likely live with them.’
‘If?’ Gemma repeated. ‘Most likely? There are too many ifs and mights, Hugo,’ she said. Good on you, Dad, she thought with a flash of fury. Top marks for fathering. That’s great. Your son is far better off living in a brothel, you arsehole. Memories of her own father with his total disregard for his daughters started to surface, but she pushed them back down again, focusing on the present matter.
‘Oh Hugo,’ she said finally, ‘what am I going to do with you?’
‘Is your cat okay?’ he asked.
‘He’s fine,’ she said. ‘Stop trying to change the subject.’
‘I wanted to see you after I ran away from your place,’ he said ‘but I was scared you’d dob on me.’
Despite herself, she was touched. ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘But Hugo, I don’t know how long you can stay living at Baroque.’
‘I could live in your boatshed,’ he suggested. ‘Then would it be all right?’
‘You can’t go round living in other people’s back rooms and sheds. And it’s not even just a question of where you’re going to live. At your age, the law requires you to live with a parent. Or a guardian. And attend school. Word’s going to get round about you. Business people will notice you around the Cross. They’ll mention it to youth workers and the cops. The Koori kids already know about you. It’s only a matter of time before the authorities get to you.’
He looked away in deep dejection. ‘All these people,’ he said, ‘telling me what to do. I just want my dad back and all of us to be together like we used to be. If the authorities are so smart, how come they can’t do that?’
‘You can’t make people do what they don’t want to do,’ she said.
‘Unless you’re a kid,’ he said. ‘Then everyone can make you do what you don’t want to do.’
Gemma remembered from the events of her own childhood that he was quite correct.
‘For goodness sake, stay out of sight,’ she said. ‘At least for the next day or so. There’re some things I’ve got to do, then I’ll come back and we’ll talk about what we’re going to do about you.’
‘You could adopt me,’ he said.
Gemma started to laugh then stopped herself when she saw the boy’s face. He wasn’t joking.
‘I saw Steve,’ he said after a pause. ‘Your friend Steve.’
‘Hugo, so you remember him. Where?’
‘He was coming out of that nightclub, the one with them big purple icicles round the doorway?’
Gemma remembered the crystalline entrance foyer to Indigo Ice and the fabulous couple parting to reveal Steve dancing close with Lorraine Litchfield. ‘And then what?’ she asked.
‘He was with a man. Then he got in a car.’
‘A man?’
The Ratbag nodded.
‘What sort of car?’
‘Big black Mercedes,’ said the Ratbag, slurping the last of his milkshake through the straw.
‘Don’t make that noise. When was that?’ she asked.
‘This morning.’
Gemma glanced at her watch. ‘What time?’
The Ratbag shook his head. ‘Early.’
‘Do you know who the man was?’ she asked.
The Ratbag nodded. ‘Naomi calls him the Lebanese drug lord,’ he said. ‘All the girls know him. George Fayed.’
Gemma felt her heart contract. If the meeting doesn’t work out, she thought, Steve will be in dead trouble.
•
Mike rang to say the analysis program was going to take longer than he’d anticipated because Sean Wright wanted him to give the names and addresses of every male who’d been at his party before he did anything else. Gemma diverted to Phoenix Bay, and made her way to the boatshed, finding in its cool silence a place of retreat from the chaotic events of her recent life. I might have to sell my apartment, she thought. Never mind Hugo, I might end up living down here. She took out the carbon monoxide canister she’d fished out from under the dead cat and carefully placed it on the shelf above the cold water tap. If that cat were autopsied, would its tissue, too, reveal lethal quantities of the deadly gas? Gemma’s brain was working on overdrive, pushing pieces of this puzzle together, then pulling them apart. Nothing seemed to make sense.
She gave up and turned to the shrouded figures. For a second, her overworked brain betrayed her, suggesting that two assassins crouched under the damp drapes. She shivered at the thought and lifted the damp cloths off both shapes, needing the reassurance of seeing her handiwork. Again, she admired the more complete figure, running her fingers over his staring eyes and open jaw. She picked up a clay knife and found herself scraping away at the second figure, finding the clay hard and very cold, difficult to shape. She only meant to stay for a little while but it wasn’t long before she became fully involved, all her anxieties vanishing for the moment in the focused attention she was giving the work under her fingers. She decided to work up the basic shape, as she’d done with the first figure, straining with effort as she pulled and stretched the surface of clay. She wanted the line of it to suggest the straining tension of the beast’s powerful hindquarters.
As she worked, bits of clay dropped to the floor and soon her shoes were covered in small lumps and blobs. I’d better not commit any major crimes, she thought, until I clean myself up thoroughly. These traces would come straight home to me, and the Physical Evidence people would just snap me up. While she was concentrating on the sculpture, her mind free from anything to do with the investigations, something happened. She was smoothing the now more pliant clay up and over to make the leaning neck of the second lion when one of underground connections of the case suddenly surfaced, and the question she’d previously put to Spinner—why would someone use an HTA?—found an answer. To obliterate all traces, came the reply in her mind. All traces of what? she asked herself. Gemma looked down at her shoes, now covered in fine
clay dust. Traces of something that is left with every step, she answered. Gemma stood there, her hands immobilised on the cold clay of the second lion’s embryonic shoulders as Locard’s famous words came into her mind. ‘Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent witness against him.’ Wherever I went, she thought, I’d be shedding tiny flakes of clay, leaving a trail that could be followed. The murderer at Nelson Bay was so fearful of leaving a trail that could be followed, that only an HTA inferno would do—the equivalent of a hellfire which would obliterate every trace. But every trace of what? Again, the question came back at her.
Gemma flung the cloths back over the clay lions and scrubbed her hands at the paint-stained little sink. Minkie Montreau’s thesis had lain in the archives unexamined for years, according to Dr Susskind’s assistant, and then ‘suddenly you’ll get people needing to see them’. What people? Who? Who was the person who had recently viewed the thesis, apart from herself?
She hurried to lock up, then climbed over the rocks at the back of the small inlet and was practically running by the time she reached her car. She swung out from the beachside road and turned back towards the city, heading for the university. I’ve got to find out who else asked to see that thesis, she thought. Already, a conclusion was starting to form, like clay starting to take shape. I think I know who it is, she thought. I think I know now who killed Benjamin Glass and why it all had to be so complicated. As she thought it through, the facts surrounding the murder—an event that had previously seemed maddeningly mysterious or crazy—started falling logically into place. As she knew from all her experience in the game, whatever people do, no matter how weird it might seem to an outsider, always makes sense to the individual concerned. And it’s an investigator’s job to crack that. I only need to check up on a few things to be one hundred per cent sure, she thought, and then Sean Wright can kiss my arse.
•
She hardly noticed the drive, moving through the gears on automatic, thinking of the disappointment that had led to murder. Envy is a terrible thing, as Gemma knew. If the person she suspected was in fact the murderer, Gemma imagined her stewing in envy while two women of her acquaintance had acquired wealthy husbands, one some time ago, one quite recently, while she herself remained single and probably broke. Then, perhaps it had looked like she might snare her own sugar daddy. For a while, as long as his infatuation lasted, she’d entertained hope that he might leave his marriage. Then, Gemma imagined the anger building as her suspect realised that her lover was never going to leave his wife. Finally, the envy and the anger had hardened into hatred. Enough to kill. It had all been there, beneath her level of consciousness. and now it seemed so obvious.
She drove through the gates of the university and parked near the library, hurrying across the wide lawns, adding more and more detail to the events that lead to a homicidal tragedy. Marked cards, a lover’s photographs of his mistress, a cleaning compulsion, a man’s missing cat. Someone who knew the security code at the Nelson Bay beach house. Someone who’d taken a great deal of interest in her rival, made it her business to find out about Minkie Montreau’s Masters thesis. Even though an ordinary house fire would have been quite adequate, she believed that the traces she would leave behind her needed a fire of more than ordinary intensity to remove. A lifetime of preoccupation and self-consciousness about her condition had created the belief in her that nothing less than the extreme temperatures of an HTA inferno would suffice. Then there was the added bonus of such a fire pointing directly at her hated rival, the wife her lover would not leave. Had she decided on the HTA scenario before or after finding out about the thesis?
By the time Gemma reached Archives, she had the whole ugly story, laid out in her mind’s eye. It didn’t take her long to hunt out the gawky research assistant, delighted at her return.
‘You’re getting hooked, aren’t you?’ His eyelid twitched—or was it a wink? ‘It happens.’
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘The other person who asked about Miriam Montreau’s thesis. I believe she’s a friend of mine.’
‘How blessed I am that two such handsome females have visited my hallowed shrine in recent times,’ he said with a whinnying laugh. His tic was going demented and Gemma wondered what it was about hanging around large collections of books that had such a negative effect on a man’s behaviour.
‘You are indeed,’ said Gemma. ‘Although she’s much better looking than I am.’
The research assistant was gallant. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it depends on what you fancy.’
‘Come on,’ said Gemma. ‘My friend is a real beauty. You’d have to admit it. She’s pretty close to perfect.’
The research assistant nodded. ‘Almost perfect,’ he agreed, ‘except for her ichthyosis.’
Gemma thought of the photographs, the beautiful face, breasts cupped by black lace gloves that she believed would not only hide the scaly surface of her fingers, but also limit the shedding of microscopic flakes of skin.
‘Ichthyosis?’ Gemma tripped over the unfamiliar word.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Scaly skin.’
•
She took a diversion to the Kremlin. Sean Wright was out, but Angie came down to the foyer.
‘Tell Sean to pull Skanda Bergen in for questioning. Tell him she’s the woman in the black lace gloves.’
Quickly, she filled Angie in. ‘The reason was there all the time. This woman has some sort of chronic dermatitis. She’d be shedding skin cells all the time, everywhere she goes. So she’s not content with an ordinary fire. And she knows enough about DNA capabilities to know that we could match her against any cells found at a crime scene. She believes that only an HTA will be powerful enough to destroy any skin flakes she might shed.’
Gemma knew she had her friend’s complete attention. ‘Skanda Bergen has ichthyosis,’ she said. ‘It’s like a bad case of dandruff of the skin,’ she added, responding to Angie’s questioning look. ‘It’s not terribly obvious, although I noticed something rough about the skin on her face as soon as I met her. I visited her twice, and both times she was frantically dusting and vacuuming. I just thought she was obsessive-compulsive. But then I made the connection. She’s obsessed with the skin flakes she’s always shedding.’ She paused before explaining. ‘She was having an affair with Benjamin Glass, not just a sex worker–client relationship. I believe he fell for her, for a while at least. The photographs I found of her hidden at his office weren’t pornography. They were more like love letters. Her colleague Lorraine Litchfield marries a wealthy crim only a few years ago. Why shouldn’t she marry Benjamin? She asks him. He’s infatuated, but he’s not going to leave his wife for Skanda. Skanda is enraged. Maybe she asks him one more time, maybe he refuses one time too many. Now Skanda hates him and hates Minkie for being in her way. My guess is that Benjamin Glass would have been very proud of his wife’s academic achievements and most likely told Skanda about his wife’s thesis. So that puts her on the trail of HTAs. It’ll be very interesting to discover where she got the accelerant from. Maybe one of her clients is a scientist?’
Angie made a note in her book, and Gemma continued.
‘So she sets a couple of practice fires to make sure this is going to work and at the same time creates the possibility that an arsonist is on the loose. And she gets hold of a bright yellow BMW and off she goes up to Nelson Bay with her little cylinder of CO. Let’s assume she’s spent time with Benjamin previously at Nelson Bay. She could have easily found out the security code to the house. Benjamin is there on his own. Maybe she gives him one last chance to redeem himself. We’ll never really know. Then’—Gemma paused—‘it might have gone something like this: she opens her bag, grabs her spray and lets him have it with a good blast of CO. He’s shocked and coughing. He wouldn’t know that he’s inhaling pure carbon monoxide. This girl wants to make sure he doesn’t escape. He’s
dead very quickly. She sets the fire and off she goes. She’s practised the detonation time on the other two fires. But she’s got no fight with his cat so she takes that back with her. Maybe she’d always liked it. But then I drop in on her and by sheer bad luck, the cat appears on the windowsill. She denies all knowledge of it, of course, but now the cat has to go. So she kills it with her little canister and dumps it in a garbage bag somewhere in the Cross, knowing that there’s no way she can now be connected with the dead man.’ She paused, aware of Angie’s amazement. ‘How am I doing?’
Angie nodded. ‘Pretty impressive, I’d say.’
‘And I haven’t finished yet,’ said Gemma. ‘She’s a smart girl. She’s set up a murder that she hopes will destroy his wife as well as the man she’s come to hate. So she creates a path of powerful circumstantial evidence that seems to lead straight to the door of the person with the most to gain from Benjamin Glass’s death. It only takes a phone call to the insurance brokers and a copy of the policy is sent to Minkie Montreau’s address. Skanda knows that’s going to look bad for Minkie.’
Angie nodded. ‘As far as she’s concerned,’ she said, ‘it’s perfect payback. The man who rejected her dead, and the woman he wouldn’t leave, her rival, serving life for his murder.’
‘And one more thing,’ said Gemma. ‘Tell Sean to make sure he collects cat hair from Skanda’s flat. Match it with cat hair from Benjamin Glass’s factory. You could even suggest he goes and collects the dead cat. If it’s still there in the lane. Then get Lance at Paradigm Laboratories on the job. He specialises in mitochondrial DNA. I can guarantee he’ll get a match.’
‘If you say so,’ said Angie.
‘Ms Bergen’s already admitted knowing the dead man,’ said Gemma. ‘But the presence of a lot of cat hair will help a jury establish she had his cat at her place, not just him. And they’d have to ask why that might be so. Tell Sean to find the yellow BMW she hired and he’ll get cat hair from that, I’ll bet. He should put it to her that she’d do well to come clean about it. There’s a canister of carbon monoxide with her on it. She’d probably wipe prints, but with her skin condition, the analysts might get lucky and find plenty of material for a profile.’
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