Medea's Curse (35 page)

When Natalie turned back to her desk, she saw that Jessie had left her box behind.

She pulled out the USB Beverley had given her and looked at it. She thought about
the pathology between Georgia and Paul. She remembered how Amber had sacrificed herself
for Travis and thought about how victims and their mothers so often protected their
abusers. She thought of Jessie and her abuser, and, finally, of Tiphanie.

Chapter 30

‘I was in
Who Weekly
,’ Georgia said. ‘They had a picture.’

‘A picture of you?’

‘What? Yes, that too.’ Georgia wasn’t looking at Natalie as she picked at the chipped
nail polish on her thumb.

‘So who else did they have photos of?’

Georgia pulled her bag into her lap. She unfolded a few ripped-out pages. ‘Look.’

The picture was of Miranda, the daughter she hadn’t seen in nine months. It was not
a posed shot. Paul was holding his daughter, trying to shield her from the camera.

‘Tell me about Paul before he met you.’ Natalie temporarily abandoned the therapeutic
process. She needed information if she was going to deal with the worm and it would
give her a better understanding of Georgia’s enmeshment with him.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Had he had other girlfriends?’

‘Nothing serious.’

‘Any trouble with the police? Trouble at school?’

‘What do you mean?’

Natalie shrugged, watching Georgia thinking. She seemed to be weighing her answer,
choosing her words.

‘He didn’t have many friends. I thought that was…all we needed was each other. Then
he was working and I had the children. We didn’t go out much.’

‘What about his trips? Was he travelling with people?’

‘He met people, did deals. I’m sure he never had an affair, if that’s what you mean.’

Natalie hadn’t meant this. Georgia was good at picking up cues and giving what she
thought you wanted. She was also adept at avoiding the questions she didn’t want
to, or couldn’t, answer.

Lee Draper had painted Paul as caring and balanced, but she’d only seen the side
he had presented to her, and if Georgia’s father, Cliff, was representative of Lee’s
taste in men, she was probably not a good judge. Virginia hadn’t mentioned meeting
him. After the session, Natalie rang her.

‘Paul?’ asked Virginia. ‘We went to the wedding of course. Vernon gave her away.
She wanted everything to be right.’

‘Before that?’

‘After she started nursing we didn’t see her much, and you know later she cut us
off. We had dinner with them once. Paul was quiet. Georgia wanted to be the centre
of attention and Paul seemed to be happy with that. We were just pleased she’d found
someone.’

Natalie really had to meet him. His answering service picked up.

‘Mr Latimer, this is Dr King. We spoke at the Halfpenny. I was perhaps a little hasty.’
It had been Liam’s suggestion to say this. ‘I would very much like to hear your side
of the
story if you’re prepared to talk to me.’ She left her mobile number.

Tiphanie was booked in to see her. Both she and her father looked like they hadn’t
slept in days.

Tiphanie paced the room, not speaking. Finally, she sat down on the edge of the chair.

‘I’m your patient, right?’

Natalie nodded.

‘So it’s not like when I was in Yarra Bend? I’m not being assessed?’

‘Yes and no. But my notes can be subpoenaed and used in court.’ She held her pen
up for a moment then purposefully laid it on the desk.

Tiphanie took a breath and looked straight at Natalie. ‘Can you find a way to have
the police ask if Rick or Allison removed a rug—like a blanket—from their car? He
would have had to wrap…her up. It was cold.’

Only if she had still been alive.

Paul rang back. He was in Melbourne and could see her at 6.30 p.m. Liam arrived an
hour earlier.

‘This office is all yours,’ she told him. She parked him next to door to where she’d
be seeing Paul. At 6.25 p.m., both with mobiles in hand, she phoned him. With the
communication link established she went to her own office and put her phone on the
desk behind the stack of files.

Natalie recognised Paul immediately. He was less out of place than at the Halfpenny,
but just as awkward.

‘Thank you for coming,’ said Natalie as they sat down. Her smile felt taut.

‘Sure.’ Paul shifted in his seat. ‘Does Georgia know
you’re seeing me?’

‘She knows I tried to earlier.’

‘So she really thinks I’m still on her side.’

‘I’m not sure I’d say that.’

‘What do you want to know?’ Paul sounded weary. He looked harmless, but then so did
most serial killers. Most murderers were weak rather than scary, but psychopaths
were different. Paul might well be one.

‘Your side of the story. Not so much about things related to the case but rather
what Georgia was like. Why you got together.’

‘I liked her, she was fun, confident.’ Paul ran his hand through his hair. ‘I was
at a party with a mate and she and a girlfriend just started chatting to us. I thought
they both liked him, but turned out Georgia fancied me. I just let it happen.’ He
shrugged his shoulders. ‘I never saw any of this coming. Idiot bloke I guess.’

‘Any girlfriends before her?’

‘Isn’t this about Georgia?’

‘I want to know how her take on you tallies against reality.’

Paul shrugged. ‘One girlfriend that was keener than I was. Didn’t go anywhere. I
was twenty-five when I got together with Georgia, and I have to say I was a bit of
a nerd. But we both wanted kids.’

‘What did you think of her parents?’

‘I thought it was a bit strange she wanted to cut Virginia and Vernon off, but Virginia
seemed pretty cold. I guess I thought it was her choice.’

If he was acting, he was doing a good job, but then Georgia was the accused, he the
hard-done-by loving father and husband. All he had to do was play innocent.

‘You took Genevieve to see Lee.’

Paul looked surprised. In his look was a flicker of something else. ‘Yes, I did.
Lee is my children’s grandmother whatever she did. I don’t know, I just thought Georgia
was missing something in her life. She’d cut her mother off for good reason of course.
But I thought if I checked her out and found she was, well, human, Georgia might
come around.’

‘But she never did.’

‘No. She had very firm ideas. I suppose that was the first time I saw the other side
of her. On the subject of Lee, she couldn’t be moved.’

Natalie let him talk more, sensing a fascination with Lee. Because she was his wife’s
mother—and a murderer?

Natalie tried to picture him as a monster, recalling a paedophile she had interviewed
early in her career. He had genuinely convinced himself that he loved the little
girls and that his initiating them into womanhood was as lovely for them as it had
been for him. Georgia had always maintained Paul ‘loved’ his girls.

‘Did you love her?’

‘Yes,’ said Paul. ‘Stupidly and blindly it seems, but yes I loved her.’

‘So much so that you still send her cards?’

Paul stared at her. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘The bunny cards.’

Paul shook his head. ‘I have no idea what you mean.’

Natalie bit her lip. She probably shouldn’t reveal any more.

‘Did you have a pet name for her?’

‘Not really. Georgy Girl occasionally. I sang that to her once. Badly.’

‘Did your children ever have a toy rabbit?’

‘Hell, I don’t know. They had tons of stuffed toys. We got rid of them all after
Olivia died.’ He took a breath and looked down.

‘What about Jonah?’

‘We should never have had him. When we threw the toys out, I decided that we just
weren’t meant to be parents, that I couldn’t handle the pain.’

‘Then Georgia got pregnant again.’

‘Hard to know how, it wasn’t like we were having sex very often,’ he said. ‘When
it was a boy I thought, well maybe this will be different. But—’

‘So if you two weren’t having sex much, did you find a substitute? Affairs? Porn?’

‘No,’ said Paul. If he was surprised by the question he didn’t show it. ‘I didn’t
have the energy for anything.’

‘What about Miranda?’

There was a long silence. ‘Georgia told me she was on the pill. She…worked hard on
me, must have known the time was right.’ He put his head in his hands.

Natalie waited.

‘I started to have suspicions. I don’t know what made me look at her Facebook page.
I’m not into Facebook myself. I knew she put photos of the children there and I didn’t
want to revisit any of it. It was too hard.’

‘So why did you look?’

Paul’s gaze was steady. ‘I’ve thought a lot about this and it doesn’t make sense.
Maybe because I knew about Lee? Lee isn’t a monster, she’s an ordinary person, yet
she killed her husband. Maybe I was subconsciously worried, I honestly don’t know.
It was one look. Just one. It made me feel cold inside. A window into her soul is
the way I’ve come to think of it.’

‘It wasn’t you that alerted the police.’ One of her other Facebook ‘friends’ had.

Paul shifted in his chair. ‘I probably would have eventually, because of Miranda.
I was still processing it. Georgia was my wife.’

‘So how do you understand what happened now?’

‘Georgia is evil, pure and simple. Don’t know if it’s the genes or what happened
after she was born, but she’s evil.’

Natalie didn’t believe in evil. People were complex products of their genes and experiences.
Perhaps too many of Georgia’s influences had been bad ones with nothing to compensate.
Personal integrity came from a balance of these influences; you weren’t born with
it.

‘Actually Mr Latimer, I’m not sure it’s that simple. All of what you’ve been telling
me is very interesting, but I’m really struggling with one thing.’

Paul looked at her blankly.

‘Why you’ve been sending me notes and videos and having someone break into my house,’
said Natalie, now coldly in control. She watched Paul struggle with his emotions.
She searched in his face for lies, or the psychopathic self-confidence, but saw neither.
There was just a sense of him wanting to please, to be liked, wanting all of this
to be over. A normal response from someone in his position or the carefully constructed
veneer of the psychopath who was a master at reading what the other person wanted?

‘Look, you mentioned something about notes last time you saw me at the pub and it’s
really the reason I said I’d come.’ Paul looked uncomfortable. ‘Can I go back to
the start? My lawyer found out you were seeing Georgia and he was worried you were
a bit of an anti-man crusader. I wanted to know all I could about you.’

That solved the timing issue. His conversation with the lawyer could have been before
the first letter.

‘Meaning you checked me out.’

‘Yes. You have to understand…’ He was struggling for the right words. ‘It’s my daughter
I have to think about.’ He looked at Natalie. ‘She can’t ever see Georgia. She really
is a monster.’

He was convincing. Very.

‘So what was finding out about me going to achieve?’

Paul shrugged apologetically. ‘It’s your profession that got her out on bail.’ There
was a hint of anger in his tone. ‘When you rang me the first time…I wanted to check
you out before I agreed to see you. I hired someone. He gave me a list of cases you’d
been to court with and it seemed to me that you believed in what you were doing.
I thought maybe I could talk to you—convince you that she’s guilty. That you needed
to protect my daughter.’

‘I’m Georgia’s psychiatrist, not her jury,’ said Natalie. She paused. ‘The notes
and the surveillance video were also just to help convince me?’

Paul looked puzzled. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘What about the dead rabbit?’

Now Paul gaped. ‘What rabbit?’ There was silence as Paul shook his head. Then he
moaned, shaking his head. ‘You asked me if I sent cards to Georgia?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well I didn’t. Which means she really is totally fucked.’

Natalie stared at Paul, taking in the implication of what he was saying. Could Georgia
be behind it all?

‘Bunny cards. Like this one.’ She showed him her photocopy.

Paul looked exhausted. There was no reaction.

‘What did you think about having sex with someone who mutilates her genitals?’ asked
Natalie abruptly.

If she hadn’t been looking she wouldn’t have seen it, but for one microsecond she
saw a different Paul, instantly replaced by the one who now frowned in bafflement.

‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘She takes a knife to her labia, mostly. Ever have oral sex with her?’

He shuddered. ‘She must have started that after we separated.’

‘We might have to wait for court to decide that.’ The GP report had only one relevant
line, easily missed. Years earlier the scars had been noted when Georgia had a postnatal
check after Genevieve. They had been fresh then and were explained away. The later
obstetric records had mostly not noted it, except for one record of the suturing
of her episiotomy, which had mentioned ‘unusual’ scar tissue.

Liam came into her office as soon as Paul had left. ‘He was very plausible.’

‘I agree,’ said Natalie. ‘Very. But he lied. I caught him out on the genital mutilation.
He wasn’t ready for it and denied it before he could think it through. And he did
it well.’

‘That might have been for any number of reasons. Not comfortable talking about his
sex life. Maybe they did it in the dark.’

‘I think it’s a male on the security camera tape, but not him. Paul’s got broader
shoulders.’ Her intruder was more Travis’s shape.

‘So he hired someone? Or one of his paedophile mates?’

‘Or,’ said Natalie, ‘it really isn’t him.’

She replayed the interview in her mind after Liam left to play happy families again,
but her mind kept taking her back to Travis. She rang Damian’s mobile.

‘Damian?’