Spiking the Girl

by Lord, Gabrielle

  There was a long silence during which she remembered, with excruciating clarity, the moves she’d made. ‘We need to talk about this face to face,’ she said eventually. ‘Meanwhile, can I ask a work-related question?’ She’d just remembered her scribbled note about Mrs Dunlop’s webcam.

  ‘Try me,’ he said, sounding miserable.

  ‘Can you check the connection at Mrs Dunlop’s? I tried to view her place last night and got zilch.’ She paused. ‘You remember her and her animal?’

  ‘I’ll have a look. It was working fine last time I checked.’

  She said goodbye and rang off. A lot of things were working fine before, she thought as she started the walk back to her car.

  •

  Eric Stokes lived in a dark-brick block of flats in Potts Point. Gemma found the flat number she was looking for and brought all her attention to the job ahead of her, putting aside as much as she could of the previous night’s embarrassing memories. She went down some steps and along a crazy-tiled path littered with junk mail and the occasional unclaimed bill until she came to the front door and pressed his flat number. He buzzed her in and she walked through a foyer carpeted in faded red. A large container of dusty plastic flowers stood on a table in front of a segmented mirror from the fifties.

  Gemma took a deep breath and knocked on Eric Stokes’s door. She heard his heavy tread and the door opened.

  Stokes wasn’t much taller than Gemma. He was wearing black jeans and a checked shirt. With a thick moustache, longish hair and a furrowed face, he reminded her of a hard-drinking, hard-living country and western singer.

  ‘Come in, Miss Lincoln,’ he said, shaking her hand with a grip that was unforgiving. ‘Excuse the mess.’

  Gemma followed him into a room that stank of ashtrays and where bookshelves along all available wall space overflowed with untidy files and binders. A large desk at the end of the room was also piled high. ‘I’m president of the FFM association as you probably know. At the moment, we haven’t got a secretary or a treasurer and I’m doing everything.’

  ‘I’m here to talk about Amy,’ said Gemma, watching him closely. ‘I won’t take any more of your time than is necessary.’

  He removed a pile of folders from an old armchair. ‘Take a seat,’ he said.

  Gemma perched on the edge of the chair, not wanting to sink into it—it was far too low to be comfortable. Around her, photographs of her host in family groups or posing with his rifle over various dead animals caught her attention. Looking more closely, she saw that the photographs showed Stokes with two different family groups. It seemed Eric Stokes had been on a second marriage too.

  ‘Fire away,’ he said.

  Gemma looked back at him from the photographs. ‘Could you describe your relationship with Amy Bernhard?’

  He perched on a stool near the desk, pulling out a packet of cigarettes and offering her one. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked with a smile that wasn’t very convincing. Gemma shook her head. He lit up and cocked one leg horizontally across the other. Now she could see he was wearing riding boots. You are a cowboy, Eric Stokes, she thought. A rootin’, shootin’ cowboy with two marriages, a lot of dead animals and a smoking habit.

  ‘Amy wasn’t an easy kid to get along with,’ he finally said. ‘She never really accepted me.’

  ‘It must be hard for a young girl when her father’s place is taken by a stranger.’

  He didn’t like that. ‘I was a better father to her than her real father. At least I was there.’

  Gemma realised she’d have to tread very carefully. This was a man, she reminded herself, who’d been dismissed as unsatisfactory by two women already. ‘Did Amy appreciate the fact that you were there?’

  He didn’t answer straightaway but inhaled on the cigarette and looked away.

  ‘I don’t think she ever saw the real me,’ he said eventually. ‘She was just pissed off all the time. That I’d taken the place of her father. Nothing I did was good enough.’ He paused. ‘It was hard. I tried to be there for her.’

  ‘How did you do that?’

  Again, the long pause. Was he reflecting so as to answer truthfully, or spending time creating answers that he thought she’d like to hear?

  ‘I talked with her about things. Tried to get the right values into her. But it was no use. Her mother had no control. No discipline. See, the trouble with the kids of today is that they don’t have any discipline. In my day, you didn’t dare speak to adults the way kids do today. We were taught respect. We got a boot up the arse if we didn’t.’

  Gemma tried to imagine Eric Stokes being of any use whatever to a young girl and failed in the attempt.

  ‘I hear you still go there to the house? That you and your friends spend time—’ She caught herself just in time from saying ‘hanging round’ and finished, ‘outside your ex-wife’s house.’

  ‘We vigil,’ he said. ‘We hold our vigils to bring attention to the destruction of the sanctity of marriage in this society. We’re men who’ve been cut out of the lives of our women and children.’ The way he said the last phrase made Gemma think of covered wagons and the Wild West. Was that how Eric Stokes saw marriage and family?

  ‘Mr Stokes, I’m here because you are a person who was connected to Amy at one stage. Do you have any idea who or what might have caused her disappearance?’

  Stokes picked up a framed photograph that had been lying face down on his crowded desk. He passed it to her. ‘Look at this. This picture says it all. We were all getting along fine,’ he said.

  I don’t think so, Gemma thought, as she studied the picture. Lauren and Eric had their arms around each other, but Amy was standing apart from both of them, a lost little girl, glaring at the photographer. Gemma studied her. Had her own face worn that look as a teenager, she wondered. She passed the photograph back. ‘I’m surprised the police didn’t take a statement from you.’

  ‘They wanted one. I was away pig-shooting near Bourke when Amy disappeared and when I got back they expected me to go down to the police station and make a statement. As if I’d had something to do with it.’ He paused. ‘I told them I had better things to do with my time than waste it hanging round police stations and if they wanted a statement from me, they could damn well come to my place and get it.’ He almost spat with contempt. ‘Naturally, no one ever came round to pick it up.’

  ‘So you’ve done a statement?’ said Gemma. Angie would be interested to hear that.

  ‘Of course I have. I don’t have anything to hide. I wrote it out myself. But no one bothered to get it from me.’

  ‘I think the police prefer it if you go to a police station and do it there.’

  ‘I’m sure they do,’ he said. ‘They’ve got fancier ways of verballing people.’

  ‘Did you go away for long?’

  He leaned back on the stool, sizing her up, she thought. ‘I was with a couple of mates.’

  ‘Other members of FFM?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  Gemma decided to lean on him. ‘You probably know, Mr Stokes, that statistics show stepfathers are the most dangerous men in the lives of adolescent girls?’

  Eric Stokes’s whole physical presence became larger, more menacing, and the skin of his face reddened behind the moustache. Gemma was pleased she was perched on the edge of the chair, ready to bolt. Pleased, too, that he wasn’t between her and the doorway.

  ‘Now that sort of remark,’ he said, ‘is exactly the kind of filth that the lesbian so-called psychologists try to foist on people! It’s the sort of shit I’d expect from all those weirdos who want homosexual marriages and all that garbage. I’m a person who’s trying to bring back normality—to uphold the sanctity of marriage, not destroy it! That’s just crap!’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Gemma kept her voice mild, ‘it’s not crap. And it’
s not meant as a personal insult to you. It’s a fact of criminal statistics.’

  ‘I’ve told you—she never accepted me. Stuck-up little girl with all her fancy girlfriends from that fancy college.’ Eric Stokes’s chip was revealing itself to be bigger with every word he spoke. He wagged his cigarette at her. ‘I did everything I could to win her over. She was just a stubborn, difficult girl. She needed to be taught a lesson about respect.’

  Here we go again, Gemma thought. How was it, she wondered, that people who were so contemptuous of others somehow expected ‘respect’ in return? She kept her voice very low. ‘And were you the person who thought he should teach her that lesson?’

  Gemma was suddenly aware of a silence. The poky flat with its piles of folders and files was now still. Nor was there a sound from the foyer beyond the front door. Even the street outside was oddly quiet. It was as if Stokes’s fury had frozen everything into immobility. Suddenly he crushed his cigarette and stood up. ‘I think you’d better go.’

  Gemma didn’t like the idea of having to get up in front of him, and hated the idea of him walking behind her. She was spooked, every instinct warning danger. She stood up and took a diagonal side-step, always keeping him in her line of sight, ready to bolt at the first sign of overt aggression. Then she was at the door and he loomed in front of her to open it. She stepped outside, nodded to him and heard him slam the door behind her. It wasn’t until she unlocked the door of her car that she realised her legs were shaking.

  She left a message for Angie that Eric Stokes had made a statement and that it would need to be collected from his flat. Was this yet another of Bruno Gross’s omissions?

  Gemma needed to get rid of some excess nervous energy so she drove to the Maroubra Seals gym. She parked and grabbed her gym clothes from the boot of the car, slinging the bag over her shoulder. Overhead, an international jet made its approach, landing gear lowered, heading into the south-westerly.

  The gym had been refurbished some time ago and was filled with gleaming new machines. Gemma missed the old days before the gym upgrade. Gone were the club ladies with their perfectly set hair and white plastic earrings who’d pedal the exercise bike for a few minutes between fags, then go back downstairs to the pokies. Now, serious young people in lycra sweated into designer headbands. Gemma worked her way through several of the machines, until her legs ached and sweat ran down her forehead. She wanted to look as good as Angie had in her underwear. Not that there was anyone round to notice, she thought, as she finished on the stepper. She had a quick sauna, a shower and hurried outside, glowing with virtue.

  As she headed for home past the rolling blue and white breakers of the Pacific, she realised that the shadow that had been hovering over her the last couple of days had suddenly lifted. It felt like the removal of a curse. She breathed deeply.

  •

  Before she could even sit down in her office, Spinner called.

  ‘Hi. Have you got to the bottom of what’s going on over at Daria Reynolds’s place?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘Absolutely bloody nothing’s going on that I could see,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got something to show you.’

  A little while later, she buzzed Spinner in; he was waving a manilla envelope. He prepared the video and called her over to the operatives’ office when it was ready to watch. From the doorway, Gemma saw the front garden and footpath outside the Reynolds’s place frozen on the screen of the monitor.

  ‘Watch this,’ said Spinner.

  It was very boring viewing. A few passers-by had been caught in the earlier hours of the night: figures walking past, left to right, right to left. But as the tape went on and the night went on, the only times the camera activated was when a cat walked one way, then returned in the same direction, as cats do, and repeated this activity on and off throughout the night.

  ‘What about inside?’ Gemma asked after they’d fast-forwarded through the external tape.

  ‘You’ll see that in a tick,’ Spinner said.

  The grainy security footage showed Daria’s bedroom. Suddenly the sleeping figure stirred in jerky time lapse and the bedside light came on. Gemma leaned forward. She could see Daria Reynolds’s lips moving. She was talking to someone. Then her mouth dropped open in a silent scream.

  Gemma came further into the room. ‘What’s she going on about?’

  Daria Reynolds was sitting up in bed, clutching the sheet around herself, screaming at someone.

  ‘I can’t see anyone,’ said Gemma.

  Spinner stopped the replay so that Daria Reynolds suddenly froze, mouth open.

  ‘Follow her eye line,’ he said, directing Gemma to a place on the monitor screen. ‘She’s staring straight to that point there. Just off screen. He’s just out of camera range.’ Spinner sounded frustrated. ‘I was sure I had the room covered.’

  ‘But that still doesn’t explain how he got in in the first place.’

  ‘There’s no way he could have got in. And yet there it is.’

  Gemma picked up the remote and pressed play. Daria Reynolds continued her silent scream, shrinking from something they couldn’t see, while the front of the house showed no movement except for the changing positions of shadows as the earth turned and the moon set.

  Disconsolate, Spinner started packing his camera and laptop back into the carry bag. ‘I’ll have to go back,’ he said. ‘Do the job again. Put another camera in. He must have dug a tunnel, that’s all I can say. Or dropped through the roof.’

  ‘That just might be possible,’ Gemma considered. ‘There’ve been some robberies recently where the thieves removed tiles from the roof and did exactly that—came in through the ceiling.’

  ‘Boss,’ Spinner said, as if he were talking to a child, ‘if that’s how he was getting in, I think she would have mentioned it. Don’t you?’

  Gemma shrugged and walked with him to the front door, worried about the intensity of his mood. As he stepped outside Spinner turned. ‘I’ll go round and talk to her,’ he said. ‘Organise another time to redo the cameras.’

  ‘It isn’t just this, is it?’ she asked.

  Spinner was silent a moment. Then, ‘Rose doesn’t want to see me anymore. Reckons she can’t be with a man who doesn’t share her religion.’

  Spinner’s words tapped into Gemma’s own loss and tears pricked her eyes. Humans are just so perverse, she thought. We’ll think of anything, even God, to destroy a relationship.

  ‘I’m sorry, Spinner. I know how you felt about her.’

  ‘Feel,’ came Spinner’s sad voice, barely audible; then he collected himself so that when he next spoke he sounded more like the old Spinner. ‘I was thinking of having a little break. Going bush to see Mr Pepper.’

  ‘Who’s lost his pecker,’ Gemma said, trying to cheer him up, pleased he’d already gone through the insurance company’s faxed case notes.

  ‘He’s moved to Bathurst to live with a relative,’ Spinner said. ‘I was thinking of taking a few days up there—if Mike and you can cover Daria Reynolds’s place. Fresh air. Wide open spaces. Do the business and have a bit of time to myself.’

  ‘Sure,’ Gemma said. ‘Just let me know what days you won’t be around.’

  After grabbing herself a coffee, Gemma found that Senior Constable Diane Hayworth had left a message for her on her office phone. She immediately rang back, but Diane wasn’t in the office, so she continued working through the afternoon, sorting through the jobs-in-progress files. She needed to eat, she realised; she could carry on working over dinner, outside.

  Things were looking better in the fridge since she’d shopped. She put two cutlets under the griller and made a salad, poured herself a glass of wine. Sitting in the humid, warm evening, with the deck’s spotlight shining onto her work, she reviewed the current cases.

  She started with the Amy Bernhard investigation, rereadin
g the notes she’d made after the uneasy meetings with Andrew Bernhard and his successor, the hunting cowboy, Stokes. Gemma opened a fresh Tasmin Summers file and made a note to act on the contacts given her by Beatrice de Berigny as soon as possible.

  Daria Reynolds’s folder she moved to one side; she felt sure they’d have a result on that very soon, despite their client’s anger and her unseen intruder. Hesitating over Mr Dowling’s file, feeling overwhelmed, Gemma leaned back and listened to the sea surge, soft and low, against the rocks. No wonder she was tired. Even when she was a police officer, her workload hadn’t been so heavy. And she’d been a member of a much bigger team. If Mike decided to leave in the middle of all this work, it would be disastrous. And if he stayed, she’d somehow have to find a way to live with her feelings of shame.

  She carried the folders back inside, locked the sliding doors and pulled the curtains. Her apartment was cooler now. Jumping at a sudden noise, she realised how the fear that she thought had lifted, was still there, running just under the surface of her consciousness. But the sound hadn’t come from her place; it had come from the flat upstairs. She remembered the time she’d flatted beneath a fireman and how the sound of him walking around in his great big boots when he was called out used to wake her up at night. Please, no more firemen, she prayed. A nice, single, professional woman was what she’d like up there. Someone who read and stared out to sea like the French Lieutenant’s woman. Someone quiet.

  Then her mobile rang. It was Angie, her voice thick. Had she been crying?

  ‘What’s up, Ange?’

  ‘Trevor’s gone. I feel really miz. And he couldn’t say how long he’d be away this time. Some special training thing he’s doing with the Academy. Terrorist games. I don’t know when I’ll see him again.’

  ‘You wanna come over?’ Gemma glanced at her watch. ‘I can make up the sofa bed for you.’

  Angie sounded a little brighter. ‘I’ll bring the report from the knots man. That’s just arrived back.’

  Gemma remembered Mr Roper and the green and white nylon cord found around Amy Bernhard’s fine wrist bones. Maybe the knot expert could throw some light on this investigation.