Spiking the Girl (11 page)

Andrew Bernhard looked up as she approached and almost immediately rang off, half stood and put his hand out. They shook and Gemma sat down, putting her briefcase at her feet. As soon as she’d neared him, his demeanour had changed. Now he was the grieving father. You’re a con man, she thought.

After offering her condolences, Gemma cut to the chase. ‘Someone told me that Amy ran away to Brisbane. Before she disappeared. What can you tell me about that?’

He shook his head. ‘That’s not so,’ he said. ‘Amy didn’t ever come to Brisbane.’

‘But maybe she contacted you? Told you she was coming? Wanted to show you her modelling portfolio?’

‘I’ve already told you,’ he said. ‘She didn’t come to Brisbane. She didn’t contact me. I know nothing about a modelling portfolio.’ He gathered up his mobile. ‘I told my ex-wife I’d talk to you about what Amy was like, that sort of thing. I’m not here to be interrogated by you.’ He rose from his seat. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go. We have a funeral to organise.’

Gemma stood with him. ‘Are you saying you weren’t involved in a modelling agency? That there was—is no such agency?’

‘You have no authority to ask me anything.’

‘Mr Bernhard,’ Gemma said, ‘why do I get the feeling that you’re not committed to any investigation into what happened to your daughter.’

‘I don’t have to talk to you,’ he said.

She passed her card to him. ‘If you think of anything that might cast some light on Amy or her state of mind when she went missing, please ring me.’

Andrew Bernhard left, leaving her card on the table.

•

On her homeward drive in the golden evening light, Gemma took a diversion and found the Bellevue Hill address that Beatrice de Berigny had given her for the family of Tasmin Summers. Behind a four-wheel-drive tank in the driveway, she noticed an unmarked car. So, she thought, detectives were inside.

She sat in the car for a while, taking in the large white house with timber verandahs facing northeast over Rose Bay and thence out to sea. A formal garden curved down to the stone wall. Proserpine Avenue was definitely a multimillion-dollar address. Was this another family home where huge amounts of money, a father away on military exercises and a mother preoccupied with her work, provided the background for a disappearing daughter? Gemma called Mrs Summers on the number provided by Miss de Berigny, but could only leave a message on voice mail.

Gemma found herself thinking of Claudia Page and the grand mausoleum in which she and her mother lived. Claudia must be feeling very vulnerable right now. Time to lean on her.

She rang the Page household. Claudia answered. ‘I’m sitting outside your friend Tasmin’s house,’ Gemma said. ‘It made me think of you. Are you okay?’

‘I think so.’ The girl’s voice was strained, tremulous.

‘It might be a good idea to stay home for a while. I’m sure Miss de Berigny could ask your class teachers to send home whatever work is required.’

‘Mum’s already got me staying home. She reckons I’ll be safer here, too. But I’m going crazy stuck here all day. And Mum’s on my back all the time about practising. It’s all she thinks of.’ A pause. ‘Does anyone know what’s happened to Tasmin yet?’

‘Claudia, I’ve seen the witness statement you gave the police. And Tasmin’s. Do you want to change anything you wrote in that?’

She heard the sharp catch in the girl’s breath. ‘Change what? I don’t know what you mean!’

‘Why wasn’t Amy sitting with you and Tasmin that morning?’

‘She was. We always sat together.’

It’s hard to remember a lie told a year ago, Gemma thought, because it’s not located in your recall of past events. Truth, on the other hand, stays available, as part of the sequence in memory.

‘In your statement,’ Gemma reminded her, ‘you said you saw Amy sitting at the front of the bus.’

‘Did I? Then she must have been.’ The answer was too quick, defensive.

‘I’m surprised you forgot that. Seeing it was the last time you were ever to see your friend again.’

There was silence on the line.

‘You all caught the bus at the turnaround stop,’ said Gemma quietly. ‘You always sat together in the seat across the back window. But that morning Amy didn’t sit with you. I want to know why. I want to know why, on the morning of her disappearance, Amy did something different.’

Again, the long silence, then, ‘Mum’s home. I’ve got to go.’

Gemma pressed on. ‘I’m going to keep working on those witness statements, Claudia. And the witnesses. I’m determined to get to the truth.’

There was a click as Claudia rang off. Gemma cursed, angry with herself. She hadn’t handled that very sensitively. Maybe, she thought, if she hadn’t lost her mother so early, she’d be better at this sort of thing. Whatever the case, she needed to find a way to break through the girl’s evasiveness.

Gemma drove home and went immediately into her office where she checked the spare laptop for the images being transmitted from Mrs Annie Dunlop’s living room. But the program wouldn’t run. She’d done a test run as soon as she got back after Mike had installed the camera and it had been working perfectly. She scribbled a note for Mike to organise a visit to check the installation and the program as soon as possible.

She flung herself on the lounge and Taxi pounced on her, making bread on her stomach. Briefly, she wished she was a nice normal housewife, doing whatever they did at this time of day. Making school lunches for the next day, watching television. Feeling wilful and guilty, she dialled Steve’s number but went straight through to voice mail. She hung up again. She had no right of appeal. Even if he picked up the phone when she rang, what could she say to him that would change what had happened?
Look at yourself, Gemma
, he’d said. As if the fight and resulting separation had been somehow all her doing.

She felt restless and unhappy and couldn’t settle in for the evening, she had no appetite. Somewhere, Angie and Trevor were feeding each other oysters and champagne. Somewhere, Steve was getting on without her. Somewhere, the slender bones of a young girl, her shoulder blade chewed by rats, awaited burial. And somewhere, a young woman of thirty-three or four—with half her genes the same as Gemma’s—was going about her business. She lay back on the lounge. What about her own life? Did she fill it up with other people’s dramas because she didn’t feel enough on her own? Was that what Steve had meant? He’d been offering her himself, wanting to buy a place with her, where they could build a life together.

Gemma put Taxi gently down on the ground. Her first job was to find out what happened to Amy Bernhard. Now get on with it, she scolded.

But she couldn’t get on with it. Memories of happy times with Steve would not let her go. She had a bath but that didn’t settle her either. She felt edgy and restless and the crack in her heart, instead of healing over, seemed to be widening. Wrapped in two towels, she went into her bedroom and, flinging open the wardrobe, looked through her clothes, finding herself drawn to a cheeky black skirt and a white scoop-neck spandex singlet edged with black diamantés. She inspected her shoes and decided on black high-heeled sandals with diamanté ankle strap. If she fell off those, she’d need to be medivaced home. She practised walking in them until she found her equilibrium, grabbed her briefcase, pulled out her purse and stashed the credit card in her bedside drawer so that she couldn’t get into too much trouble. She stashed two fifties and her mobile in her little square evening bag. Just about the right size to stow a man’s heart in, she’d joked when she’d bought it.

Locking up, she went up to the road to her car, admiring the way her legs looked in the diamanté ankle-strapped heels. Damn it, she thought, swinging them into the car and slamming the door, she’d check out Deliverance as well as the talent. Ask a few questions. She was a free woman. A cutting-edge nightclub might be just the thing to mend a single Sydney woman’s broken heart. And she hadn’t forgotten how to party.

•

Gemma parked a few streets behind the main drag, wishing she’d brought some flat shoes for the walk up. Most of the businesses around here had closed down, apart from those servicing tourists. She cut through one of the smaller streets swaying gracefully, she hoped, on the impossible heels, passing by the rear entrances of the takeaway places and tourist shops. Finally, she turned into Macleay Street. The doorman outside Deliverance gave her an appraising look and greeted her. It had been ages since Gemma had done anything like this and for a second she regretted it, wishing herself safely and boringly at home with Taxi on her lap. But once inside, the driving rhythm of the DJ’s selections blotted out anything cerebral and she fronted the bar, checking the list of drinks on the wall. The place was packed and she understood what Kosta had been grizzling about.

Gemma ordered something called Liquid Cocaine and watched while the barman poured double vodka, topping it up with white wine and Red Bull. He swirled it all together and put it in front of her, announcing the price as if he was proud of it. When he came back, Gemma surveyed her change from one of the fifties. At this rate, she wouldn’t be drinking too much.

‘This is a great club,’ she gushed. ‘Who owns it?’

The barman shrugged. ‘I just work here,’ he said.

She went to a table in a corner, away from the throng near the bar. Around her, fragments of words and even whole phrases kicked in between the surges of the music. Looking around, she noticed a number of Sydney celebrities—a glamorous newsreader, a famous soap actor and a criminal lawyer among other vaguely familiar faces. She also noticed small packets being pushed across table tops and knew the people involved weren’t playing Pass the Parcel. A tall girl, her sparkling dress looking as if it had been glued onto her, staggered past Gemma’s table, brushing something from under her nose. Gemma felt sure that one or two of the bulky men who were moving round the tables were off-duty cops and wished Angie were with her—she might even know their names.

She finished her drink too quickly. Liquid Cocaine, she discovered, tended to make the drinker feel reckless, especially when taken on an empty stomach. So she went back to the bar and ordered Sex on the Beach. It might be the closest she was going to get to doing the wild thing for some time. The barman mixed an alarming mêlée of peach schnapps, vodka and various fruit juices topped up with champagne. A young man made a half-hearted attempt to pick her up, but very quickly changed the focus of his attention when the girl in the glued-on dress collapsed herself onto his lap.

Later, common sense warned her against the Pink Pussy—vodka, pink champagne and pink lemonade—but by then she was halfway through it. With something like half a bottle of vodka alone, not to mention the other forms of alcohol starting to compromise her system, Gemma knew it was time to leave. She managed to walk quite normally into the night air—warm and gently putrid after the icy air conditioning inside Deliverance. She knew she shouldn’t drive, so rang for a cab. The first available car would be sent, but there was a delay. Gemma waited for what seemed a long time, plenty of cabs driving by, but all engaged. From time to time she had to fend off men who tried it on. She removed her high heels, wishing she could ring Steve to come and pick her up. Then she thought of Mike. He’d bailed her out once before. Feeling a little self-conscious, she called him.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ve just put my target to bed. Where are you?’

He arrived so quickly that Gemma, thinking an attempt was being made on her honour, stepped back in alarm when a car pulled up at the kerb. Then she saw Mike leaning across the front seat, holding the door open.

‘Am I glad to see you,’ she said and scrambled in, holding the diamanté sandals, her legs feeling far less reliable than the pair she’d been using when she left her place. ‘These damn things were killing me.’ She sank back gratefully. ‘My cab hasn’t showed and it’s been ages.’ She realised she was quite affected by alcohol and regretted not eating earlier.

He looked her up and down. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I thought it was a good idea to check this place out. It’s a dealer’s paradise in there.’

Gemma settled back and watched Kings Cross going about its business before they headed down the hill to Rushcutters Bay. She was intensely aware of Mike’s presence, even his scent, which was a comforting mixture of clean male and some other spice. Thinking dreamily how nice it was to be driven home safely like this, it was a jolt when the car stopped and she realised Mike was pulling up outside her place. The evening was still warm and as he switched the ignition off, the tune on the radio, inaudible till then, suddenly came into focus.

‘Oh, I love this song,’ she said, leaning forward to turn it up. Mike moved to do the same and they collided, then apologised together. This made her laugh.
‘I know, it’s only rock ’n’ roll
,
’
screamed the singer. ‘But I like it,’ Gemma and Mike sang together. Gemma grinned. Bugger the neighbours. She felt about seventeen as they belted out the song together. And when Mike leaned over and gently kissed her, she experienced only a second of indecision before kissing him back, hard and hot, winding her arms around him, dislodging herself from her seat, moving over against him, trying to negotiate the gear stick. Everything went hot, hard and fast. Mike scooped her up and started pushing her dress away from her knees, running his hand along her thigh. Gemma was dimly aware of ‘Wild Horses’ as she lost herself in the kiss. Finally she broke away, panting. ‘I’d better go.’

But despite her intentions, she remained, staring at him, as if seeing him for the very first time, unsure of this exciting stranger she’d discovered wearing the body of a colleague. She couldn’t leave the car, she couldn’t do anything except kiss him again, this time more desperately. Her blood crashed loud and hot in her ears. Through the heat and the vodka, Gemma heard a tiny voice say, ‘Stop this now and say goodnight. You can put it down to the Liquid Cocaine and Pink Pussies. All you’ll have to do is apologise in the morning.’ But another, more urgent voice was saying, ‘Do it, do it now! In the car, like kids! It will be so good!’