Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing (15 page)

So that when she felt the arm grapple her from behind and apply a choke hold, she reacted as if her life depended on it, instinctively elbowing down and hard with all her strength, targeting his soft lower belly. She heard his shocked grunt, felt his clutch loosen enough for her to swing out and around. He fought to maintain his hold on her, head down as he sought to regain balance and wind. Gemma seized the opportunity with more instinct than training and, bending her right leg, she raised her knee as fast and hard as she could. She felt the sharp impact of his jaw and teeth against the bones of her knee as his own momentum collided with all the upward force concentrated in her knee. The impact threw her off-balance but in the dim light, as she stumbled to regain her footing, ignoring the pain in her knee, she saw him falling backwards, his clothes swirling around him in strips.

Then her knee buckled and she went over again, this time on her ankle. She struggled to her feet but found she could barely use her left foot. Half-hopping, half-falling, bumping along a wall, she stumbled towards the lights and people of Francis Street. She made it to the corner and tried to call out, but she had no wind. She propped herself against the wall, her breath screaming through her throat, trying to recover. It wasn’t until she could breathe again that her brain kicked in. She looked behind her. She couldn’t see anyone in the dimness. Leaning against the wall, she realised that her legs could barely hold her up right.

It took several minutes for her to retrace her footsteps, hoping she’d find him on the ground, hoping she’d knocked the stuffing out of the bastard. She knew that a good knee to the head could do this, and she wished she’d been able to follow that up with another kick to the windpipe. With a blow like that, there’d be no way he’d get up quickly. She hobbled back to where the lane turned, where the headlights had shone on the walls. It only seemed a few seconds since she’d stumbled out of there. But there were no headlights, no car. The lane was empty. The bastard had got away.

•

‘I didn’t get a look at him,’ she told Tim Conway at Kings Cross police station. She’d hobbled into a restaurant where a superior
maître d’ had looked her up and down but had let her ring the police. A nearby squad car had picked her up.

‘All my attention was on survival. I didn’t think or feel anything in the moment except to get him off me and get out of there.’

Gemma had worked with Tim years ago and remembered him as a decent man. She felt her bruised side with a tentative hand, wincing at any pressure. She realised her whole left side was hurting painfully where he’d whacked her in the first few seconds of impact.

‘You know what it’s like in a blue. All mixed up and crazy. I only saw the top of his head, really. When I kneed him. I don’t remember getting this,’ she said, wincing as she touched a nasty cut that ran across the backs of her left fingers. ‘He uses a horrible aftershave.’ She suddenly remembered Steve and how he’d smelled like a stranger the last time he’d been in her bed.

‘You might need a stitch or two,’ said Tim, peering at the deepest cut. Sitting in the almost deserted office of the police station, drinking the coffee made for her by Tim’s workmate, Debbie, Gemma became aware of a deep cellular trembling. Her whole body was shaking from the bones out. She saw Tim staring at her short skirt, the transparent blouse.

‘And don’t say a bloody word. I 
was
asking for trouble.’

She told Tim about working for Shelly and the street girls.

Tim looked away, keeping his thoughts to himself. ‘Are you sure you can’t remember anything else about him?’ he asked.

‘All I can say,’ she said, while Tim recorded the details, ‘is that he was about five eleven. I think he was dark but that might have just been the night, and he had a nasty, whispery voice. Oh, and awesomely bad aftershave.’ The trembling in her legs increased and her knee and left ankle, twisted as she stumbled after the knee-butt, throbbed a warning. ‘And,’ she added with satisfaction, ‘he’d have a very sore face right now.’ Now her knee was swelling up, and a deep graze oozed blood. ‘There was something else. Something odd.’

Tim waited.

‘When he went flying, I had the impression that he was wearing ribbons all over his jacket.’ She noticed the look on Tim’s face and leaned forward, searching her memory. But it was all so distorted and weird that she couldn’t refine it further. ‘What time was it that I rang you from the restaurant?’ she asked.

Tim checked the report. ‘Your call was logged 1.28 a.m.’

‘He grabbed me only a few minutes before that,’ she said. ‘It didn’t take me all that long to get back into Francis Street, although it felt like an eternity at the time. In spite of this,’ she added, indicating her left leg. ‘Have you got a rape kit here?’ she asked. ‘I want to get these clothes bagged as soon as possible. If he’s a shedder, there might be something on my blouse.’ She remembered how his grip round her neck had loosened when she’d elbowed him. Now she was glad that Shelly had buttoned her up to the neck, going for the ‘classy’ look. But she had a sudden realisation. ‘How could he have got away so quickly?’ Gemma wondered. ‘Maybe there were two of them?’

Tim made a note. ‘We’ve only been told about a lone attacker.’

‘Yes, but you know how sometimes there’s a second man hiding in the back seat,’ said Gemma. ‘Big thrill to trick a sex worker out of her money. Two men against one little girl.’

‘Deb?’ Tim called out. ‘Get a rape kit for us. And have you got anything Gemma could wear home?’ He looked down at her leg. ‘You’d better go straight up to Casualty,’ he said. ‘Get someone look at your cut and that bit of two-by-four you’ve got for a leg.’ Gemma saw that now the ankle joint had began to puff up too, matching her knee, so that her leg was starting to look very swollen.

‘Here,’ said Debbie. ‘One rape kit and you can borrow my tracksuit top.’ She handed Gemma both items.

In a couple of minutes, Gemma had bagged and labelled the transparent black blouse, donned the grey tracksuit top and was making her way painfully towards the main counter.

‘Send this off to the Lidcombe Analytical Laboratory, will you?’ she asked. ‘Ask Ric Loader to check it against the DNA sample they took from the Robyn Warburton assault. I want to nail this bastard.’

‘We’ve got to catch him first,’ said Debbie. ‘We need his name and address.’

‘You might just have it,’ said Gemma. ‘Have a look through the records. Ten years ago, I remember an offender who used to tamper with the inside passenger door handle when he picked up sex workers.’

Debbie looked blank.

‘It was before your time,’ said Gemma, feeling a hundred and ten and aching all over. ‘If you find him, and there’s any physical evidence associated with his file, will you send it over to Ric?’

‘Of course,’ said Debbie. ‘It just might be our lucky day.’

‘I need to get to Casualty,’ said Gemma.

‘I can’t really leave here,’ Tim said, ‘or I’d run you up to St Vincent’s myself. Maybe Debbie might?’

Shortly afterwards Gemma and Debbie were driving down Victoria Street, past the cafés and the restaurants. They were almost at the intersection of Burton Street, and the entrance to St Vincents when the call came over the radio. Gemma listened, imagining the scene sketched in by the terse police call. Some poor bloody woman had been found dead. Debbie turned to Gemma as she grabbed the handset.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I’ll have to go. I’m the closest.’

‘Be my guest,’ said Gemma with a generosity she didn’t feel. Her left ankle was hurting like hell now. ‘I’ll grab a cab.’

‘Car 141,’ Debbie called. ‘I’m one minute away from the scene.’

She turned left, only a street away from the hospital. Gemma saw an empty cab drive by and tried yelling out the window. It was only a couple of hundred metres from Cas, but she didn’t want to try walking. Maybe the cab driver had a guilty conscience or maybe he was on his way home at this late hour. Either way, he didn’t stop for the woman yelling out of the passenger window of the squad car.

Debbie turned into Womerah Avenue, and they drove past the dark shape of the school. Gemma could see a small group of people further along the narrow road, and an ambulance parked halfway on the footpath. Debbie parked the car behind it and climbed out, leaving the lights on.

‘Step back, please,’ she said to the gathering. ‘There’s nothing you can do so I suggest you all go home and let us get on with our work.’ The onlookers moved further away and Gemma managed to wriggle out of the passenger side door. She tried putting some weight on her left leg and nearly screamed out loud in pain. Using the police car as a support, she stumbled round the back of the car, glancing behind her, aware that the crowd was moving away, revealing a dark green plastic council recycle bin. The lid wasn’t completely closed. The bastard had just shoved her in the bin, Gemma was thinking, and then she recognised with horror to whom the matted dark hair at the top of the bin and the graceful arm that hung down one side belonged, her delicate fingertips already starting to darken and her broken golden fingernails shining in the lights.

•

Debbie and Gemma waited, fending off the curious, till the Crime Scene people arrived and taped off the street.

‘I know who she is,’ Gemma told them as they set up their cameras. But then she realised she’d forgotten Shelly’s second name. Finally it came to her. ‘Glover,’ she said, ‘Michelle Glover.’ She gave what details she could, including the fact that Shelly had a daughter, Naomi, a stepfather and a boyfriend, Kosta.

Debbie dropped her off at the hospital. It was a typically busy Saturday night and seemed a long time before she was seen. She waited in a timeless limbo with strangers with bloody noses, a little girl who whimpered constantly and a man who’d lost most of his last three toes riding barefoot on a motorcycle. Images of Shelly in the wheelie bin kept her mind going round and round. Did the same man who attacked me, she wondered, also attack Shelly? Would he have had time to recover if the capsicum had reached his eyes?

Finally, her knee and ankle were cleaned, bandaged and strapped, and the bruising on her flank checked. Her left side was red and swollen in odd-shaped, plait-like weals.

‘Good heavens,’ the young resident doctor exclaimed. ‘What did he hit you with?’

She winced at his touch. ‘I don’t know. Some bloody thing. Whatever it was knocked me for six,’ she said, straightening up from trying to see the marks.

It was nearly six in the morning before she rang Steve’s mobile and left a message. Then she ordered a cab. Her head was spinning with exhaustion, anger and grief. She needed to sleep and the painkillers the doctor had prescribed, picked up by the cab driver, made everything seem a long way away.

She limped up the steps to her apartment as the sun was rising behind a bank of opalescent cloud, fell onto her bed, and slept for five hours without stirring.

•

She woke with what felt like a hangover, thankful it was Sunday. Her injured knee and foot felt heavy and dead this morning, the pain now only a dull ache. She hobbled out to the kitchen, trying to put no weight on the leg, pleased that the sun was shining brightly now. At least she didn’t have a murky day closing around her, worsening her mood.

Taxi whinged around her, demanding food. She found the last chicken wing, thawed it under hot water and hoped it wouldn’t give him a tummy ache. Then the full awfulness of the previous night overwhelmed her—Shelly dead and jammed into a rubbish bin, the violence she herself had suffered, and her sense of betrayal that one of her operatives had let her down. Mike Moody, she thought to herself, you’re dead. You’ll never work in this town again. She leaned against the counter, staring through the sliding glass doors with sightless eyes. Hot tears took her by surprise and she quickly pushed them away. Shelly was one of those friends who didn’t quite fit in anywhere else, but with whom Gemma liked to catch up a couple of times a year, hear the word from the street. Now there would be no catching up ever again. She felt a surge of anger through her tears. No one should die like that, she thought. Dumped contemptuously in a rubbish bin.

Part of her longed to ring Kit for tea and sympathy, but that seemed impossible just now. Kit wouldn’t say anything unkind, Gemma knew, but the unspoken words would still make Gemma feel bad. You seem compelled, Kit
wouldn’t
say, to deliberately put yourself in situations where your very life is threatened. Now look what’s happened.

Is it true? she asked herself. Is that really what I do? She looked at her bandaged fingers and her strapped-up leg. She had a vague working idea, mainly culled from reading and some of Kit’s more interesting cases, about the ‘repetition compulsion’, the way people continue to re-create the relationships of their childhood in their marriages, their careers and their relations with their children, repeating dangerous patterns of neglect or hostility. But when she looked back to her childhood she couldn’t see anything remotely similar to the way she lived now. She was certainly not a depressed woman, medicated by and living with a psychiatrist husband as her mother had been. Her life and her mother’s life seemed light years apart. But it was true that she had been involved in a serious assault last night and it was also true that her father used to assault her mother. She remembered hiding with Kit in the big wicker clothes basket while her father raged and her mother wept.

Gemma took her tea and some vegemite toast out onto the timber deck. It was a perfect winter’s day, and a calm blue sea lay under a soft sky. Taxi, leaving bits of chewed chicken wing strewed around the floors, came outside to harass her, trying to climb up on her lap. She kept pushing him away, wincing as she unwittingly twisted her damaged foot. Steve and the world of George Fayed seemed light years away from her now. She sat there, staring out to sea, wondering how she was going to deal with an injured leg and damaged fingers as well as everything else.

She poured another tea and hobbled with it back to the lounge room, where she collapsed onto the blue leather sofa beside the phone. Had the black meteorite struck last night? Or was it still spinning soundlessly through unthinkable distances in her direction? She looked out to sea again, to the blue horizon, the perfect sky. Out of the blue, she thought. That’s the expression we use for something completely unexpected. This sort of thinking will do you no good, she scolded herself. Time to get back into your life, girl.