‘But—’
‘No buts. And I don’t want you getting beaten up by irate drug dealers.’ She didn’t say, ‘Kids have been murdered for less than this.’
‘I could work for you,’ he said in his reasonable way, and for a second she almost forgot he was barely thirteen. ‘I’d be real good at that. Following people, sussing them out, bounty hunting.’
‘Bounty hunting! I don’t do that!’
‘I would.’
‘Get some sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s late. We can talk about all this in the morning.’
She bunked him down on the lounge with sheets and a pillow and, because it was such a mild evening, a cotton throw over his feet. When she went past a few minutes later he was asleep in that way the young have when they have shelter, a full belly and a reasonably benevolent adult nearby.
Gemma’s head ached and she realised she was exhausted. But before going to bed, she unlocked her safe and lifted out the gun case. Working quickly, she assembled the weapon, chambered the nine cartridges and pushed the magazine home. She took the Glock with her into her bedroom and put it under her pillow. She’d heard about colleagues deep in the world of undercover double-crosses doing this. She’d never imagined that one day it’d be necessary for her. Something in her felt defeated.
The Ratbag breathed gently on her sofa bed and she envied him the relative simplicity of his life. She put his washed clothes out to dry on the deck and went back to her bedroom, where she remade the bed, trying to settle down. Despite her physical exhaustion, she lay listening to how the soft surging of the sea smoothed over every other sound, softening and hiding them. She wished for clean, clear silence so that she could hear the slightest footfall. It was an ugly feeling that someone hated her enough to make such a threat.
To take her mind off the anonymous letter, she started wondering about Romero and his ambiguous language. She thought again about Mrs Ponzi and the rat problem. Eventually, after pulling the pillow around, she finally got it to feel acceptable. She was just dozing off when, from the living room, the Ratbag yelled something incomprehensible. Gemma bolted upright. But as the silence closed around her again, she relaxed her vigilance a little. Taxi came in and settled on her legs, becoming impossibly hot and heavy. She pushed him to the side and finally went to sleep.
•
A sound awoke her at dawn and she was immediately fully awake, feeling for the Glock. She lay there, senses alert, but heard nothing; eventually she relaxed, pulling her hand away from the weapon, and lay back again, wishing she could recontact the dream she’d been in before being startled. She caught the tail end of it. It had been about Mrs Ponzi and the rats. She got up to find the purloined letter and read it again, standing next to her bedroom window.
Dear Mr Romero, this is the third time I’ve had to ask you. Will you please tidy up your things? It’s a disgrace and the neighbours say they saw rats. If you don’t do this within seven days, I’m going to get a man in and get it all tipped. Sincerely, Mavis Ponzi.
The tone reminded Gemma of what a mother might say to an untidy child who refused to clean up his room. She thought about this while she disassembled the Glock and locked it back in its safe in her bedroom. She had a shower and dressed in a skirt and T-shirt and made breakfast, tiptoeing round the Ratbag who was still crashed out on the sofa bed. She made a mental note to ring Kit later. She wanted to talk over what was best to do about the Ratbag.
Her mobile rang: Angie.
‘The techies were up all night with Romero’s laptop,’ she said. Gemma could hear the disappointment in her voice. ‘Squeaky clean. Nothing in the history that shouldn’t be there.’
‘I’m following up that letter,’ said Gemma. ‘From Mrs Ponzi.’
She went into her CD-Rom program and checked the name. There were three Ponzis—two out Parramatta way and one at Queens Park. Mr Romero lived at Paddington, Gemma recalled, which adjoined Queens Park.
She called the number and a woman answered.
‘I’m ringing on behalf of Mr Romero,’ said Gemma, after giving her name.
‘You tell that man I’m going to throw all his stuff on the tip and send him the bill!’ said Mrs Ponzi. ‘I’ve warned him!’
Bingo! thought Gemma, this new development eclipsing her concern about the death threat. ‘I’ll come round,’ said Gemma. ‘See what needs to be done.’
‘You’d better get on to your friend!’ Mrs Ponzi warned. ‘Otherwise, it all goes in twenty-four hours!’
After the initial introductions, Mrs Ponzi, a square-bodied woman of indeterminate age, took Gemma down the side of her neat Federation house to a fibro garage standing against the back fence. The old-fashioned double doors were bulging outwards against a padlocked chain, timber splitting around their hinges.
‘See what I mean?’ said Mrs Ponzi. ‘The place is going to fall over if he doesn’t come and clear it out. Joan next door has seen rats running along the eaves!’
They approached the garage’s side door and Mrs Ponzi pulled out a tagged key and unlocked it. Spider webs festooned the nearby window.
‘How long has he rented this place?’ Gemma asked.
‘Must be nearly ten years now,’ said Mrs Ponzi, opening the door to reveal a densely packed room, crowded shelving around the walls lined with numbered and coded boxes, piles of history journals and magazines towering from floor to ceiling along the walls and more stuffed into overflowing boxes and cartons. Some of the journals had been chewed at one stage and shreds of paper strewed any available floor space.
‘Look at this! How he can find anything in this mess is beyond me,’ Mrs Ponzi clucked and scolded under her breath, looking around at the bundles of magazines tied up and piled into stalagmites.
Gemma made her way through them, thinking that Romero must be the sort of man who couldn’t throw out anything. She checked the magazines—history, lifestyle, art and antiques seemed to be the most popular, as well as a huge collection of cuttings and old newspapers. Six grey metal filing cabinets piled almost to the roof with bundled paper, stood against the inside of the garage doors, the pressure from the stacked papers on top of them threatening to break open the double doors. In front of the dusty window, an easel and a table covered with brushes and dried paint held several sketches. Gemma threaded her way through the maze of paper to see them better. Coy nymphs in revealing robes posed artfully in sentimental, pastoral vistas. Some of the luminous figures had been completed with faint washes of colour, others were still only at outline stage.
‘Since my husband died,’ Mrs Ponzi was saying, ‘it was good having the extra dollars for the garage. But look at the mess now.’ She wiped her hands on the duster she was holding. ‘I draw the line at rats.’
Gemma murmured something, barely paying attention. This was a treasure trove—Mr Romero’s storage space. Gemma’s attention was drawn to a shrouded shape on the other side of the easel, near the window.
‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ said Mrs Ponzi. ‘Do you know anyone else who might want to rent this? The phone line’s connected and there’s a toilet and shower in the laundry over there.’
Gemma thanked her. ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.
After the woman left, Gemma went over to the paint-marked shrouding and pulled it off to reveal a tripod supporting a high-powered telescope. Without touching it, she squinted through. It was already focused and she could see a young girl walking across a distant verandah, her hair wrapped in a towel, to disappear briefly behind a blurry obstruction before reappearing. Gemma followed her actions until the girl vanished through a doorway.
Gemma drew back, moving the angle of the telescope slightly so as to discover what building supported the verandah. She squinted through the eyepiece again and realised it was familiar. She was looking straight through the window of one of the glassed-in balconies that formed part of the dormitories of Netherleigh Park Ladies’ College. Gemma realised she’d been holding her breath. Mr Romero, she thought, you are in deep shit.
Like a hurricane, Gemma went through the drawers in the filing cabinets, pulling them out, checking all their contents. They were filled with more bundled art magazines and more of the familiar watercolours, all in the same coy pastoral style.
In the lowest drawer of the fifth filing cabinet, she lifted out a sheaf of clippings and under these she saw a black fabric bag. As she lifted it out, excitement surged—she could tell what it was from the shape and the weight.
‘Ahh,’ she said out loud. ‘There you are.’
Gemma unzipped the bag. No wonder Mr Romero hadn’t cared two hoots about the computer from his school office being taken for examination, she thought. Carefully, she lifted out the black laptop and its cables and took it over to the art table, clearing a space for it among the unfinished watercolours. Mrs Ponzi had told her about the phone line being put on out here. Although she was longing to know what Romero might have stored on this secret laptop, Gemma knew she must leave it alone until the police technicians examined it. Just by switching it on and logging on, valuable data could be irretrievably lost.
She rang Angie. ‘There’s enough here to arrest Mr Romero,’ she said, telling her about the laptop and the telescope trained on the schoolgirls’ dormitory.
‘Get the hell out of there,’ said Angie. ‘Lock the place up and I’ll get the cavalry straight over.’
‘You’ll be arresting Romero once you’ve seen this, I swear!’ said Gemma.
‘Great work, honeybun, but someone else will have to have that pleasure—I’m already in the car on the way to a job. Coming down Oxford Street.’
‘But I really need to talk to you about something. Woman to woman,’ Gemma said, her mind returning to the warning note in the envelope in her office. ‘I need to see you.’
‘I can’t put this off, Gems. G-for-Gross called in sick again.’
Sick
again
, Gemma thought. It might be worth running a quiet surveillance operation on Bruno. Catch him moonlighting. Have something to hold over the bastard. Something to deal with.
‘Reckons he’s got some ear infection,’Angie was saying. ‘So I have to go out to Richmond now.’
‘But it’s urgent,’ Gemma insisted. ‘Couldn’t you detour, just for a few minutes?’
‘No,’ said Angie. ‘Some kids camping out there found something really weird. Looks like multiple human remains. We’ve got to make sure Tasmin Summers isn’t part of it. Lots of human teeth.’
‘Please, Ange. I
must
see you. This is serious.’
There was a silence. ‘Okay. Feel like a spin in the country?’
‘What, now?’
‘Yes, now. I’ll radio Sean with the address so he can get the troops organised to visit Mrs Ponzi. Then I’ll pick you up in ten minutes. You can talk to me on the way. Okay?’
Gemma said goodbye to Mrs Ponzi. She felt mean not telling her that in a little while her house and grounds would be crawling with searching police.
She drove home, her mind jumping between the new information she’d uncovered about Netherleigh Park’s senior History teacher and the pencilled death threat that she wanted to talk about with Angie. Mr Romero was definitely prime suspect now. She briefly thought of Beatrice de Berigny and what this would do to her beloved college. And what if, she thought, Miss de Berigny was also implicated?
Once at home, she quickly put on some lipstick, changed into pants and sturdy R M Williams boots, grabbed an apple and left a note for Hugo telling him she’d be away for a few hours.
She put a twenty-dollar bill next to the note, then took it back again, remembering the wad of cash he’d had in his pockets. She stopped in her tracks. Something was wrong. Hugo had told her his backpack had been taken by heavies. That might be so, but how come he had all that money? No one ever has the drugs and the money together. Hugo was lying to her. Eddie whoever might be capable of exploiting a kid as a courier, but there was no way he’d break the first and last commandment of dealing. If Hugo was delivering coke and other prohibited substances to people, there was no way he’d be handling the money as well. Deliverance’s customers must work on a credit system.
Gemma went over to where Hugo lay sleeping on his back, hair tousled, eyelashes surprisingly long against his cheeks, just a little boy. Her hand that had been about to shake him awake dropped back to her side. She’d deal with it later. She went into her office and picked up the warning note in its envelope, slipping it in her briefcase. Then she heard Angie’s car outside.
•
Traffic was light on the Anzac Bridge. The huge bronze soldier, head bowed in eternal grief, stood frozen over his Lee Enfield rifle. White sails shone in the morning sun and a light breeze belied the rising summer heat. Angie turned the police radio down so that it was no more than a murmuring presence punctuated with soft static.
‘Good on you, girl,’ said Angie, after Gemma had told her the whole story of what she’d found in Mrs Ponzi’s garage. ‘No wonder he wasn’t worried about us taking his school computer. Can’t wait to have a chat with him.’
‘Guess who turned up on my doorstep last night?’ said Gemma.
‘Stevie boy? I told you—’
Gemma shook her head. ‘The Ratbag.’
Angie frowned. ‘The Ratbag?’
‘Young Hugo,’ Gemma reminded her. Used to live in the flat beside mine.’
‘He’s always turning up on your doorstep,’ said Angie. ‘What does he think he is? A homing pigeon?’
They drove in silence for a while, passing outlying suburbs leafy with trees and small-acre holdings, where horses grazed and project builders had delivered too many massive houses, badly proportioned, shoddily constructed. As they headed further west, the heat started rising and Gemma turned the air vent louvres in her direction.
‘Tell me more about these teeth,’ she said.
‘A detective rang from Parramatta. Some kids had camped out Richmond way and, to cut a long story short, they’re talking multiple human remains.’ Angie slowed for a red light. ‘So even though it’s a long shot, one of us has to go out there and take a look.’
She squinted in the bright sunlight and gestured to the glove box. ‘Fish around in there, will you? You’ll find some sort of visitor’s badge.’