Feeding the Demons

by Gabrielle Lord

  There was a long pause. ‘Actually, I need to talk to you. And now. I’m not able to move around freely just yet. Tomorrow I won’t be available. It’s about the statement your father wrote the night your mother was killed.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Gemma told me she’d given it to you to give to some language expert.’ And it all rose up in her again, the huge business with her father. The death of her mother, all of it eclipsed by the drama of the last few hours in which she’d thought that she, too, would die.

  ‘Actually,’ Steve was saying, ‘it’s really good that you’re there.’ He paused. ‘You may know already that Gemma and I have gone our separate ways and I didn’t know how to do this.’

  ‘Do what?’ Kit asked, alert to the urgency in his voice.

  ‘I can’t really explain over the phone,’ he said. ‘I know this sounds peculiar, but could I come over? Now?’

  ‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘But I don’t know how rational I’ll be. I’ve had a helluva night.’ She started laughing as she rang off. The laughter became more intense and she just let it rip until it turned into deep sobbing.

  She was still blowing her nose when Steve arrived. ‘I’m sorry about the hour,’ he said, looking anxiously at Kit’s tear-stained face. ‘But this is extremely important.’

  They sat at the dining table opposite each other, and Steve pulled out a manila folder. ‘Locky’s written a full report,’ he said, handing it to her. It contained a dozen or more typed sheets of paper. She briefly looked through it and handed it back, noticing that the copy of the statement was covered with highlighters of different colours and all the pronouns were circled.

  ‘I’ll do my best to give you a concentrated SCAN lesson,’ said Steve. ‘This sort of analysis is based on the fact that the language a person uses in his statement reflects reality.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m familiar with the way mind and behaviour are connected. It’s my life’s work.’

  ‘Gemma told me that the subject—your father—sat down and wrote this after the death of his wife. So the statement hasn’t been contaminated by questions or any weird policese, like “male person”.’ Kit nodded. Steve went on. ‘Humans are extremely possessive creatures. But your father doesn’t use the possessive pronoun “my wife” when he introduces her in the text. The next important thing to notice is where your father decided to start his statement about the event. Not as one might have expected with his arriving home to find the terrible scene. No. He starts his statement with this sentence.’ Steve started reading:

  ‘At about two-thirty, I rang Marianne to see if she wanted to go to the dinner that night at the university. She told me she didn’t want to go to the dinner, because she is being treated for depression. I said that was fine with me. We did not argue.’ He looked up again from the statement. ‘Expert analysis says that that phone call—in your father’s mind at least—is the start of the main event. Now you’d have to ask yourself why is that?’ Kit leaned forward, listening with all her attention. ‘Because during that phone call, his wife told him something that was the beginning of her death.’ Steve put the statement down. ‘This is hard for me,’ he said. ‘Having to tell you this.’

  ‘Keep going,’ said Kit. She found that she was clenching her fingers so hard, her nails were cutting into the palms of her hands.

  ‘The fact that he wrote “we did not argue”,’ Steve continued, ‘is extremely important. When someone writes what they didn’t do in a statement, or what didn’t happen, a SCAN analyst becomes extremely curious, because a statement is about what did happen.’ Kit looked down again at her father’s statement, following the written words upside down as Steve read them aloud. ‘I saw four more of my patients.’ Steve stopped. ‘Notice he says “my patients” and yet a little further on he’s talking about “a” patient. The analyst wants to know why it is that he wants to distance himself from that particular patient.’ Kit slowly nodded. It made sense to her. Steve read on. ‘. . . went to the bank but because there was a long queue, did not get money out then. Made a brief house call to a patient.’ Steve jabbed at the paper. ‘This is what we call the missing “I”,’ he said. ‘Three times he’s not there. In his own statement! It can mean that the person was not actually present in the action. So he’s “missing” at the bank, “missing” when he doesn’t get money out . . .’ Again, he paused. ‘Remember the importance of mentioning something that didn’t happen. And in this case, he further unwittingly draws attention to this transaction by using the word “then”. This tells us that he did get money at another time. This withdrawal is very important in his mind. And an analyst wants to know why. Because almost straight after that he is making a house call to “a” patient, not “my” patient as in the earlier example, and the “I” is also missing. These are significant signals of concealment and deception.’ Kit felt her heart sink.

  ‘After that, I left.’ Steve put the paper down. ‘“After” is what we term a “missing connection”. After what, we have to ask? What happened at this meeting with this patient that he wants to distance himself from in the statement? Did he give the patient money, this patient that he distances himself from? The use of the word “left” in a statement always implies some sense of stress or urgency.’ He saw Kit’s face and his serious expression softened. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘to be telling you this. I wish it was otherwise. Then look what your father does: drove straight to the house—”the” house. Not “my house” or “home”. This indicates no sense of ownership of the house. Was it rented?’

  Kit shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It belonged to Grandfather Lincoln.’ Steve nodded at the confirmation.

  ‘Marianne was in bed and the girls were in their room,’ Steve read. ‘The way he refers to his daughters doesn’t indicate relationship. His own daughters are just “the girls”.’ Kit felt her own eyes filling. Some old sense of shame was activated. We weren’t important to you at all, were we, she said to herself. ‘Nor does he bother introducing you. It is not very good. And you have no names.’ Kit turned her attention back to the statement, not wanting Steve to see the incipient tears. But he was reading on.

  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 decept
ion 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.

  Thirty-Three

  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 be
came 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.