Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing (10 page)

‘I wonder if we’ll hear anything about that cat.’

‘If I do, Nick, you’ll be the first to know,’ she promised.

•

Gemma woke suddenly to realise she’d fallen asleep, head leaning against her window. She blinked and looked around. The car was humming along steadily, passing the trucks and road-trains taking up the slow lanes, settling down behind the traffic that moved along the Pacific Highway. She felt a little more rested, but she could still feel the leaden quality that seemed to come and go like a mist through her moods lately.

The rest of the trip passed pleasantly enough, the jazz singer spiking the atmosphere in the car until Gemma realised that it was over two hours since they’d set out and she was hungry. After a pit stop for an iced doughnut and a bad coffee, they soon found themselves turning off to the isolated headland where Benjamin Glass’s luxury holiday house had once sprawled.

She pulled out the photographs again and looked at them, concentrating on the squat tower that formed the north-east corner of the third level.

Nick tapped the picture without looking at it, keeping his eyes on the road. ‘See that tower area? That’s where he was supposed to have been working at the time of the fire,’ he said. ‘He had a separate apartment in that block. His wife’s quarters were along the eastern side of the top level, and the lower levels were for business conferences and guests. The Crime Scene people will be looking through all the rubble, of course, but they’ll concentrate their efforts in that corner.’

It would have been a beautiful place to live, Gemma thought, and for a moment, she felt envious of the wealth that had enabled Benjamin Glass to enjoy it. From up there, Gemma thought, looking at the squared-off tower, there’d be 360-degree views of the coast. Then she remembered the reason for her journey. They were on their way to look at the ruins of this house. Any envy vanished.

•

Gemma could smell the fire on the light breeze a long time before they pulled up near fluttering blue and white Crime Scene tape. Her breath steamed in the sunlight as she climbed out of the station wagon and looked around. A pair of kookaburras laughed at them before taking flight over the treetops while Nick went round the back of his vehicle and fitted her out with a small overall and together they crunched through the scorched grass towards what remained of the house. The whole area looked, Gemma thought, like a scene from a Steven Spielberg film after an intergalactic strike. It had been divided into grids by the investigators for systematic searching. Gemma stared at the molten, twisted mass that seemed to have bubbled up through the earth and then spread like treacle into igneous lava channels that charred through the surrounding soil and heat-blasted vegetation.

‘Holy smoke,’ she said. ‘What did
that
?’

They stood together in silence, staring at the black demolition job. Gemma looked around, remembering the video. Someone must live nearby. ‘Neighbours?’ she said. ‘Where are they?’

Nick took her arm and drew her to the beach side of the scorched headland. Across the gully that separated this outcrop from the next was a modest timber house, nestled into the side of the hill. ‘Over there,’ he said.

Gemma went closer to the tangled mess. The structure had all burned away but she could still see something that might have been the floor downstairs, some fancy turquoise-coloured stone. In what would have been the double garage, an ashen frame delineated Benjamin Glass’s car.

‘The first guys on the scene found that parts of the steel girders had vaporised,’ Nick was saying. ‘They’d never seen anything like that in their lives.’

‘What would happen to a human body in such temperatures?’ Gemma asked.

‘That’s what we really don’t know,’ he said. ‘Normally, in even the hottest fires, natural teeth and bits of the large bones remain. But this isn’t normal. In house fires, steel rarely melts, let alone
vaporises
.’

If steel was vaporised, Gemma thought, even human teeth might be destroyed.

‘Maybe Benjamin Glass was in the place when it went up,’ said Nick. ‘But because of the nature of the fire and the lack of physical evidence, the Crime Scene people aren’t jumping to any conclusions just yet. Nor am I.’

Gemma turned the possibilities around in her mind. If it turns out that he
was
in the fire, she thought, did he start it himself? She knew arsonists sometimes perish in their own fires, or turned up at the nearest hospital with burns. Or was he murdered? If so, who started the fire? Could it have been Minkie? But then, why on earth would she call in yet another investigator? Gemma thought of the man she’d briefly seen in Minkie’s BMW. Who was he? Where did he fit in? It was quite possible that he had reasons to want his girlfriend’s husband dead. Or what if Benjamin Glass himself set the fire to make it look like he’d died, and then scarpered? Gemma remembered not to let these questions overwhelm her. She would work through each one until only one possibility became clear. It would take time. And if an experienced fire investigator like Nick Yabsley wasn’t sure yet what had happened, Gemma knew she would have to be patient.

Nick took a last batch of photographs and the two of them were about to leave when they saw another station wagon approaching them, sides emblazoned with the NSW Police Forensic Services logo. It pulled over under a large orange angophora tree and two people got out. One was Detective Sergeant Sean Wright and the sleek young woman with him must have been from Photographic, Gemma thought, if the cameras she was unloading were anything to go by. Sean ambled over to where Gemma and Nick waited. Gemma remembered him as a smart, ambitious man whose shadowed eyes seemed far too old for the rest of his boyish face. While in the police service, Gemma had often collided with his competitiveness. Now that she was out of the job and no threat to him, he seemed more relaxed.

‘Long time no see,’ he said, shaking her hand first and then Nick’s. ‘What’s it like out of the job?’ he asked.

Gemma laughed. ‘Some things stay the same,’ she said. ‘The paperwork, the reports, running sheets, that sort of thing. But there’s no one breathing down my neck. And I get to choose the work I do.’

Sean walked back to the station wagon and started pulling on overalls.

‘Find anything yesterday?’ Nick asked him. Behind them, the young photographer’s gleaming head bent over her work as she uncapped film and loaded cameras using the front seat as a work bench.

Sean shook his head. ‘Nothing in the way of human remains,’ he said. ‘No trace of anything. Yet,’ he added.

‘Would you mind introducing us?’ Gemma asked, indicating the young photographer.

‘This is Melissa,’ he said.

‘Detective Senior Constable Melissa Grey,’ said the young woman, and the two women nodded to each other.

‘Sean,’ Gemma said, keeping her voice relaxed, ‘did you hear anything about a cat?’

Sean shook his head as he fastened the overalls. ‘Nup. So far, we’ve found nothing. We moved in as soon as it had cooled enough. And that took ages. We had a big team. Kids from the Academy. We examined a lot of debris. Found zilch so far. It’s been too hot to get right to the centre. Such as it is.’ He turned to Nick. ‘In fact, we found almost no debris. It’s almost like the whole joint just melted. All we got left is that.’ He indicated the smooth, swirled remnants of the house, spreading out, Gemma thought, like dark spaghetti on a big black plate. She found herself staring at it and as the four of them surveyed the charred ruins she wondered when would be the right time to tell Sean about Minkie Montreau and her young man.

‘What’s your take on this?’ Nick asked Sean.

‘Hard to say,’ said Sean. ‘With everything gone, it’s not like I can look for the usual fraud indicators.’

Gemma was pleased to find that memories from her student days and several training sessions with the Fraud Squad were starting to kick in again. Would the land be more valuable without the house on it? The answer here was definitely not. Was the area declining in value? Again, the answer to this was a definite no. The entire Nelson Bay area was booming, with prices rising every year. Had the place been for sale for a long time with no takers? Again, a negative answer. As far as they knew, the place wasn’t listed with any of the local real estate agents, and even if it were, a beautiful mansion like this would be snapped up fast. It was only bad houses in undesirable areas that failed to attract buyers, month after month, year after year. These were the sort of places mysteriously burnt down, not an elegant and desirable residence such as this one. She knew that the police would check whether the insurance had been recently upgraded, and whether a copy of the policy had recently been sent out to Benjamin Glass. They would also check if there was an outstanding loan on the property and if it was in arrears. And they’d ask further questions about that cat.

‘It’s not going to be an easy investigation,’ Sean was saying. ‘You get a feeling about these sorts of things. It’s arson all right, but why? And who? And is it murder as well? People are funny animals,’ he said. ‘They set things up in weird ways. They make mistakes, or they do things that don’t make sense. You know why?’

This was the Sean Gemma had known and not loved in the old days, the man who always knew just that little bit more than the next person and took great pains to make sure everyone knew it.

‘I’ll tell you why,’ he said. ‘It’s not what actually
is
the case that’s important,’ he said, ‘it’s what people
believe
to be the case and they are often two very different stories.’

Something about these words arrested Gemma’s attention. It sounded like a riddle to her. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

Sean raised an eyebrow.

‘Have you seen a copy of the analysts’ report?’ Nick asked.

Sean nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘When the experts don’t know, it makes it a bit hard for the likes of us. That’s why I came back today. To keep looking through the guts of the place. I don’t want to miss anything. And I’ll keep coming back to make sure I don’t.’

‘You won’t miss anything,’ Gemma joked.

Sean turned his elderly eyes on her and he wasn’t smiling. ‘No,’ he said, ‘You can be sure of that.’

And in that moment, Gemma decided she’d keep Minkie Montreau’s secret to herself just a little longer. In fact, Mr Right, she said to herself, you can sort the whole thing out on your own.

•

She and Nick had a late lunch in Nelson Bay, the only people eating in the spacious café with its honey-coloured flagstones and the rain falling in a soft straight curtain outside in the street. Gemma ate fish and chips and Nick had a hamburger and most of her chips while she stole his salad.

‘What is it,’ she asked, ‘with men and salad? They just don’t get salad, do they?’

Nick grinned and stole another chip from her plate. ‘Salad’s all right if you’re a rabbit,’ he said.

Their hot chocolates arrived, with marshmallows melting on top. Gemma sipped hers, looking around at her surroundings.

‘Nice floor,’ she said to Nick, pointing to the Italian tiles with the toe of her shoe. It brought to mind the pretty blue-green floor back at the Benjamin Glass fire scene. ‘Strange,’ she said, ‘that the flooring back at the Glass holiday house survived so well. The colour wasn’t touched.’

Nick looked up at her while pinching the last of her chips. ‘Are you referring to that glassy stuff on the ground floor?’ he said.

‘Yes. That turquoise surface. I would have thought it would’ve been blackened or charred by the fire.’

Nick wiped his mouth and put his knife and fork neatly together. ‘That floor was more than blackened or charred by the fire,’ he said to her. ‘It completely changed its molecular structure. Like metamorphic rocks.’

‘What do you mean?’ Gemma asked.

Nick took a sip from his hot chocolate. ‘We worked out from the architect’s plans,’ he said, ‘that the turquoise area was the concrete slab of the entire ground floor.’

Gemma stared at him, trying to imagine the heat that could transform grey concrete into blue-green glass. All she could think of was the furnace of a pottery, where oxides became enamelled glass. Or the immense fire at the centre of the earth, smelting sedimentary rock into molten streams, to cool as hard, igneous basalts or granites.

‘Concrete turned into glass,’ she said. ‘That’s hot.’

‘Same thing happened at the factory fire at Botany. The fire at Engadine wasn’t quite so severe.’

‘I hope the cops find out what links these three properties. Apart from the fires, I mean,’ she added.

Nick shrugged. ‘You might have to do that,’ he said. ‘Non-fatal fires aren’t high on their priority lists and I don’t think much would have been done about those first two fires.’

Just like bashed street workers aren’t high on their priority lists, Gemma thought. You’ve got to be dead to get the right attention. Now, with Benjamin Glass missing, maybe dead, priorities would change. She made a mental note to sniff around the Securities Commission to see if there were any links between the fires.

She had looked up to see that Nick had pinched almost all her chips.

‘Take them all,’ she said. ‘They’ll only make me fat.’

‘Look at you,’ he said. ‘A stiff wind and you’d blow over.’

‘I can still put up a fight,’ she said, smiling at him.

‘That Sean Wright’s a bit of a prick,’ he said, taking the last chip.

Gemma grunted. Over the years, she’d learned discretion, even with someone like Nick. ‘He’s a copper, Nick,’ was all she said.

They sorted out the bill at the counter and walked outside into the drizzle.

‘I’d really like to know,’ she said, ‘where that cat is.’

•

Back in Sydney, Nick gave her the video of the fire at Benjamin Glass’s mansion, and Fire Brigades’ footage of the Botany factory fire as well as an archived tape used for educational purposes of an American hotel fire. She watched, replaying the Glass fire several times, noting the three brilliant flashes Nick had mentioned, clearly visible through the trees in the background. At first the foreground was taken up with a birthday cake and the noisy appreciation of little boys. Then the video operator lost interest in the party and the camera focused in on the lower glass doors through the trees as it zoomed to show the tall jet of white-hot flame spearing up through the roof and the magnesium brilliance of the explosions in the lower parts of the house. She then played the video of the factory fire. Even to her untrained eye, it was the same sort of fire as that recorded by the neighbour as Benjamin Glass’s holiday mansion went up. Finally, Gemma watched the American hotel footage, complete with on-the-spot witness reports.