Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing

by Lord, Gabrielle

  She paced around, unable to be still, anxiety driving her. If this were someone else’s case, she reasoned, I’d have to say ‘no way!’. This is someone who knows you, lady. This is someone very close to you who knows your address and your boyfriend’s name. This is someone acting out of personal spite and malice, someone who wants to punish you. For what? For some offence. But I’m not an ex-wife, she thought. I haven’t taken some bloke to the cleaners. I haven’t put prawns in anyone’s hubcaps.

  Her mind kept coming back to Mike Moody. Why? she asked herself. Because he fits the profile, he knows me and he’s got an angry ex-wife. DNA material matching the assault on Robyn Warburton and the murder of Shelly had been found at Mike’s house. On a handkerchief he said wasn’t his. From a coat he denied owning. Over a dozen men had been contacted by the police, she knew, to give a sample so as to eliminate them from the investigation. The coat itself had been taken away. If it isn’t Mike, it’s got to be somebody he knows or somebody who came to his party. Someone’s partner perhaps. Gemma racked her brains, trying to remember Mike’s flatmate’s name. Robert. Roger. Roger something. Jolly Roger. Roger Hollis. Roger Hollis with the familiar voice on the phone. Why was the name, too, familiar? Was it simply because it sounded so ordinary? She went into her program explorer, and typed in ‘Roger Hollis’. She waited the few seconds it took to scan through her files.

  There was a file in that name from nearly seven years ago. She opened it. As she scrolled through the case, memories returned, clarified. She’d been reminded of someone when Peter Greengate came seeking surveillance on his wife because she’d seen the same hatred in Peter Greengate that she’d seen in another man: the client from whom Gemma had withheld salient facts about his wife’s behaviour because of fears for the woman’s safety. She read the last comments she’d noted down about the case and gasped. The client from whom she’d withheld information all those years had been Roger Hollis!

  ‘We share similar interests,’ Mike had said of his ex-flatmate, and Gemma had assumed he meant grievances about ‘the missus’. But Roger Hollis could also be another cop who knew about her and Steve, a techno-freak, like Mike. A hacker. In Gemma’s imagination, the cyberstalker took on the physical dimensions of the man who’d attacked her in the lane. She remembered the ribbon-like streamers that flared from his jacket as she kneed him. Roger Hollis’s ex had destroyed his wardrobe. Did that mean she’d slashed them into ribbons? So now when he plans his attacks on women, he wears the jacket. To remind him of what she did, to consecrate his violence. In Gemma’s mind, the stalking figures merged and became one. The cyberstalker, the attacker in the lane, the man who left the DNA traces at Mike’s place, were all the same person!

  She jumped to her feet. Oh my God, she thought. I’ve got to get out of here. She raced into the bedroom, packed the Glock in a bag with a box of ammunition, grabbed up her coat, mobile, a rug from the bottom of her cupboard, a packet of chocolate biscuits and left. Roger Hollis now also knows that I lied to him about his wife years ago. He could easily identify himself as the husband in the damning newspaper report about the exposure of her confidential records, cheated on not only by his wife, but also by the very investigator to whom he’d paid good money to catch her at it. Now I’m another woman who’s betrayed him. Another woman he has to punish. For a split second, she thought about going to Kit’s but rejected the idea, remembering another time she’d led a killer to her sister’s house. She ran up the steps, ringing Angie on the way, leaving a message for her.

  ‘Angie, check out a man called Roger Hollis, until recently living at 646 Todman Avenue, Kensington. Bring him in. Match him against the attack on me, Robyn Warburton and Shelly. I’m lying low for a while, because he knows my address.’

  She headed for her car, then stopped. He might easily know my car, too, she thought. She hurried through the dusk down to Phoenix Bay. It was deserted except for a dog chasing seagulls but even he trotted off home as night fell and the beach darkened under the pallid light of a rising moon. With trembling hands, Gemma unlocked the padlock on the boatshed, pulling back the half-jammed door, squeezing in and slamming it shut again, padlocking it on the inside. She switched on the light, bumping it as she did so. The swinging shadows, moving back and forth with the light, startled her and made unsettling patterns on the shrouded shapes of the two lions on the workbench. She reached up and stilled its motion, feeling sick at heart, and looked around. One of the shrouded lions looked wrong somehow, its sheeting hanging right down from the bench to the floor, curtaining the dark area underneath. She knew she hadn’t left it like that. She stayed rigid with fear. Someone was under the bench, crouched low. She started to reach for her gun but remembered Angie’s warning: ‘Gun in bag with zipper get you dead, lady.’ Without taking her eyes off the shrouded area under the workbench, she reached around behind her and her fingers closed on a clay tool, an awl with a sharp point.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she yelled. She jumped back in alarm, fingers scrabbling for the zip on her gun bag, as the shrouding moved a little. ‘Who is it?’ she screamed. ‘Don’t move, just tell me. I’ve got a gun.’

  She’d managed to half unzip the bag and was fishing round blindly for the Glock, too terrified to take her eyes off the veiled hide-out under the counter.

  ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! It’s me!’

  Gemma’s body sagged with relief. ‘You little bastard, Hugo. Get out of there!’ She stood back, as the dishevelled figure crawled out. ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’ she said. ‘I could’ve shot you!’

  He crawled out, standing up, face white in the caged globe’s light.

  ‘How the hell did you get in here?’ she demanded.

  ‘The window,’ he said. ‘I could just squeeze through.’ The two small windows on the northern side of the shed had always been jammed shut. ‘I found an old rusty fishing knife,’ he said. ‘And I got it open. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.’

  She went to the window and saw where the rotting wood of the window frame splintered.

  ‘Someone dobbed on me and DOCS came round to Naomi’s place to get me. I had to make a run for it.’ He looked shyly proud. ‘Have you got anything to eat?’ he added.

  She unzipped her bag, pulled out the packet of biscuits and passed them to him.

  ‘Wow,’ he said, spotting the Glock. ‘Do you carry that everywhere with you?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Can I hold it?’ he asked.

  Gemma shook her head. ‘It’s not a toy, Hugo,’ she said sternly, but pathetically glad of his company. She shivered and put on the small one-bar heater, heating up some water for pan coffee from the packet of ground beans under the sink while the Ratbag, seated on the little low foldaway bed, wolfed his way through the biscuits. She switched on the tinny radio, sat in the nineteenth-century wooden office chair and began to breathe again. No one knew about this place except Kit and Steve and he was in hospital. She was safe. She could relax. She had a small flask of brandy on the shelf over the sink and she thought she’d earned one. She was rinsing the glass prior to pouring a shot when she heard something. She turned the tap off but then had to wait until the water had gurgled its way down the drain. She strained, listening. Just the wash of the waves against the rocks, the distant sound of traffic up on the road.

  ‘Did you hear anything?’ she asked the Ratbag. He shook his head. He wouldn’t have heard a thing, she thought, over the crunching of the biscuits.

  Her mobile rang and she nearly jumped out of her skin. Steve, she thought, moving to pick it up.

  ‘Hullo?’ she said. For a moment, she didn’t get it, thought that someone was playing a joke. A rhythm and blues song was coming down the line and a man’s raspy, whispery voice was singing along with it; the voice she’d heard in the lane. ‘He sings along,’ Shelly had said, ‘while he’s doing that to them.’

  He was
here. He’d come here, down the phone line, singing into her most private sanctuary. ‘Baby did a bad, bad thing,’ she heard, the syncopation jumping ahead of the beat. For a moment, disbelief prevented every other emotion. It isn’t possible, she was thinking. How could he trace her like this? The answer was immediate. He knew her mobile number. Now she remembered the breather and the music in the background. That was the song she hadn’t quite remembered. Mike’s flatmate had rung her at home, claiming to have lost her mobile number.

  ‘What’s that music?’ asked the Ratbag. For a frozen moment, she stood there as the spidery sound floated out of her mobile. She felt sick. She remembered Mike’s words: ‘Receivers are transmitters are receivers are transmitters . . . ’ With the right scanning equipment, Roger Hollis could pinpoint her via her mobile phone signal. Maybe, even at this very moment, her number active and lit up on a monitor screen, his scanning program was homing in on this little wooden box on deserted Phoenix Bay. And he was speeding closer to her every second. She punched the call off button and threw the handset down as if it were a poisonous snake. It slid off the bench and fell to the floor. Frantic, she checked the bolt locks, wishing like hell she’d secured the place properly. At least he wouldn’t be able to fit through the windows. But the boatshed was not safe. The whole place could collapse in a strong wind. And why would I want to huddle here like a sitting duck? We’re getting out of here right now, she thought.

  ‘Who was that?’ the Ratbag wanted to know, pausing his munching.

  ‘Hugo,’ she said. ‘We need to get out of here smartly because someone’s on his way here. Someone very unpleasant.’

  ‘Who?’ he said. ‘The singing man?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘So it’s best we’re not here, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘But what if he’s already out there now?’

  ‘That’s why I’m going to ring Waverley police right now to send a car down here just in case. Okay?’

  No, I can’t ring out, she realised. This mobile’s number will light up on his screen, give him more time to refine his search. She remained immobilised. A triple 0 call could be her death warrant. She prayed that the message she’d left for Angie was being acted on.

  ‘I’m hopeful they might be just about to pick him up anyway,’ she said. ‘I left a message with his name and details.’

  ‘But what if they don’t?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve still got to get out of here,’ she said.

  The Ratbag cocked his head to one side, listening.

  ‘What was that?’ he said.

  She felt fear rising from the pit of her stomach and leaned against the counter for support.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ the Ratbag asked. ‘There’s someone out there.’

  Gemma felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. She sensed, rather than heard, the presence outside. She grabbed the caged globe and switched it off, pulling the Ratbag down onto the floor with her. ‘Don’t make a sound,’ she said. ‘We’re ready for him.’

  Down on the floor in the dark, her senses were sharpened. Now she thought she could hear the tiny facets of shellgrit scraping together at every stealthy footfall. Was he only yards away beyond the weathered timber of the boatshed?

  They crouched in the silence of the night. The waves washed up along the boat racks, tinkling shells on the ebb flow. All was silent and still under the waning moon.

  ‘What do you think you heard?’ she whispered.

  ‘Dunno. Something.’

  They waited. But nothing happened.

  ‘Maybe I was imagining it,’ he said. ‘It might’ve been one of those birds.’

  They waited a few more minutes in the silence. Gemma slowly stood up and, keeping well back, peered through the frosted panes. In the bluish murk outside, nothing moved. Under the ghostly light of the moon she could see, just past where the sand met the darkness of the rocks, the molten curve of the riptide, cutting an arc through the modest swell. Maybe we could hide under a boat and wait it out till help arrives, she thought, noticing the dim hulls of the overturned fishing boats. The bulk of the old surf club building on the northern curve of the beach offered some sort of shelter.

  ‘Hugo,’ she said, ‘we’re going to make a run for that building over there, and then, when we’re sure the coast is clear, go around the rocks to the inlet of Tamarama beach.’

  Dangerous, she thought, in the dark and over uneven ground, but by the time he got here, we’d be safely away. She tiptoed around to the other window and checked the southern side. Again, nothing. Just the blurred shapes of neglected, waterfilled boats near the higher ground, the pale railing along the path and the dark bush reaching up to the road. If the killer had pinpointed her by way of her mobile, he could be cruising the road above, trying to fine-tune her location, waiting for her to use the mobile again to call for help.

  ‘Come on, Hugo,’ she said. ‘We’re moving camp.’

  She tucked the Glock into her belt. So much for your fancy Bianchi holster, Angie, she thought. She snatched up the box of matches she used to light the gas rings, wishing she’d brought the torch, and unbolted the double doors. She could feel the Ratbag close behind her.

  ‘The faster we’re out of here,’ she said to him, ‘the better. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  She could feel his body keeping close, and couldn’t tell who was trembling more.

  ‘Ready?’

  He nodded.

  Gemma flung open one of the doors, stepped out and started running.

  ‘Come on, Hugo,’ she hissed, grabbing his hand as they sprinted along the sand.

  They were halfway to the surf lifesaving building when they heard a splintering sound and she swung around, trying to pinpoint the source of the noise in the darkness. Had someone trodden on a rotten board on one of the old boats? She pushed the Ratbag down next to an overturned aluminium dinghy, dropping down beside him.

  ‘Stay there!’ she whispered. ‘Whatever you do, don’t move until I tell you. I have to know where you are at all times. Otherwise you might end up getting shot.’ She paused, listening. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’ His voice barely audible.

  She drew the Glock out of her belt. I’m ready for you, you bastard, she thought. You don’t know about this nice little piece of plastic in my hand. The stink of petrol was strong here away from the wind and the silence seemed deeper, apart from the hum of the surf on the rocks. Maybe the splintering sound had simply been a piece of rotting timber falling away. Gemma raised her head. All was dark and quiet on Phoenix Bay. She tugged Hugo up and hurried across the sand, lit by the fading moon, the Glock in one hand and Hugo’s hand in the other. I’ve overreacted, she thought. There’s no way he could’ve pinpointed me in that time. Even so, she decided, I’ll give my place a wide berth until he’s safely locked up.

  They had almost reached the old surf club building. Gemma could see the moon shining on its broken windows. ‘Nearly there, Hugo,’ she said, jollying him along.

  And then the shadow struck. Out of nowhere, jumping down from the ramp of the surf club from some dark lair, something pounced and Hugo screamed as he was snatched from Gemma’s grasp. Gemma’s uncomprehending eyes saw that a powerful man now had Hugo viciously around the neck, a knife blade to the boy’s throat. As his arm moved, the slashed jacket he was wearing danced like the strands of a hula skirt.

  ‘Throw the gun down,’ he snarled.

  Hugo struggled briefly then went limp. God, Gemma thought. He’s died of fright.

  ‘Do it!’ Roger Hollis ordered. It was the weird voice, harsh and whispery. In the dim moonlight, Gemma could see the point of the blade pressing hard into Hugo’s soft skin and a thin black stream start to make its way down his neck.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ she said, not daring to take her eyes off him, throw
ing the Glock as far as she could away from him. She heard the splash as it hit the shallows. Hollis’s face was in darkness, but there was no mistaking the hatred in his voice. With a shivering thrill, Gemma suddenly recognised the landscape of her nightmare, the waning moon lighting the water. But this was no sacred lake on Delos. Hollis scrambled sideways towards the water’s edge and the weapon, dragging Hugo with him. The boy was crying, softly and hopelessly. You bastard, Gemma thought, her eyes filling with tears of rage. She felt the red surge of anger move up from the base of her spine, firing ideas in her brain. I could tackle him while he’s trying to get the gun, drag Hugo away, maybe disarm him. Hollis continued to back towards the shallows, dragging Hugo with him. But a slight turn of his head as he sought for the dark shadow of the Glock provided Gemma’s chance. She dived, flying at the man, knocking him off-balance, wrenching Hugo away. Now she was running as fast as she could towards the surf club, but Hugo was a handicap. She gave him a mighty shove.

  ‘Get up to the path!’ she screamed, pushing him towards the dark shape of the building. ‘We have to split up! Get help! Hurry!’

  Behind them, Hollis roared. ‘Stop right there, or I shoot the boy.’

  Gemma stopped. She saw Hugo scramble to climb up the old surf club’s cement rampart, slip and fall.

  ‘Both of you,’ he yelled. ‘Neither of you move.’

  Gemma turned to face him. Her enemy was now close to them, the Glock secure in his hand.

  ‘Okay, Miss Private Investigator,’ Hollis whispered. ‘Climb up there.’ He indicated the cement edge of the rampart that had foiled Hugo’s flight a few seconds ago. ‘We’re all going to walk nice and quietly up to my car. To a more private location.’ He dragged Hugo to his feet, pulling him roughly to him. ‘Do it now, or I snap the kid’s neck.’

  Gemma considered her chances but a cry from Hugo caused her to wince and move to obey.

  Roger Hollis, still clutching Hugo, backed over to the rampart. He laughed and it was a horrible sound. ‘Up there now,’ he ordered. He indicated behind him and Gemma placed her hands on the edge, about to pull herself up, her mind whirling as she searched for a way out of this nightmare.