‘A person could still buy the cord and use if for other purposes,’ said Angie. ‘Sean’s already checked with Tektanika, the people who make it. They supply a dozen or so retail outlets in New South Wales with that stuff. And a few more interstate. Doesn’t exactly narrow things down.’
Gemma walked round Angie’s car and knocked on the passenger door. ‘Let me in. I feel like a goose standing here talking down to you.’ Angie unlocked the passenger door and Gemma slid in. ‘Both the girls had meetings with Romero,’ Gemma continued, ‘but Amy arrived at school that morning, whereas Tasmin went missing on the way to school. We need to keep those little differences in mind.’ She tried to remember the witness statements. ‘Amy’s seen at school early but then goes missing.’
‘Surely the killer wouldn’t try something on at the school?’ Angie said. ‘Anyone could walk in any time.’
‘Maybe that’s what happened. Someone did walk in. Maybe Romero was getting hot and heavy with AB after the declaration of love in the letter and the principal walks in.’
‘Or maybe they meet at the beach and go somewhere else. He tries something on, she panics, says she’ll tell—bang goes his career—and he kills her. We’d better have a really good look at his place,’ said Angie.
‘And check out Beatrice de Berigny. Maybe she goes crazy with jealousy, kills Amy, tells Romero, and he colludes with her and the two of them dispose of her body,’ said Gemma.
‘Maybe she kills her and disposes of Amy all by herself,’ Angie suggested.
‘It’s hard work, lifting and hiding a body,’ Gemma reminded her.
‘There’s definitely something going on between him and Madame de Berigny,’ Gemma continued. ‘But why wouldn’t she just dob on him, get him arrested and clean up the school? Or sack him on the spot if he’s misbehaving with a student? That’s better than leaving an ongoing situation like this. I can’t believe she’d turn a blind eye to suspected seduction, with the possibility of abduction and murder, going on in her classrooms!’
Angie stretched her arms on the steering wheel, leaning back. ‘But if they’re both involved in some way, all that makes sense. It wouldn’t be the first time a couple have got together for murder.’
‘True. But why would she have employed me then?’ said Gemma. ‘The last thing she’d want would be closer scrutiny of Amy’s disappearance. The whole thing was quietly dying. Bruno had been taken off the case, although she wouldn’t have known that. But it had pretty well come to a standstill. Amy was fading into one of those missing girl posters you see peeling off walls in police stations. Why would Miss de Berigny want to stir it all up again?’
‘But didn’t you tell me you thought she was only employing you so she could impress the parents and the school board?’
Gemma nodded. ‘Yes, that’s what I first thought. But that was before Amy’s remains turned up, when it was still only a missing person’s investigation. It’s asking for trouble, getting someone like me to sniff around.’
Angie hugged her shoulders to her ears, moving her neck around. ‘God, I’m getting stiff. I’ll have to get back into training with the muscleheads. My back’s aching.’
‘Too much sex,’ said Gemma. ‘But, Angie, why
would
she do that? What possible motive could she have, especially if she was involved in some way?’
Angie stared back at her, raising an eyebrow.
‘You’ve got your smart cop expression on,’ said Gemma. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking there’d be no danger in stirring things up again if you believed you were right across the situation, in an unassailable position.’ Angie wound her window down and leaned an elbow on the sill. ‘Try this on, Gemfish. Beatrice de B and Romero are lovers, like you suspect. Miss Amy gets a crush on Mr Romero. Mr Romero—like an idiot—responds. It wouldn’t be the first time a middle-aged man has fallen for a teenager. Or a jealous older woman has got rid of her young rival, for that matter. Just say Beatrice does away with Amy, then writes an incriminating ‘love’ letter, using the initials AB and stashes this in Romero’s papers in the classroom. That way, in one move, she gets rid of the rival and punishes the faithless lover.’
‘It’s a pretty big move. How often do the principals of exclusive girls’ schools feature as murderers?’
‘Ask the lady friend of the Scarsdale Diet doctor,’ Angie said. ‘Miss Jean Harris was the principal of a very ritzy ladies’ college. Beautiful manners. But that didn’t stop her firing four rounds into her cheating doctor boyfriend.’
Gemma swung the passenger door open. ‘It’s late. I’d better get going,’ she said, then thought of something. ‘That love letter in Romero’s desk,’ she began.
‘Yes?’ Angie waited.
‘Killers keep trophies.’ Gemma hesitated, one foot on the ground. ‘And I can’t stop thinking of what Romero said when you told him you wanted to search his place.’
‘Remind me.’
‘He didn’t say, “You won’t find anything”, like you’d expect. He said, “You won’t find anything
here
”.’
They looked at each other. ‘Meaning,’ said Angie, ‘that you might find something somewhere else?’
‘The school?’
Angie shook her head. ‘I doubt it.’
Gemma got out of the car. ‘I can’t think straight right now.’ She patted the roof. ‘I’ll think about that when I’ve got more working brain cells. Nighty-night.’
It was after eleven by the time Gemma got home but she didn’t feel like sleep. She was overwrought. Too many
investigations. Too many questions. Mr Romero hadn’t been alarmed at the thought of a search of his premises. And he hadn’t been worried about his laptop being taken into custody. Yet all her instincts, not to mention the sentimental, suggestive watercolours he painted of young girls, told her he was ‘off’ in some way.
She caught sight of herself in the mirror of the hallstand and, for a second, didn’t recognise her own reflection, seeing instead only someone who looked like her. Does my half-sister look like that, she wondered. She wished for a moment that she’d never heard Rowena Wylde’s information. Right now, it felt like just another chore she had to do in a life that was already seriously overstretched.
As she went out of the sliding glass doors onto the timber deck, Taxi appeared from a secret location and started figure-of-eighting round her ankles. She bent to stroke him. What, she wondered, did she think she was going to do if and when she found her sister? And how would she approach her? Maybe she should just leave the whole thing alone. After all, they’d survived quite well until now without knowing about each other.
She went back inside, Taxi trotting behind, claws clicking on the polished floor. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘How about Sardine Supreme for supper? Sorry it’s so late.’
The smell nearly knocked her off her feet when she opened the tin, but Taxi purred and applied himself to it smartly. The cat attended to, Gemma poured herself a weak scotch as a nightcap and took it into her office to sort through the mail. The micro camera had arrived and she checked all the components were there. The tiny lens was barely the size of a pinhead, and the fine cabling ran into a battery not much larger than a matchbox. She put the camera safely in her desk then turned to a letter that had caught her attention with its handwritten address. As she opened it, a small piece of paper fell out and fluttered to the ground. Gemma picked it up.
There is a contract out on your life
, the carefully printed pencil words read.
Watch your back
.
Gemma’s heart rate increased. All thoughts about Romero and the Pre-Raphaelite nymphs were swept aside at this threat. She tried to calm herself by thinking it was just someone’s bad idea of a joke. But Gemma wasn’t laughing. Hadn’t every instinct been warning her lately that something was wrong? She felt vindicated in a frightening way. She’d felt that shadow shifting over the last couple of days, but now it was right back in place.
Automatically she went to ring Steve, to talk with him, get his take on it. But with all that had gone on, and the latest embarrassing incident, Steve wasn’t there for her anymore. She couldn’t seek his help on this. Gemma felt very alone as she slipped the note and its envelope into another larger one, sealing it. She half considered calling Angie, but dropped the idea. She’d handled worse than this before. The scientists at the analytical lab might find something helpful on it. And if it wasn’t a bad joke, if it was real .
.
. ? She tried to think who might want to scare her. Who might even want her dead. And why? Whom had she offended so grievously? Had the man following her in the white Ford been waiting for the perfect moment in a desolate car park, where the sound of a couple of pistol shots might go unnoticed, mistaken for a car backfiring?
Gemma hurried through her apartment, checking her boundaries, making sure the grilles were intact and the sliding doors onto the deck were well and truly locked. She checked the front garden on the CCTV. The only things moving out there were the petunias nodding gently in a night wind. But she didn’t like the look of some of the shadows, hollow and black, where dark things could hide. She peered out through the glass of the locked sliding doors. Despite knowing she was well protected, that ill-written note had shocked her right down to the cellular level and she realised she was shaking. She snatched the curtains together, blocking out the night. No one was going to get her in her own place. And during the day, she’d get Mike—that’s if Mike was still happy to work for her—to keep on her in traffic whenever he was free. Just when business was starting to pick up, she thought, along comes this.
A sound at the front door caused her to freeze. She dropped to the floor. Maybe it was Taxi pushing his paw under the front door to scrabble at the doormat. But no, her cat was safely curled up in one of the forbidden spots on top of the cedar sideboard, next to the ship’s decanters, digesting Sardine Supreme. Again, she heard the sound. She strained to listen in the silence of the night. Creeping forward on hands and knees, she peered at the CCTV screen in the corner of the hall.
Someone was outside. Framed by the CCTV was a hooded figure.
She crept further along the hallway. The Glock 27 was uselessly locked away in the gun safe in her office and it would take her some time to assemble it. Her heart thudding, she studied the hunched figure on the screen. Someone wearing a hooded parka in the middle of summer. Was this a killer coming boldly to her front door to shoot her between the eyes and in the neck the moment she opened it? Slowly, sliding her feet along the floorboards, she glided down the hallway, keeping her eyes on the figure on the screen, feeling her way to the front door. She wouldn’t stand in the doorway of the front hall; instead, she stepped sideways into the doorway to her office. That way, she was protected if the killer decided to blast through the fabric of her front door with a shotgun.
Once in position, she took a deep breath. ‘Who’s there?’ The figure jumped at the sound of her voice, clearly nervous. She made her voice harder. ‘What the hell do you want and what are you doing here at this hour?’
‘Gemma?’ A voice she didn’t recognise. A male voice.
‘Who are you? What do you want? Piss off before I call the cops!’
Still with her eyes glued to the monitor, she took another deep breath. ‘I’m calling the cops right now!’
‘No! Please don’t! It’s me, Hugo.’
Hugo. The Ratbag.
She saw the hooded image spread its hands in demonstration. ‘It’s me. Honest.’
‘Step back,’ she ordered. He did so and in the light she saw that it was indeed the Ratbag, taller, skinnier, with the bones of his face just starting to jut into manhood. He must be thirteen or so by now.
‘Please let me come in.’
Now that she was feeling calmer, she realised he had the reedy tenor of the just-breaking male voice. Cautiously, she opened the door and he slipped in. She closed the door behind him, making him go ahead of her down the hall. Once they’d reached the door to her living room, he turned, eyes huge and shadowed in his pale, worried face. ‘I’m in real shit,’ he said.
Just what she needed. Someone else in strife. Gemma considered frog-marching him back down the hall again. He wasn’t her problem. Let his parents deal with him. Let anyone deal with him, as long as she didn’t have to. But despite the anonymous warning looming in her mind, she found herself patting him on the head. ‘Join the club, kid,’ she said.
Once he’d showered and was dressed in a white towelling robe with his hair slicked back into a ponytail, Gemma realised she was pleased to have Hugo’s company. It took some of the sting out of the anonymous warning. Remembering, she glanced up at the security monitor and its coverage of the front garden. No one around.
Looking back at Hugo, Gemma saw that his face had changed subtly. She recalled the deep frown of puzzlement on his young brow. As if he’d endlessly tried—and failed—to understand the adults in his life and the world hurtling around him. He polished off her cutlets and a pile of pasta with tomato sauce—the best she could do without notice.
‘You’ve run away again,’ she said, as he bolted the food. ‘Naomi told me.’
Hugo paused in his swallowing, but didn’t answer.
‘Tell me why.’
He was reluctant. ‘Me and Mum had a fight,’ he said finally. ‘As usual. And Dad still hasn’t got room for me at his place. It’s been like over a year now. He reckons the builders are real slow.’
And I reckon he’s a real jerk, Gemma thought, recalling her impression of Hugo’s father, a well-dressed, ambitious man who’d left Hugo’s mother and married a younger associate. The three of them had shared a pizza a year or more ago. He’d never shown a scrap of interest in his son.
‘So how is your dad?’
Hugo shrugged. ‘He took me out for a feed. Explained that I’d have to go home to Mum. But you know, Mum’s got a new boyfriend. He tries to boss me round all the time.’ Hugo put the fork down. ‘I don’t think Dad likes me. He never writes or contacts me.’
‘I can hardly remember my father,’ Gemma said. ‘I mean, from when I was young.’
‘Why?’
She told him a very abridged and cleaned-up version. ‘He had to go away when I was about five. I didn’t see him again until a few years ago. And then he died.’ She didn’t say how or in what circumstances. That scene was still too painful for revisiting.
Hugo put his knife and fork down because there was nothing left on his plate. ‘Got any ice-cream or anything?’ He looked around hopefully.
Gemma did a search in the freezer and, behind a small glacier, found half a tub of ice crystals that proved to have some chocolate ice-cream buried underneath. Hugo ate that and then several slices of toast, finishing off a month’s supply of strawberry jam in one go.
Gemma sat on a chair and watched, wondering what on earth she was going to do with him. ‘I’d forgotten how you can eat,’ she said.
Immediately, he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a handful of large bills. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I can pay my way.’
Gemma stared. ‘Where did you get all that?’ There must have been hundreds of dollars in the pile.
‘It’s okay. It’s legit.’
Gemma frowned, picking up the bills and giving them back to him. They were the real thing.
‘Hugo. Where does a kid get this sort of money?’
‘I’m trying to tell you. It’s okay. It’s my job. I get paid for doing deliveries. But I got busted delivering a package to someone. I had to run.’
‘Delivering what?’
He shrugged. ‘Not my business. I don’t ask.’
‘Who were you working for?’
‘Eddie the Man. He works for this nightclub.’ He looked sideways at her.
‘Do you know what his real name is?’
The Ratbag shrugged.
‘Which nightclub?’ Gemma thought she knew the answer already.
‘Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this. You’re sort of like the law.’
Gemma remembered the business cards:
We deliver
, and the smart sketch of a razor cutting powder. ‘You’re talking about Deliverance,’ she said and tried again. ‘Eddie who?’
‘Dunno. That’s what everyone calls him.’
‘You’ll be in trouble big time if you hang round people like him. Delivering substances, for God’s sake!’
The Ratbag looked perplexed. ‘I thought it was drugs.’
Gemma saw he wasn’t joking. ‘You knew you were working as part of a drug dealer’s network and it didn’t worry you?’
‘I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just like the postie. Eddie said to just make sure I keep out of sight during school hours.’
‘Nice that he’s so concerned for your welfare.’
He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘After three o’clock, I’m just a kid on his way home from school. With my backpack. I wave at the cops on the pushbikes. No one takes any notice of me.’
‘Oh Hugo, Hugo.’ Despite all the mess she was in right now, Gemma’s heart was touched. She knew what it felt like to be the kid nobody wanted. She remembered his courage on a terrifying night last year and felt a surge of affection for him. ‘So what do you do during the day?’
‘I hang out. I’ve got a friend at the Cross—Gerda. She’s nice. Got some friends in the city at the games places in George Street. We bolt if we see a cop.’ He paused. ‘I can always pick them. There’s a cop that hangs out at the club too. Hangs around with kids—girls, I mean. He wears a diamond stud to be real cool, but I just know he’s a cop. I can tell them even if they’re not in uniform.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Gemma. ‘So what’s the shit you’re in?’
The Ratbag shook his head slowly. ‘Today, a coupla rips bashed me up. Took my backpack before I’d finished my deliveries.’
‘Rips?’ Gemma hadn’t heard the term.
‘Rip-offs. You know, scavengers who steal other people’s gear. They just cruise, watching and waiting.’ He looked away. ‘I told Eddie what had happened.’
‘And?’
‘Bastard thought I was lying to him. That
I
pinched the stuff from him.’
‘Did you?’
Hugo looked hurt. ‘Now you’re doing it.’
‘I’ve got to be sure,’ she said.
He looked around the flat. ‘Can I have a drink?’
‘I’ve only got milk or water.’
‘What’s that over there?’ he said, pointing to the decanters.
‘That’s hard tack!’
‘That’s what I meant.’
‘No way! It’s against the law. You’re a minor.’
The Ratbag threw himself back on the lounge. ‘All these bullshit rules to protect kids.’
Gemma knew what he meant. If adults really cared about children, she thought, this world would be a very different place.
‘Have you still got your Glock 27?’
‘Never you mind about that,’ she said. ‘Tell me about what happened with Eddie.’
‘He went ballistic. I bolted. The dude with the diamond stud was pissed off heaps too.’
‘Tell me about the rips,’ Gemma coaxed.
‘I can’t. I didn’t see them.’
Gemma glared at him. ‘Hugo, I’m not sure I believe you.’
‘True! They jumped me and they grabbed my backpack. By the time I got up off the ground they’d gone. But I had the money inside my trousers.’
Gemma finally stood up, went over to the decanters and poured herself another weak scotch, her mind going over what he’d told her. She could see the potential dangers ahead for Hugo—welfare interventions, DOCS trying to do their best despite the lack of staff and resources, then police, juvenile detention centres. The descent into the underworld. She came back to him. ‘We’ve got to work out a plan, Hugo. This running away business of yours. This must be—what? The third time? I’ll bet your parents have had enough of this.’