Feeding the Demons

by Gabrielle Lord

  ‘She’s heavily sedated, at her sister’s place,’ Angie said. ‘We’ve got to get this bastard. He’s taken this girl right from under her family’s nose.’

  Gemma thought of him going through his sick gig, just a metre or so away from where she lay sleeping. ‘He likes that,’ she heard herself say. ‘He likes the risk. That’s part of it for him.’ She knew that from her own experience, the dens of iniquity, the nameless men and searing sex without words. But in this man’s case, it wasn’t the thrill of anonymous sex he was seeking, but the ultimate and lethal power over another human being.

  ‘We’re taking statements from everybody who knows Bianca and her family,’ said Angie. ‘And I mean everyone. Then we’re getting a Scan analyst to check them all out for any hint of anything.’

  ‘Scan?’ said Gemma, remembering the conversation she’d had with Steve. The sadness welled up again and she turned her full attention back to Angie.

  ‘It’s a powerful investigative tool,’ said her friend, ‘a way of detecting deception and concealment in statements by way of detailed analysis of the words used.’

  The two women walked out of the house, leaving the other Crime Scene personnel behind them, walking down the front garden to the driveway gate, past the wheelie bin, heading towards their respective vehicles. The sun had risen and it was a beautiful morning filled with clear early light. The Channel Ten van was still parked across the road and Mick was talking to the heavy-set man Gemma had noticed earlier, who was now standing near the driveway entrance to the Perrault house.

  ‘This is a crime scene, sir,’ Mick was saying, jerking his notebook towards the house. ‘And I must ask you to leave or you could be arrested for impeding the police in the course of their duties.’ The bulky man mumbled something and turned away to walk back across the road and past the Channel Ten van. ‘Cheeky bugger,’ Mick said to the two women as they watched. ‘He was trying to go inside.’ A small crowd had gathered beyond the cordoned area and were watching the house and the vehicles parked around it. ‘You’d think they had better things to do at this hour of the day.’

  ‘Wish we did,’ said Gemma, as they crossed the road. ‘Steve’s going to give the statement my father wrote on the night of my mother’s death to a Scan expert.’ She wondered now if he would.

  ‘I didn’t know you had the statement.’ Angie asked. ‘Why are you doing it now, after all this time?’

  ‘I’m hoping to reopen my father’s case. I want to show the crime scene pictures to that American bloodstain expert.’

  ‘I see,’ said Angie, understanding her friend. Then she came back to business. ‘That street worker you rang me about,’ she said. ‘Can you chase her up for me?’

  ‘I’m not sure she’d talk to you,’ said Gemma.

  ‘She’ll have to, this is getting big,’ Angie said, indicating the house behind them and the gathering crowd and a TV journalist looking sincerely into the camera while he did his on-the-spot number for the viewers. ‘The boss has a lot riding on me.’ She looked around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. ‘And Bruno is being his usual charming self. He’s one of those guys who thinks his dick’s going to drop off if he says “Yes” to a woman. Tanya told me he’s been bad-mouthing me. He’s determined to be as difficult as possible.’

  They’d reached Gemma’s car. ‘When I got my promotion last year, know what he said?’

  Gemma nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘“Whose cock did you suck to get that?”’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I got it, too.’

  ‘He’s getting worse,’ Angie said.

  ‘Men like that always get worse.’ Gemma unlocked her car and climbed in.

  ‘Now that Bianca’s missing,’ Angie said, ‘that street girl is going to have to come in. See if you can talk her into doing a session with Devlin. She might be less nervous if you ask.’

  Gemma remembered Bill Devlin, the forensic hypnotist, and the sometimes extraordinary details he’d been able to elicit from witnesses and victims of major crime. ‘Okay,’ she said doubtfully, extracting her keys from her wallet. ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘And I want you to come in with your video to the Strike Force meeting,’ Angie said. ‘Because it looks like you were his first victim.’

  ‘That we know about,’ said Gemma.

  ‘Oh,’ Angie said. ‘That rego check you asked me to do on the green Ford. The vehicle came up as stolen ten days ago according to Marrickville police. Owned by a woman kindergarten teacher.’ Angie started her car. ‘Now,’ she said over the sound of the engine, ‘you can do something for me.’ Gemma raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Now that everything has to be done by the fucking book standing on your head in triplicate,’ said Angie, ‘I’d feel a lot happier if I knew I had a girlfriend on the outside who’s not tied up like we are. Someone who can move around freely. Ask questions. Keep an eye on things. Let me know stuff. And quickly. Like you’ve already been doing.’

  ‘Fast and free,’ Gemma said. ‘That’s me.’ She started her car. Angie waved her friend goodbye and Gemma drove away. She stopped at a still-closed bakery and patisserie at Bondi and sat in the car for ten minutes until it was seven o’clock, in order to pick up some croissants for breakfast.

  •

  On the way home, she found herself once again cruising Steve’s street, her eyes darting, trying to cover everything and the road ahead as well. She braked suddenly, causing the car behind her to screech to a halt and lean on his horn. She waited while the angry driver behind her accelerated and took off past her, giving her the finger as he did.

  Outside Steve’s block of flats stood four wheelie bins, waiting for the council garbage pick-up. Gemma squashed the paper bag of croissants into the glovebox, parked, jumped out of her car, dragged Steve’s bin over and opened the back door of her car. She started throwing the bags of rubbish from Steve’s bin into the back seat. She had done this so often on other jobs that it hardly seemed odd any more, but she was aware of people’s stares. The stink of rubbish filled her car as she took off for home.

  Back at her place, she squashed Steve’s rubbish into her own bin and dragged it to the door of her apartment. The Ratbag looked up from where he’d been squatting on the grass next to a cardboard carton. ‘Why are you taking rubbish in to your house?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Because,’ she said.

  ‘Because why?’

  ‘Because Y is a crooked letter and you can’t make it straight.’ And she dragged the bin over her doorstep, hearing the ghost of her Aunt Merle’s voice in the words as she closed the front door. She left the rubbish bin in the hall and, after she’d washed her hands, put the coffee on and went back outside to get the croissants. The Ratbag was hunched over the carton and he didn’t look up as she went up to the car. She remembered that his mother left very early in the morning. On the way down, she felt suddenly sorry she’d fobbed him off with the smart-arsed ‘Y is a crooked letter’ response.

  ‘What you got there?’ she asked, coming up behind him.

  ‘It’s a nankeen kestrel,’ he said. ‘I found him in the cemetery. One of his wings is hurt. I wanted to take him to the vet but Mum wouldn’t go. She said wild things just die anyway.’ He opened the lid and Gemma peered in to see the kestrel huddling in a corner, its fierce brown eye glaring from its moth-coloured plumage. It flapped awkwardly and the Ratbag put the lid back on the box.

  ‘What are you feeding it on?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘Mice,’ he said. ‘I buy pinkies from the pet shop.’ Gemma looked at him. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I kill them first.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Gemma.

  ‘They’re only mice,’ the Ratbag said reasonably. ‘And he doesn’t actually eat them anyway. He hasn’t eaten anything.’ He looked up at her. ‘Do you think he’ll die?’

 
‘Maybe you should let him out,’ she said.

  ‘But your cat!’ the Ratbag cried, and there was real anguish in his voice. ‘Your cat would kill him.’

  ‘You could make a safe place for him,’ she said, ‘where Taxi couldn’t get at him. Like a cage or something.’ He looked up at her. ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got coffee on the stove.’

  •

  She took the coffee out onto the deck, carrying with her the contents of Philip Hawker’s manila envelope. The sea was a mirror of blinding light and she had to turn away from the glare, spreading out the contents of the envelope. There were two small notebooks, pages of court transcripts and several pieces of folded paper which Gemma put aside for the moment. She briefly glanced through the court pages, noting Philip Hawker’s name. She paused at the evidence of a Detective Sergeant Frank Alan O’Donell from the CIB Scientific Section. ‘All the blood was deposited at the time of the attack’, the typed words declared. ‘All the blood’, Gemma was thinking. My mother’s blood. Deposited. That special police language that tones down the horror of moments of violence.

  The photographs were hard to look at. She turned the close-up shots of her mother face-down and concentrated on the shots of her father’s clothes and the surroundings of her childhood home. Black spurts of blood stained the jacket in the picture and the walls of the dining room. She remembered Philip Hawker saying the pattern of the bloodstaining was consistent with impact splatter, and this could only have happened at the time of the attack as major blood vessels opened. In one picture, someone’s hands held the jacket up against the wall, like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, to show that the black spatter on the wall was a continuation of a large stain on the right sleeve of the jacket. But was it? Gemma looked closely. It certainly looked as if the blood on the clothing and the blood on the wall were part of the same spread. This was the sort of evidence, she considered, that only expert eyes could judge. As they had. Thirty years ago.

  The blood on the walls and the blood on the jacket curved in large, sweeping patterns, vaguely reminiscent of palm leaves, with one strong splash running diagonally up the wall like the main stem and the other smaller splashes branching down like the individual leaves. Gemma stared at the patterns. She tidied the photos, edge to edge, put them back in their envelope with the notebooks and the transcript pages and sat immobile, shocked at how deeply they’d affected her. She felt tears well up. She tidied everything back into the manila envelope and placed it near the front door. She turned her attention deliberately to Steve’s rubbish. As she started on one of the standard operating procedures of her business —checking someone’s rubbish—she remembered a conversation she’d had with Kit some time ago. You can learn a lot about a person, Kit had told her, from the way they live, the environment they’ve created around them. ‘People’s decor becomes diagnostic,’ she’d said, and Gemma had been taken with the phrase. She recalled the derelict homes she’d been into during her time with the cops, the filth and rubbish of some people’s houses reflecting the filth and rubbish of their messy minds creating chaos around themselves. But you can learn as much, if not more, she was thinking, from what they throw away. What magazines or papers the targets read, what they eat, whether they cook themselves or use take-away, how much they waste, what sort of condiments they like, what sort of food they prefer, who’s written to them, and often the letters as well. Phone numbers on scraps of paper, whether they’ve used condoms. You can even find out what some of their activities are in advance, especially if they’re list-makers.

  The rubbish bin from outside Steve’s place, like most people’s, was like an archeological dig: today and yesterday on top, and moving backwards through the week until last week lay squashed at the bottom. And from the top until almost the bottom, there was no hint of Steve. Not only that, there were items that indicated someone else had moved in and had been living there for the last five days. That would make sense, Gemma realised. Steve would have to vanish the minute the drug squad had made their bust of his erstwhile bikie buddies.

  It quickly became clear that the new tenant living in the flat was a woman who smoked Winfield Lights, drank tinned vodka and orange, used panty-liners, lived on Lean Cuisine and fruit and ate a lot of potato chips. But right at the bottom of the bin was a shopping list in Steve’s handwriting, as well as wrappers from the honey and lemon sweets he’d started continually sucking once he’d given up smoking.

  Gemma seized the list. ‘G’s present’, she read. She thought of the little package that had hit the floor during that last scene with him. She still hadn’t dared look for it, far less open it, knowing it would break her heart. This is pathetic, she told herself as she smoothed out the stained piece of paper. It’s bad enough when I’m charging forty dollars an hour to root around in rubbish. But here I am, doing it for free. She turned her attention back to the scrap of paper with Steve’s writing on it; there were two more words: ‘Bike, Keys’ followed by a phone number. Gemma put it to one side, rebundled the rubbish back in the bin and wheeled it back up to the roadside. There was no sign of the Ratbag, who must have gone to school. When she came inside she lit some scented rose-shaped candles—a gift from last Christmas—and placed all five of them in different parts of the house. The stink of old garbage started to fade and she walked back out onto the timber deck with the scrap of paper in her hand. She felt ashamed of spying on Steve but, despite herself, she studied the little shopping list. Did ‘Bike’ mean to take the bike back to the police centre? And the keys to it? Or could it mean to pick up the keys for a new safe house? Still, her search had yielded a phone number, and that was something. But before she could act on it, Angie was on the phone, asking her to come in at once.

  She drove straight over. ‘Next time I’ll be true, I’ll be true,’ sang the radio and she had to turn it off because her eyes were filling with tears. At the police centre, Angie came downstairs to meet her and they went up in the lift and out into the corridor. ‘We’re set up down the hallway,’ she said, indicating a room further down the hall. ‘Do you want tea or coffee before we join them?’

  Gemma followed her into the meal room, where Angie poured boiling water onto the instant coffee spooned into styrofoam cups. ‘The press is going apeshit over this case. You’re not supposed to have this sort of thing happening in the eastern suburbs. It’s why we pay such high rates,’ she said. ‘Not too much violent crime and the nor’easter. The Commissioner’s just been up here talking to the boss and to us—as much overtime as we need.’ She looked pleased and Gemma stole a biscuit from a packet left on the table, remembering that the croissants she’d bought earlier were still in their paper bag lying near the sink and realising that by now Taxi had probably chewed them. Angie was peering into the fridge, looking for milk. ‘Kings Cross cops are trying to find that sex worker who spoke with you. Devlin wants to try getting something on the FACE program with her.’

  A young detective put his head round the door. ‘Come on, Angie, we’re waiting on you. Boss says get your cute arse down here now.’

  ‘Don’t cute arse me, Col,’ said Angie, ‘or I’ll put you on paper for sexual harassment.’

  ‘Only joking,’ said Colin. ‘You haven’t got a cute arse at all.’ He ducked too late and the biscuit Angie had thrown at him ricocheted off his forehead and onto the floor. Gemma felt a stab of something that wasn’t quite nostalgia or jealousy.

  The psychiatrist was holding the floor when Angie and Gemma slipped into the room and into two chairs together at the end of a long table covered with styrofoam cups and notebooks. Copies of photographs of the crime scene at Maroubra and the bedroom at South Coogee were doing the rounds.

  ‘There’s every indication that he knows his area very well,’ Dr Garry Copeland was saying. ‘Might even live close by. We’re working on the assumption that he’d been watching the house. It wouldn’t have been hard to work out that Mr Perrault was away.
It’s possible he might even have known the girl.’

  Not necessarily, Gemma thought. It is so easy to collect the most intimate knowledge about perfect strangers. She thought of days, weeks, months even, of sitting watching a house, noticing who came in and who went out. Noticing which car was missing from the garage, or not being used, day after day. Watching the routine of the day right up to the hour the light in the bedroom is finally turned out and the house is in darkness. But that doesn’t mean that things can’t be seen. As long as there is someone outside watching and listening, the household is exposed.

  As Garry droned on, listing the facts about the murdered accounts clerk from Maroubra, and the missing girl from South Coogee, Gemma’s mind continued imagining the killer. Perhaps there’d been other women who’d woken to find their clothes all stabbed on the floor who had stayed silent.

  ‘See,’ said Garry, scratching his balding head in a way Gemma remembered well, ‘what we’re primarily looking for when we build up these victim profiles is motive. That’s why we want to know all sorts of things about these two young women. Particularly their personal habits, any friends and enemies and any recent changes in lifestyle. Motive is what we’re after. But these sorts of cases often don’t have what we’d usually call a motive. That’s when profiling can be helpful. But keep in mind,’ Garry added, looking around sternly, ‘that the use of profiling does not replace sound investigation procedures.’

  Oh God, Garry, Gemma thought, you are so boring. Her mind was racing ahead of him, working through what she knew already about the clothes killer. He’d been opportunistic, noticing a door left slightly open. He’d come into her life through a crack of her own making. She’d have to admit that now. This had excited him, he’d come in closer to investigate. Maybe he had been a ‘virgin’ until then, Gemma thought, and this was the first time he’d gone ‘out’ to find a target. Maybe until then, he’d snow-dropped women’s clothes and wanked over them. She picked out the photographs of the two crime scenes and laid them down, side by side. Too different, said the analysing part of her mind. But some things are similar, said the rationalising part. One idea in particular suggested itself to her, but she wanted to talk to Kit about it and get more depth and clarity before voicing it.