(2011) The Gift of Death (19 page)

‘
I know she’s untrustworthy and a liar, but - ’

‘
As long as you know what you’re doing.’

‘
Well, not really. But when have I ever.’

Josh laughed. ‘Let’s talk tomorrow. ‘Night.’

Josh hung on the line, expecting her to respond, but she cut the connection. If she had stayed talking to him she didn’t know what she might have said. She couldn’t trust herself. She got out of bed and walked over to her window. She opened the door to the balcony and stepped outside. The night air was warm, the smell from the garden below sweet and sickly. The moon cast its silver glow over the land outside, creating strange shadows. The city glowed in the distance, an amorphous chaotic mass.

Two killers – maybe more – were out there somewhere. One of them wanted to scare her, hurt her, maybe even kill her. And what about Cassie? What would they do to her?

She knew that outside her mother’s house was a police car. That her every move was monitored and that with the cops’ protection it was unlikely she would ever come to any harm. But how long could she continue like this? She wasn’t going to live in fear. That wasn’t her style. She would have to do something.

She felt a flutter inside her. Surely it was far too early for it to be the baby, wasn’t it? The baby. She tried to think ahead to a time after she had given birth, tried to imagine herself holding the child in her arms. She closed her eyes, willing herself to picture the scene. But there was nothing there but a dark emptiness.

20

She woke early after a fitful sleep, eager to dispel the nightmarish visions from her mind. Gleason was standing by her bed, watching her. She tried to move, but she was paralysed. She opened her mouth to scream but no matter how hard she strained her voice she couldn’t make a sound. He smiled as he stepped nearer towards the bed. He reached out to touch her. She tried to snake away from him, but she remained stationary. Then she felt his long fingers caress her stomach. The touch terrified her. She felt like she was going to swallow her tongue. He began to run a long fingernail down from her abdomen towards her thighs. She felt a spasm of pleasure, a knot of tension, as he began to work his fingers around her. And then a shooting pain that tore into her. She looked up from the bed to see Gleason standing there with her tiny baby, baptised in blood, that he had cut out of her.

She would wake, terrified, then fall back to sleep only for the dream to play itself out again.

At 6:30 am she had had to rush to the bathroom to be sick. Jesus, when was the nausea going to end? Afterwards, she felt drained, but grateful to be awake. She took a shower to wash away the sickly sweat that had drenched her during the night and dressed quickly. She checked on Cassie, asleep in one of the guest rooms down the hall, and slipped out of the gates of the house as the sun started to rise. The police officer stationed outside in the unmarked car wound down his window as she approached.

‘
Everything okay?’ said Naylor.

‘
Yes, officer. Fine, thanks,’ said Kate. ‘There’s just something I need to do. At the beach house.’

‘
Do you want me to take you?’

‘
No. I think I need some time alone.’

‘
Okay. I’ll be on your tail.’

‘
Thanks.’

‘
And Ms Veringer?’

‘
She’s still sleeping inside.’

‘
Okay. I’ll let Jurganson know,’ he said, nodding in the direction of another unmarked car stationed across the road.

Kate shivered as she stepped into her car. She started the ignition and pulled off into the empty street. As she drove she tried to assess the situation. Either she could remain trapped in this prison of fear – enduring exhausting nights haunted by horrific dreams and a prospect of her future days shadowed by the cops – or she could take the initiative and do something about it. The latter scared her, terrified her, but what was the option? At least she would actually be doing something to bring this nightmare to an end – not only for herself, but for Cassie too.

But what on earth could she do? She knew Josh wouldn’t let her help with the investigation. Why should he? What could she achieve without that sort of inside knowledge? She didn’t have the technology, or the expertise.

If she did nothing she knew it would be tantamount to giving in. She may as well have a sign on her forehead saying, ‘Kill Me’ and a scrawled message on her stomach saying ‘And my baby too’. Josh was good at his job – he was one of the best in the force – but she had a feeling that that was not going to be good enough. Whoever they were dealing with here was clever, clever enough not to leave behind forensic traces. And what was it Josh had said about the two killers? He had admitted that he didn’t know what to do.

‘
And neither do I,’ she said to herself. She thought about turning around at the next interchange. She could go back to her mother’s house, and make them all a breakfast of pancakes and berries. But then what? Nothing would change. She would still be a victim. And that, she had promised herself, that wasn’t going to be her fate.

She pressed down hard on the accelerator. She checked the mirror. Naylor was still behind her. She drove down Santa Monica Boulevard, where traffic was already building, onto the 10 before joining the Pacific Coast Highway. The sight of the ocean stretching out before her unnerved her. She hadn’t been down to the sea since that day.

As she neared the beach house she began to feel fear pricking at the back of her neck. Her mouth was dry. She knew there was nothing inside the house that would hurt her, but she was still afraid. She pushed memories of that awful morning from her mind. Yet there was something else that unsettled her. Something that made her breathing shallow and her skin cold.

She pulled off the highway and drove down the track towards the sea. She got out of the car and smelt the salty ocean breeze. A wave of nausea threatened to rise inside her. She walked down the wooden steps to the beach and watched the swell, trying to imagine a time before all this happened. In the night she had decided she would have to cancel her exhibition. She would call the gallery later that morning and let them know. Sure, they would be disappointed, but she had no choice. Perhaps, if they were willing, she could postpone it. But at the moment she couldn’t imagine being centred enough to take photographs of anything, let alone breaking waves. In fact, every time she saw the sea crashing on the shore she would think back to that moment when she had caught a glimpse of the baby out there in the water. In that instance her life had changed. Suddenly, her work seemed pointless, stupid even.

She heard the bang of a car door behind her. Her heart jumped. She felt her eyes widening with fear.

‘
I’ll just wait here,’ shouted Naylor, getting out of his car. ‘Unless you want me to come in with you?’

‘
No, I’ll be fine, thanks.’

She cursed herself for being so easily scared. ‘Get a fucking grip,’ she mouthed to herself, as she unlocked the door.

As she stepped inside the house she wondered whether she could ever move back here. Her parents had bought it in the sixties, with the proceeds from one of her mother’s films. Which one was it?
The Dream Denied?
Her mom had always known how much she had loved it and after her father’s passing she had insisted on signing it over to her. But how could she live in a house that had been contaminated with death? Even if she had it professionally cleaned and completely redecorated she would never forget the trail of people who had invaded her home that day. A shiver danced up and down her spine as she remembered the series of events of that morning. How could she feel joy at getting pregnant after what had happened?

No, she wasn’t going to think about that. She had something she had to do.

She walked through the living room towards the back of the house, down some stairs to a lower level until she came to an internal room that did not have a window. It was her darkroom.

She stepped into the room, bare and simple, with a long metal trough that ran along its right hand wall. She thought back to the times when she would come home from a day’s work at the laboratory, tense and anxious, and how she would immediately relax when she came in here. She loved the ritual of turning out the lights and sitting in darkness as she teased the spool of film from her camera. And the ritual of washing the strips in chemicals, the rinsing and then, her favourite of all, the magic of the fixing solution, when the image would gradually appear to her.

At the back of the darkroom was another room, more of a large cupboard really, which held the remnants of her former life. She knew what was inside and she hesitated. She felt her throat tighten as she turned the door and pushed. A dry mustiness invaded her nostrils, causing her to sneeze a couple of times. She wiped her nose on her sleeve as she reached for the light switch. The bulb flickered for an instant before it came on.

Arranged around the wooden shelves were a number of clay heads, images of the dead that she had brought back to life. Lifeless eyes stared out at her, reminding her of the cases she had tried to forget. No matter how hard she had tried to push them away the memory of creation remained in her hands.

Under each clay sculpture was a label. Here was KEELINGWARD, HOWARD; PATRICK, BENJAMIN JOSEPH; WREN, CATHERINE; JOHNSON, JENNIFER, names that she had only come to know after she had pieced their faces back together. Before their remains had come to her they were unknown, lost, unclaimed. But she had been able to give each of them an identity, fashioning likenesses out of what little remained. Without her – or at least without people like her – they would still be without names; individuals lost, sometimes unloved, existing in a kind of limbo, a nothingness situated somewhere between sudden death and due remembrance.

The sculptures on display were victims. She had chosen to store the reconstructions of career criminals, rapists and serial killers out of sight in a series of cardboard boxes. Those monsters did not deserve to be seen.

She moved a step ladder and placed a foot on its bottom step when she thought she heard a noise from outside. She felt her heart race. She listened hard. It was just the crash of the waves. Nothing more. She built up a slight sweat as she lifted a couple of boxes out of the way. She placed the ladder underneath the shelves and started to climb. She would only need to raise herself to the third or fourth step in order to reach up to the shelf. That was if her memory served her correctly.

She pushed herself upwards, gripping the sharp metal edging of the shelves as a support. She ran her hands over the rows of boxes arranged on the shelf. She was certain the case would have been filed under his, not her, name - Gleason, not Veringer. Killer, not victim.

She reached out and took hold of the box, pulling it towards her. Steadying herself, she climbed down the ladder and put the box on the floor. She looked at it for a moment before picking it up again and carrying it into the darkroom.

She placed it on the trestle table and eased off its lid. She pushed her hands down into it and felt the form inside. Was that a curve of the lip she was touching? She pictured Gleason forcing himself on those girls – on poor Cassie – and then remembered a fragment of the dream. The one where a clay tongue was pushing itself into her mouth.

Instead of relinquishing her hold – she wasn’t going to wuss out now - she gripped it tightly and brought it out. A life-size bust of Gleason, the image that she had formed with Cassie’s help. She turned the clay model towards her and compared it to the man. Not a bad likeness at all. In fact, she had to admit there was something uncanny about it. There was the high forehead, the square jaw, the large, straight nose, the deep set eyes, the pock-marked skin. Cassie had also felt the ear stud in his right ear and the distinctive scar that ran from the right temple down across his cheek to the corner of his mouth. In addition to the physical resemblance she had also managed to capture something of his soul, or perhaps the lack of one. The model stared out at the world with the same indifference, the same cold blankness that she had witnessed in Gleason.

She carried on looking at the clay model, thinking perhaps that it might offer up some sort of a clue. But Gleason in death was just as uncommunicative as he had been in life. The only time she thought she gained an insight into his character was when Cassie was giving evidence and talking about what he had done – how he had degraded her - that night. Tears spilled down her cheeks as she related how he had sodomised her. Kate had looked over to Gleason to see a sly smirk playing across his face.

‘
You bastard,’ she said to herself. ‘You fucking son of a bitch.’

She reached out to take a swipe at the model, only stopping herself at the last minute, hitting her fist on the table instead.

‘
I’m going to find you,’ she said through the pain of a smarting hand. ‘I’m going to get you, you fucker. Just you wait and see. I’m on your case now.’