‘Don’t forget!’
‘And your old perv—you were right about Alistair Forde. He’s done time. He’s in the system all right, but with his surname spelled differently.’
‘What sort of form?’
‘Three convictions for indecent behaviour.’
‘I knew it,’ Gemma said. ‘No way could he see out the window and down into the area outside Amy Bernhard’s house from where he said he was. Reckoned he was standing on a table to change a light globe. He was standing on a table all right, but at the window, so he could get a good eyeful into Amy’s bedroom. And that table was a fixture by the window although he said he’d just shifted it there.’
‘But he still could’ve seen someone in the bushes outside Amy’s room. Even if he was standing on a table having a wank.’
‘I’m not saying there wasn’t a prowler that night,’ said Gemma. ‘Forde reckons he chased him over the back fence. But his prior convictions put him in the picture.’
‘Let’s go visit him.’
Opening his front door, Alistair Forde cringed when Angie flashed her ID. He gave Gemma a filthy look. ‘What
are you doing back here? I answered all your questions. I reported that prowler to help the police! Now you’re treating me like I’m the intruder. Why are you hounding me like this?’
‘This is just a polite invitation,’ said Angie. ‘For a quiet chat.’
‘What about?’
‘About perving on girls through their bedroom windows. Standing on tables to get a better look. That sort of thing.’
Forde’s face reddened. ‘But I explained about the table! It was only by the window so I could vacuum the carpet.’
‘Don’t give me that crap,’ said Gemma. ‘You climbed on that table all the time to see into Amy Bernhard’s bedroom. I could see the deep indentations the table legs had left on the carpet.’
His face suffused more darkly. ‘It’s the bloody last time I’ll do anything to help the police. If this is how it’s going to be used against me!’
‘We just want to be sure of a couple of things,’ said Angie, smiling.
‘I didn’t do anything wrong!’
He was still saying much the same twenty minutes later. ‘I only looked. Why are you making such a fuss about it?’ He looked desperately first at Gemma, leaning against the wall in the corner, then at Angie opposite him.
To rattle you, sport, thought Gemma, to take you out of your comfort zone. To impress upon you that you could be in serious trouble. That way, you might be more inclined to tell us if you know anything.
‘There’s no harm in looking, and anyway,’ he said, ‘there hasn’t been anything to look at for a year.’
‘So you’ve been peeping on other young girls, have you?’ Angie asked. ‘Like Tasmin Summers? Did you go round to her place too?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’
This time his perplexity seemed genuine. Recalling the mansion in Rose Bay—the steep formal gardens, the well-protected grounds—Gemma had to concede it would be hard for someone like Alistair Forde to do his number in such a place.
‘I’m just wondering,’ Angie said calmly, ‘about your bid to be helpful. The way you reported a prowler outside Amy’s window last year.’
‘I won’t bother again,’ he muttered. ‘Last time I’ll ever try and be helpful.’
Angie ignored him, continuing, ‘Because what we’ve found in the past is that the person who reports something concerning a murder is often the real offender.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ said Alistair with self-righteous smugness. ‘It was well before that girl got herself into any sort of trouble.’
‘I think you saw through Amy’s window.’ Gemma moved in closer, menacing him. ‘You decided to get her all for yourself, didn’t you.’
Alistair’s eyes widened in shock and the blood fled from his face. With his hunched shoulders and the dry scaly skin around his eyes, he reminded Gemma of some old reptile checking its environment from under a ledge.
‘You think I’m making it up?’ Alistair cried. ‘I tell you—I saw that man! He was crouched down in the bushes on Halloween night. And when I went down to see what he was up to, off he went, over my back fence! And that’s the truth. I’ll swear on my mother’s grave!’
Gemma continued as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Amy would’ve trusted you. You could easily pull up and offer her a lift and she’d hop in with you.’
‘Me?’ Alistair Forde shook his head. ‘What would I be offering a lift to a young girl for? She’d just laugh at me.’
Gemma pounced. ‘Is that what happened? Did she laugh at you?’ she dropped her voice. ‘And you decided to put an end to her laughing?’
Forde was actually backing away, till he hit the edge of a chair and almost stumbled. ‘It’s not true! You’re just making this up as you go along! Everything I say you twist! You’re making everything I say into something ugly!’ Sweat beaded his forehead and his breath came in shocked bursts.
Gemma closed in on him. ‘What you do is something ugly. Perving on young girls while they think they’re safe and sound in their own bedrooms.’
Alistair Forde backed sideways around the chair behind him but Gemma followed him, step for step. He sat down suddenly, in another chair. God, thought Gemma, hearing his ragged breathing. She hoped he wasn’t having a heart attack.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I might have had a bit of a look from time to time. But I swear I never touched that girl. Never. On my mother’s grave.’
Angie’s mobile rang and she took the call. This gave Forde sufficient time to gather himself. He got up out of the chair, pointing a shaking finger towards the front door. ‘I want you to leave my house now,’ he said. ‘I try to be helpful and this is what I get.’
Angie rang off. ‘If you let us have a look round your backyard, we’ll go,’ she said. Gemma realised Angie didn’t want the hassle of having to organise a warrant.
Forde hesitated, weighing up the situation. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide,’ he mumbled eventually and showed them out into the small fenced yard. ‘But you’re not coming back in here after today without a proper warrant,’ he said, slamming the door behind them.
Alistair Forde watched from the window while they checked around his boundary line. The bushes in which he’d alleged he’d seen a prowler proved to be an overgrown ginger plant and a couple of hydrangeas that grew almost to the sill.
‘Amy’s window,’ Angie remarked as they stood looking across at it.
‘And then he’s supposed to have taken off down the back and over the rear fence,’ said Gemma.
The fence, covered in the glossy green leaves of star jasmine, stood on a slight inclination of the land. Angie hauled herself up on it, peering over into the adjoining backyard. ‘It’s all quite possible, what he’s told us,’ she said, jumping back down again, brushing bits of jasmine off her hands.
Back in Angie’s car, Gemma put a hand on her abdomen, feeling bloated and uncomfortable. She would be very pleased when her period arrived.
‘Let’s head to the morgue,’ said Angie. ‘I phoned earlier today.’
‘What about Forde?’ Gemma replied, giving her friend an enquiring glance.
‘I think he’s telling the truth,’ Angie said.
•
‘Got your visitor’s badge?’ said Angie as they walked around to the back door and were buzzed in by the same morgue attendant Gemma recalled from eight years ago.
‘I called Dr Annette Chang earlier,’ said Angie, flashing her ID. ‘The pathologist who did the PM on Tasmin Summers?’
‘She’s just finishing up now,’ said the attendant. ‘I’ll take you down to her.’
Gemma followed him and her friend down corridors she remembered from her days in the job until they arrived at an open door. At the sound of their approach, Dr Chang, who’d been working at her desk, turned round. Perfect creamy skin was enhanced by the tiny pearls in her ear lobes; the refinement of her silk blouse and tailored jacket set off by her sleek black hair.
Gemma recalled the times she’d stood on the blue lino near the pathologist, patiently taking photographs at each stage of the examination and documentation. She’d spent many an hour watching the weighing and recording of the dead organs, the placing of tissue samples in little plastic cages, the brain in its bucket to harden for the neuropathologist.
‘I’m here on behalf of Bruno Gross,’ Angie said. ‘I had a message that you’d finished your physical examination of Tasmin Summers?’
‘My part is almost done,’ said Dr Chang. ‘But it could be a week or two before all the tests come back.’
‘Anything you can tell me while we’re waiting for the analysts’ results?’ asked Angie.
Dr Chang reviewed her screen, scrolling through a document. ‘I do have the results of the diatom concentrations. I requested those ASAP.’
Gemma remembered this word. Microscopic algae, their filigree silica shapes as varied as snowflakes, diatoms occur in teeming numbers in waterways.
‘At first glance,’ the doctor was saying, ‘it looked like the cause of death was drowning. We found concentrations of diatoms in the lungs.’ Angie and Gemma looked at each other as the doctor continued. ‘But none in the other organ samples—brain, marrow, liver or kidneys.’
‘So she didn’t drown?’ Gemma asked.
Doctor Chang shook her head. ‘I found initial indications of opiates in her system, but again, we’ll have to wait for the toxicology reports on the tissue samples before we can say for certain what she’d taken. I did notice a very strong smell of alcohol in the stomach contents.’ She looked over the top of her screen at them. ‘Very high concentration in the bloodstream too.’
‘That deep laceration on one side of the wrist,’ Gemma said, remembering the gash she’d seen on the crime scene video, ‘where the cord was tied. What made that? Do you think Tasmin cut herself trying to get free?’
Dr Chang again shook her glossy head. ‘By the time that cut was made,’ she said, ‘Tasmin was long past trying anything. It was a post-mortem wound. There were no vital reactions around it.’
Gemma took that in while the doctor stood, gathering up papers from the desk. ‘Maybe someone lifted her body by the cord and the skin tore?’ the doctor went on. ‘Or possibly the cord became entangled with something underwater? Whatever it was, it exerted sufficient pressure and tension to cause that injury.’
Dr Chang packed papers and notebooks into a fawn and green crocodile briefcase and rose to feet enclosed in perfectly matching low-heeled shoes. ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ she smiled. ‘It’s late and I have children to pick up.’
‘Of course,’ said Angie, stepping back to allow the doctor to switch her office light off and step out into the corridor. They walked towards the exit in silence until the foyer area.
‘So if she didn’t drown .
.
. ?’ Angie began.
‘I believe she died from the combined effects of various opiate depressants and alcohol, together with a physical obstruction to her breathing.’ The doctor paused, just about to push open the heavy glass doors onto Parramatta Road. ‘I found large amounts of semen at the back of her throat. And blood in her mouth.’
‘Her blood?’ The picture that was forming in Gemma’s mind was not pretty. It seemed Tasmin had been exploited sexually in every possible way, and fatally.
‘At this stage, I don’t know. But I had positive reactions for semen in both vaginal and anal swabs as well.’
Gemma felt a sudden rage. ‘You’re suggesting she choked during oral sex?’
Dr Chang pushed the door open. ‘That theory would not conflict with my findings,’ she said. ‘We’ll know more when the DNA samples are profiled.’ She made a graceful inclination with her head.
Gemma and Angie got the message and hurried outside.
‘That’s what might have happened to Amy,’ Gemma said as they got into Angie’s car.
•
The Ratbag wasn’t in when Gemma finally arrived home again. Unable to shake the feelings of anger and sorrow aroused in her by Dr Chang’s findings and the rape case she’d read about in the VMO files, she went out to the deck. The evening seemed heavy with unavenged, seething energies. Looking down, she saw that the neglected garden was wilting and decided to water it in the hot night air. She glanced up to the windows of the apartment on top of hers as she watered plants and saw that whoever had moved in still hadn’t organised curtains.
She heard the radio crackle into life in her office. She turned the hose off and hurried inside.
‘Tracker Three here, Base. Copy?’
‘Spinner!’ she said, snatching up the radio. ‘Where are you?’
‘I wanted to check with you about Daria Reynolds.’
‘Don’t waste another second on that woman!’ said Gemma. ‘Work out your hours and give them to me. Can you do that Bathurst job?’
‘Yep.’
‘And there’s something else you can do while you’re there.’ Gemma’s free hand scrabbled around on the desk until it located Mannix Romero’s employment details. ‘It’s over twenty-five years ago, but someone who works or worked at Bathurst High might remember something. That was his first posting after teachers’ college.’
She gave him a brief outline of the case and Romero’s name and date of birth, then told him about her first meeting with Romero, how he’d barged into the principal’s office without knocking, the breathless love letter inviting a rendezvous hidden in his desk and her discovery of his second laptop and the telescope trained on the girls’ dormitories.
‘Why do you want to know, Boss? Wasn’t he arrested?’
‘Yes,’ said Gemma. ‘But I’m curious. And Angie is overworked.’
‘I’ll ask around. See what I can dig up.’
If anyone could unearth an old secret, it was Spinner, Gemma thought as she wished him a safe trip. She rehoused the radio and went back outside to finish the watering. A quiet evening on the lounge beckoned invitingly but she glanced at her watch. No rest for the wicked, she thought.
•
Gemma was almost at Tiffany Brown’s place when her mobile rang. She picked it up and saw that Angie had sent her a text message—a website address followed by
Take a look at this! The techies found this archived on Mr Romero’s laptop
. Gemma saved it as she pulled up.
Tiffany herself opened the front door when Gemma knocked. ‘You’re the lady on the staircase,’ she said with surprise, ‘who talked to us that night.’
‘The lady on the staircase! That makes me sound like a ghost,’ said Gemma and immediately regretted her comment. She’d forgotten how embarrassed adolescents can be by the remarks of adults. And worse, the words caused a shiver to run down her spine.
Someone’s walking over my grave
, Aunt Merle used to say. I’m not ready to be a ghost, Gemma thought as Tiffany led her into an open-plan house. Half an acre away, a granite kitchen gleamed and in another corner a lounge was arranged. Tiffany plonked herself down on a damask sofa, sinking into the luxurious cushions like a spoonful of sugar into a cappuccino.
‘I’ll sit here, shall I?’ Gemma asked.
‘Oh, yes. Sorry.’
Gemma perched on a small upright chair as Tiffany waited expectantly, eyes bright in her softly freckled face.
‘Tiffany, I need to ask you about your witness statement,’ said Gemma.
Tiffany looked scared. ‘Why?’