‘Stoke’s got something he wants to tell you, Detective’, I said meaningfully. ‘Something that if he voluntarily confesses to, then things might go a lot easier for him further down the track.’
Gemma’s arms were crossed over her chest in the classic ‘I’m giving away nothing’ pose. She stared at me for a long time, and then very slowly turned her attention to Stoke. There was a pause in which I assumed Stoke was considering whether he should confess to killing Snow or make a run for it. I was really hoping he’d do the former.
But Stoke wasn’t considering either of these options; he was thinking about something else entirely.
‘Could I have something to eat?’ he asked, and when we both stared at him, gobsmacked, he added, ‘It’s just that I’m starving and I haven’t had any breakfast yet.’
Gemma’s eyes did that eyes-popping-out-of-the-head thing that I thought only cartoons could do. I shot Stoke a warning look.
‘Tell Gemma what you did, Stoke. Tell her what you did for Niki. And while you’re doing that I’ll go see if there’s anything in Gemma’s fridge to eat.’
Gemma shot me a look of outrage but I ignored it.
The murmur of their voices filtered through to the kitchen while I made some toast and a cup of tea. The bread looked a bit mouldy but not once I’d cut into it strategically. Despite Gemma’s hard-arse demeanour, I could hear her voice was quite gentle as she talked to Stoke. Needless to say, there wasn’t a tea tray, Gemma not being the Sunday brunch-in-bed kind of girl, but I found a semi-clean breadboard to carry the breakfast in on. Stoke looked pretty depressed, but when I placed the board on the coffee table he cheered up immensely.
Gemma was on the phone asking for a car to come and collect an arrest from her house. She had that barely suppressed excitement that always accompanies a collar. Having a crim confess a major crime is definitely a high point in a cop’s life, and though I was pleased for Gemma, I felt a bit like a well-trained hunting dog who’d just delivered her a dead duck. The image was tragically apt for poor old Stoke. It felt mean handing him over for doing something I’d only dreamed of, but never had the guts to carry through. Instead, I poured him a cup of tea and offered the plate of strategically cut-up bits of toast.
A little flush of pleasure bloomed on his cheeks. ‘Oh, cute,’ he said. ‘You made shapes out of them. No one’s ever done that for me before.’
Gemma’s mouth opened, but I shot her a look and thankfully she shut it again. What the hell. Let him think I’d cut toast shapes for him. He’d taken out my sister’s killer because he loved her, and now he was going to prison for it. Shaping toast was the least I could do in return.
Gemma poured herself a cup of tea but wisely declined the toast. She appeared relaxed but her body was on alert, keeping an eye on Stoke in case he suddenly had a change of heart and either made a run for it, or jumped us. Neither seemed very likely to me. He was much more interested in breakfast, and rather tragically seemed to genuinely enjoy our company.
‘So how come you two hooked up at this ungodly hour of the morning, anyway?’ Gemma asked, eyeing me over the rim of her cup. ‘Last I heard you were tucked up in bed.’
Stoke shot me a look. He’d admitted to Gemma that he’d murdered Snow, but clearly had failed to mention the bit about breaking into my house. I spoke up before the urge took him to confess. Stoke was definitely a spontaneous-combustion kind of guy who needed to be carefully watched. I reckoned he was in enough trouble without landing himself a breaking and entering charge.
‘Stoke came to see me at home early this morning,’ I said, avoiding his eyes. ‘He wanted to give himself up for Snow’s … death,’ I explained, carefully avoiding incriminating words like ‘killing’ or ‘murder’. ‘And he asked me to help with that.’
Stoke looked momentarily confused but then grinned at me around his toast slice.
‘Yeah,’ he agreed, nodding good-naturedly.
Gemma wasn’t buying it, but she let it go.
‘What happened to Ryan?’ I said, hearing the peevish tone in my voice. ‘I thought he was staying outside my place until morning.’
Gemma hesitated, glancing in Stoke’s direction, as if weighing up what she could say in front of him. I felt a little frisson of premonition.
‘What?’
‘Ross is dead. His body was found about an hour after Ryan dropped you off home.’
I felt the relief flood over me. ‘How?’
Stoke seemed to have zoned us out completely. I watched him claim another piece of toast. He was alternating between honey and Marmite — and here I’d thought that our both loving Niki was the only thing we had in common. It helped to watch his rhythmical, enthusiastic chomping while I waited for the details of Ross’s death.
‘He blew his brains out. With Ross dead there was no reason for Ryan to stay outside your place any more, so we sent him home.’ She stared meaningfully at Stoke. ‘Though maybe we should have left him there since you never can tell who might try and break into your house.’
I half expected Stoke to spontaneously confess, but he seemed to be enjoying his breakfast too much to have picked up his cue. Gemma turned back to me.
‘Ryan decided you needed your sleep more than you needed to hear about Ross being dead, so he didn’t wake you.’
‘That was nice of him,’ interjected Stoke, smiling benignly.
Gemma shook her head, staring at Stoke with an expression of amused bewilderment.
I wanted to laugh, but I had something on my mind that I needed to work through. I hadn’t come here just so Stoke could confess — that was a bonus gift for Gemma, really. I came here because I had a suspicion about Niki’s death. Something I’d noted down way back when I met the Bookends on my first visit to the strip club.
I asked Gemma if she’d edited anything out of the recording she made of her ‘conversation’ with Snow. She glanced uneasily in Stoke’s direction, not keen to talk about it in front of him, but when she saw he was happily pouring himself another cup of tea and seemed completely uninterested in our conversation, she relented.
‘Yeah, sure, I did,’ she admitted. ‘You have to remember, when I gave you the tape you didn’t even know Niki was turning tricks. You sure as hell didn’t know she was running a dirty sex scam and blackmailing her clients — so yeah, I edited those references out and just gave you the last bit of the recording. Even then, you learned more than you wanted to,’ she reminded me.
‘Have you got it? The full tape? The unedited one?’
She jutted her lower lip out. ‘I think so. Yeah. Sure.’
Stoke stopped sipping and chewing. His eyes shifted from me to Gemma. He could feel the tension. Not surprising since I was standing with my fists clenched.
Gemma was looking at me too. ‘What? You mean, now? Can’t it wait?’
‘No.’ It sure as hell couldn’t.
For what felt like a full minute Gemma just stared at me. Then, with a shrug, she left the room, returning with an old-fashioned cassette tape and a pair of cracked vinyl-padded headphones which she jacked into the stereo.
Stoke must have heard something that neither Gemma nor I heard, or maybe he sensed something. His head spun round to face the door, and a split second later there was a knock. A knock like only a policeman can make. Stoke looked at Gemma, a frightened look, but as I slotted the tape into the deck I saw Gemma give him a reassuring pat on the shoulder. He relaxed and helped himself to the last piece of toast while she let the uniformed cops in. I put the cans over my ears. The silence was sudden and complete.
I listened to the full tape of the conversation between Gemma and Snow as a soundscape to the cops taking Stoke into custody. The younger of the two cops wanted to handcuff him but Gemma motioned that it wasn’t necessary, and both Stoke and I were grateful for that. Even though the cop’s handcuffs were metal and not the plastic type favoured by Ross, I’d broken out in a sweat as soon as they appeared.
I’d listened all the way through t
he unedited tape and had reached the section where Snow described Niki’s Good Luk! undies when Stoke was led to the door. I didn’t need to hear any of that again and flicked the stop button and removed the cans. Stoke offered me a rueful smile and a wee wave, and I gave the same right back to him. Gemma closed the door behind them and turned to look at me.
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘Not exactly,’ I said.
CHAPTER 28
I wasn’t allowed to confront the person charged with procuring my sister’s death until after the guilty plea was sorted out with various lawyers, and once the legal bigwigs had argued over the finer points of the Crimes Act 1961, number 43, section 66, 1 (d). Sean tried to insist on coming to the prison with me, but that was something I had to do on my own. I needed to hear the confession face to face. That was all I needed from Niki’s killer. Nothing more.
Prisons always remind me of health camps. Maybe it’s that 1950s colour-scheme, or maybe it’s because I’ve loathed health camps ever since Dad sent me to one when Niki was born. When Mum died, that is. I waited in the barren dining room for the prisoner to be brought through, mouth-breathing to avoid the stench of sweat and overcooked corned beef.
At first I didn’t recognise Vex without her bronze ponytail. Her hair was now cut short and framed her face in a little bob the colour of dishwater. Dressed in avocado-green prison overalls, she looked like a ten year old. Ten going on eighty. Those grey eyes had a blankness to them I hadn’t noticed before, but maybe they’d always been like that.
The prison guard remained by the closed door as Vex approached the table and sat opposite me. This meeting was part of her ‘deal’ with police, and she looked relaxed and ready to see it through. She didn’t smile or act like we were friends, and I was pleased about that. I sipped my bottled water and worked at keeping my heart rate and voice low and steady. An orange plastic mug of water had been placed in the centre of the table. She took a sip, and then rolled the mug between her palms before finally looking up at me.
‘So where do you want me to start?’ she asked.
It was my cue and I started right in. ‘It was your scam, wasn’t it? The whole sex and blackmailing thing — it was yours, not Niki’s.’
I didn’t tell her that I’d figured out she was the ‘chick boss’ Snow had referred to moments before he was killed — not Niki, as Stoke had presumed. Didn’t tell her that the beautiful Samoan Bookends at the club had given me the clue that very first night when I’d written ‘Snow — Vex’ into my notepad. They’d told me the two were connected but I hadn’t put it together. Didn’t tell her I should have guessed she was the puppet-meister when I saw Stoke follow in her wake up Molesworth Street.
‘Sure. Niki worked for me,’ she said, tilting her chin up proudly. ‘The deal with Niki was that she’d front it — she’d get to act like she was the big “boss-lady”.’ She waggled her head sarcastically. ‘I didn’t want anyone to know I was running things, so it was a win-win.’ Vex offered me a long, amused look, edging on a sneer, but I refused to be baited. I wanted to hear everything from her, which meant I needed to keep my cool.
‘She wanted to develop her “business skills” as she called them.’
I could tell she was quoting Niki. I could just imagine my little sister saying that. We both knew Niki had been practising her business skills because she wanted to impress me.
‘Whatever,’ she laughed. ‘It wasn’t her business skills that made me money.’ She shook her head and laughed again. ‘That girl made me rich doing things with men I sure as hell wasn’t ever prepared to do.’
I kept my voice steady. ‘And when she tried to get out of it, you had Snow kill her.’
Vex opened her mouth to answer, but the thrumming of a bee against the window pane distracted her. She turned to watch the bee batter its little body against the glass in a futile attempt to escape. Finally, she turned back to answer me, but some of the heat, the sarcasm, had gone out of her voice.
‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like I planned it from the start. Niki just got so uppity. She kept talking about this legit business you and her were going into.’ She shrugged before adding. ‘It really annoyed me.’
Vex drained her glass, and turned again to watch the bee buffet against the pane. I took the opportunity to take in a deep breath, not trusting myself to speak until I’d gathered myself together. Niki had been brutally murdered because she’d ‘annoyed’ Vex. The seconds ticked by while I tried to focus on my next question, but Vex, eyes still on the bee, started up again of her own accord.
‘Actually, she hated doing it, but she was good at the sex stuff, I’ll give her that. Even the really ghastly stuff. She made me a shit-load of money.’ Again, the little shrug. ‘She was using every day, but that suited me as long as the clients didn’t know. They don’t like junkies. They like them young and fresh-looking, you know? Girl-next-door types.’
She turned her gaze back to me for confirmation. Yeah, I did know what she meant, but before I could answer, Vex turned back towards the bee. It had become tangled up in a spider’s web in the corner of the pane, and its hum was now at a higher, more desperate pitch.
‘I had a good offshore supply of ice I fed her through Snow, so the money was going in a nice little circle back to me.’ She flicked those flat grey eyes back at me, expecting a reaction I think, but when I just returned the look, she made that little shrugging gesture again and continued. ‘But then she got it in her head she could go clean. They all say that, you know, but they never do it. But Niki surprised me. She cut right back and the next thing she’s talking about how she’s going to ask you to help her come off it completely — going on at me about how she’s going to admit to her “big sister” that she had a “drug problem” and ask you for help. I knew once she started talking to you she’d never stop — it would all come out, and I’d go down for the drug supply and the whole blackmail scam. She’d told me about your cop connection.’
I felt the air go out of me, as if I’d been punched. Vex dragged her eyes away from the desperate bee, and leaned back in the chair before delivering her body blow.
‘So yeah, I got Snow to kill her,’ she said.
‘Just like that?’
‘Yeah. Just like that,’ she answered with that little shrug of her shoulder.
‘And the cops never suspected you?’
‘Not me. They had Snow lined up for it. That ex of yours was on him night and day and, to tell you the truth, for a while there, I thought Snow would buckle and tell them everything, but then suddenly all the heat was off and no one was asking questions any more. Until that woman cop set Snow up and got him on tape confessing to knifing Niki. Jesus, what a pain in the arse that was. It was real dodgy for a while there. But eventually even that blew over and everyone forgot about Niki again.’
I hadn’t forgotten about her, but I wasn’t going to mention that now. Vex had become quite chatty, rolling the whole sordid scenario out in front of me like a red carpet. She seemed to have forgotten that this was my sister she was talking about. Or maybe she didn’t care enough about Niki or me to try and soften the blows.
‘Snow was a jerk-off,’ she added. ‘A waste of space. I have no regrets about having him killed.’
Whether she had any regrets about having Niki killed lay between us, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. She levelled those cool grey eyes at me but didn’t offer an answer to my unasked question.
‘If the heat was off, why did you have Snow killed?’
She sighed as if tiring of the subject, and folded her arms across her chest. The bee was humming in little staccato bursts of panic. It was giving up the fight.
‘The cops had shelved Niki’s case because they had no evidence, but Snow started yabbering to anyone who’d listen about how he’d knifed her. What was he thinking?’
It was a joke — Snow didn’t think — and she grinned in my direction, complicit,
inviting me to join in the comedy routine. I sipped my water, not wanting to buddy up to her, but not wanting her to stop talking either. I could feel her eyes on me, and eventually she continued.
‘He was so totally a liability. He was going to lead the cops to me, if not now, then eventually. I had to get rid of him.’
Her eyes swivelled again to the window. Now there was only the occasional burst of sound from the captured bee.
‘And then Stoke presented himself to you on a plate,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘Poor old Stoke. He was totally gaga over Niki. Sure enough, Stoke totally leapt at the chance to play little Niki’s avenging angel, so I guess I was right about him, wasn’t I?’
‘Yeah, you were right.’
She dragged her eyes from the bee’s final struggle and levelled that gaze at me again, and then she pushed back her chair. The screech of it made the hairs on my arms stand on end. The guard stepped forward, her hand hovering over the taser on her belt. Vex turned to face the guard, holding the plastic mug up and indicating the sink bench beside the window. When the guard nodded, Vex crossed to the sink.
It was time to leave. I retrieved my jacket from the back of the chair and shrugged my arms into. When I turned back to the table, Vex approached but, in deference to the watchful guard, positioned herself on the other side of it again.
She held the plastic cup towards me. ‘Let it go?’ she asked.
We looked at each for what felt like a very long time, and then I took the cup from her hands. I could feel the vibration as the exhausted bee hummed and rolled in the bottom of the cup. Yeah, sure. I’d set it free. I’d release the bee into the warm, pollen-filled summer air somewhere way beyond the confines of the prison where I hoped Vex would be held captive for a very long time.
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