Brittle Shadows (27 page)

“Some other
time, eh?” Jemma summoned up a smile. “I’m supposed to be somewhere else now.”
Where, though, she didn’t know.

Fen flapped a
hand. “Don’t worry, I can take a hint.” She flounced off in the direction of
the building entrance before Jemma could stop her.

Jemma vented a
silent scream into the air. What had she unleashed? She thought she wanted the
truth, but did she really? Her gaze traveled up the building tower, stopping at
the seventh floor. All roads led to Marcus Bartlett. She should have listened
to Chris.

The hairs on
the back of her neck rose. She turned slowly, surveying the streetscape,
searching the faces of drivers and pedestrians alike. No one paid her any
attention. She shuddered, unable to shake the prickly sensation of being
watched. She needed to get out of there, if only to the nearest café.

Only when she
was off the street and hidden in the back booth of a fifties-style American
diner, did Jemma start to relax. She ordered a double-shot latte, leaving it
until the waiter left to dig in her bag for her mobile phone. She’d had it with
lying, deceitful men.

Of course Ethan
wasn’t available to take her call. She left a terse message and hung up. For
someone who supposedly cared for her, he had a funny way of showing it. He had
yet to report back to her about the second security breach, let alone anything
else. She didn’t know what or who to believe anymore. She only had Ethan’s word
– for what that was worth – that the platinum blonde woman was his sister.

Then in her
next breath, Jemma wished she could take back her message. He wasn’t the one
who screwed everything that moved, including his loyal employee’s
husband-to-be. He wasn’t the one lying to his son, to his wife, to the world.
He wasn’t the one…

She shivered,
her next thought too repugnant to contemplate. But who knew what that man was
capable of?

Jemma’s pulse raced. Too much
coffee or something more sinister? She couldn’t shake the feeling someone was
shadowing her. She ducked into a newsagent’s alcove. An elderly, hunchbacked
lady hobbled past on her cane. Then a couple of teenage boys in blue school
uniform. A fat-bellied man in shorts and a striped T-shirt approached from the
other direction.
He waddled past without even a cursory
glance her way. She breathed out.

But instead of
continuing her journey, she headed into the shop. At the rate she was going, it
would take her until nightfall to get back to the apartment. She loitered near
the postcard rack at the door, feigning interest in the glossy, over-glamorized
images of everything from koalas and kangaroos to Melbourne’s historic Flinders
Street Station.

Twenty minutes
later, her heart rate restored to something below hyper-speed, she stepped back
outside, a paper bag containing two postcards clutched in her hand. Gail would
appreciate them.

She heard
footsteps behind her and froze. A spectacled man, his pinstriped suit hanging
from his gaunt frame, veered around her. After a couple of thumps on her chest
with the flat of her hand, she set off again.

She caught
movement in her peripheral vision. She whirled around. Had she imagined it? The
closest person to her was at least fifty meters away. Hallucinations
and
paranoia. What next? If she weren’t careful, the white-coated men would come to
take her away.

Her intention
had been to board the next tram, but if someone was following her, she wanted
to know who and she wanted to know why? Resisting the urge to glance over her
shoulder, she continued on across the intersection and down another block.

At the next
corner, she dug in her shoulder bag for her mobile. On the pretence of making a
call, she held it near her ear. Her fingers found and pressed the button for
the phone’s inbuilt camera. Click. She kept it to her ear, every thirty seconds
or so, taking another shot.

She waited
until she reached the more populated Arts Centre to check what she had captured
on her phone. Lost-looking tourists milled about her as with her back up
against a concrete wall, she opened the picture viewer and scrolled through
shot after shot of unremarkable streetscape. In the last photo, she had sliced
a man in half. She enlarged the image, panning in on the left edge of the
frame. Even with only half a face and out of uniform, she recognized the
thickset man. How could she not?

Standing on her
tiptoes, she scanned the crowd, moving out to the far edges when she couldn’t
see him. She knew he had to be there, knew she hadn’t imagined it, the photo
proof of that. She maneuvered through the crowd, checking faces. But it was his
back she saw first, his distinctive bulky gait giving him away as he charged
down a footpath and around a corner.

She chased
after him, almost bowling over a Hawaiian-shirted man in the process. She
rounded the corner just as her quarry disappeared down a concrete stairwell.
Wrapping the straps of her shoulder bag around her right hand, she took off
after him. Bigger and uglier he might have been, but she wasn’t about to let
that stop her.

Gerry Hobson
was waiting for her at the bottom. “Well, well, look who we have here.”

Her grip
tightened on the straps in her hand. “What the hell do you think you’re playing
at?” she hissed.

“Who, me?” he
asked, his eyes widening.

His innocent
act didn’t fool her for a second. “I don’t know what your game is, but I’m
warning you, if you continue to harass me, I’ll have you charged.”

“Aww, I’m
scared.”

“You should be.
A criminal conviction and you’re out of a job.”

His grey eyes
flashed. “I would watch what you say, missy.”

“Or what?” she
asked, goading him. Playing with fire sprang to mind, but he daren’t attack her
in public.

He sniggered.
“You don’t want to know, darlin’. You really don’t want to know. But I would
watch your back if I were you.”

Something
touched her back. She jumped. Gerry laughed.

“Excuse me,”
said a mature female voice.

“
Sorry
,” Jemma said, as she skipped sideways
to allow the woman and her friend to pass.

Taking a deep
breath, she drew herself up to her full height and squared up to the off-duty
security guard. “Just for the record, if anything happens to me, my lawyers
have instructions to release a letter naming names to the police. Talking of
letters, sign yours next time. And oh, by the way, roses aren’t my favorite
flower.”

“Huh?” His
mouth gaped. “What planet are you on?”

“A different
one to you, obviously.”

“You can say
that again.” He started to walk away, but then hesitated. “When I said watch
your back, I meant it.” The brusque edge gone, it sounded more like a warning
than a threat.

She waited until
he disappeared from view and then headed back up the stairwell to street level.
What would prompt an off-duty security guard, someone with whom she had hardly
exchanged a word, to give up his free time to tail her? And to what end? Was
the only reason she had picked up she was being followed, because that’s what
he had intended all along? Was it part of some obtuse plot to scare her off,
send her packing? But if his reaction to her barbs about the letters and roses
was legit, that discounted that theory somewhat.

That or her
presence in Melbourne threatened more than one party. She felt sure that Marcus
was behind the theft of the DVD. Whether in person or by proxy, it didn’t
matter. Then there were the nuisance phone calls in the wee small hours. Except
instead of making her more nervous, each additional incident just served to
piss her off further. She’d had enough.

The first thing Jemma did when she
walked in the door was download the photos from her phone to the laptop. Her
next task was something she had told Gerry she had already done: a letter to
her lawyer to be opened in the event of her death or disappearance.
Melodramatic she knew, but a necessity nevertheless.

Her fingers
flew over the keyboard. While putting it all down in black-and-white provided
no new answers, it did help to clear her head. Like a computer’s hard disk, her
brain worked more efficiently when it wasn’t overloaded.

In the end,
though, she had to accept that all she had was a collection of seemingly
unrelated incidents that didn’t prove or disprove anything except that Marcus
Bartlett was a bisexual, philandering cad. His wife was a shrew, but with
Marcus as a husband, Jemma couldn’t blame her. Kerry’s past behavior toward her
ex-husband and his mistress, too, was irrational but understandable. Jemma
hadn’t come up with any feasible explanation for why Gerry would harass her,
but it didn’t make him a murderer. It didn’t make any of them killers.

Her sister did
not kill herself. If Jemma’s lobbying to have the case reopened was to work,
she needed a more heavy-handed approach. The lawyer had mentioned in passing
that publicity might force the situation. Maybe he was right, but it would also
be a sure-fire way to get Chris offside, especially if she went behind his back.
She needed allies, not enemies.

She was still
thinking about it when her phone rang.

“You’re never
going to believe this,” said an excited Fen the instant Jemma answered.

“Believe what?”

“Marcus
Bartlett and Sean Mullins were lovers.”

“What?”

“It’s true.
What’s more, there’s a rumor that Marcus killed Sean when he threatened to make
the affair public.”

“Where are you
getting all this?”

“Off the
Internet. I didn’t see it, but apparently there was also a video of them at it
posted on YouTube.”

“You’ve got to
be joking,” Jemma said as she plugged Marcus’s and Sean’s names into Google.

“I know,
unbelievable, isn’t it? How awful for Tanya.” Fen paused. “I wonder if she
knew.”

Jemma gulped.
News of the alleged affair between the ‘wealthy property developer and his
chauffeur’ had spread like a computer worm, replicating itself on blog after
blog. By tomorrow, the original posting would be buried even further, along
with its poster.

“Did you hear
what I said?”

“Sorry, I was
just…” Jemma shook her head. “Sorry, Fen, tell me again.”

“I was asking
if you knew where it might have come from.”

“Where what
might have come from?” Jemma couldn’t think straight.

“You know: the
video, the goss, everything.”

“I wish I
knew.” Only four living people that Jemma was aware of had known of the DVD’s
existence, and of those, only two had access to its contents. The person who
stole the original DVD and Chris. Though Ash had viewed the footage, all he had
was the cropped image of the tattoo. And she couldn’t see Marcus outing
himself. But like a badly kept secret, it would only take one to leak it to the
outside world. “Fen, there’s someone at the door. Can I call you back?”

A white lie.
Jemma needed time to think, but before she had a chance to do so, her phone
rang again. Chris.

Like Fen, he
didn’t give her a chance to say hello. “What on earth possessed you to go and
do something like that?” He gave a snort. “Utter madness.”

“Stop right
there. I’m not sure what it is exactly you’re accusing me of, but whatever it
is, am I not at least entitled to a fair trial?”

“I’m talking
about putting that vulgar video up on YouTube. As if you didn’t know,” he added
with a huff.

“Not guilty,
Your Honor.”

“If it wasn’t
you, who was it then?”

“I don’t know,
but I can assure you it wasn’t me. I didn’t even know about it until a minute
ago.”

“Who else did
you send that link to?” he asked.

“No one. What
about you? Did you forward it to anyone?”

“Only to one of
the techs,” he said. “He was going to have a go at enhancing that tattoo. But
I’ve known the guy for years. It’s not the sort of thing he would do.”

“And it’s not
the sort of thing I would do either. Have you even considered that whoever
stole the original disc posted it online as some sort of bizarre payback?”

“Payback for
what?”

“I don’t know.
You’re the detective.”

He laughed.
“You’re right and I should have known better than to jump to conclusions.”

“Thank you.
Anyway, knowing how you feel about Marcus, I’m surprised you’re not applauding
the culprit.”

“It wasn’t him
I was concerned about,” Chris said, his voice softening. “Defamation isn’t
something the courts take lightly.”

“No doubt, but
you can stop worrying. On that count at least, my conscience is clear.”

“Good. Keep it
that way. Now, how are you placed tonight? Care to have dinner with this crusty
old cop?”

“You’re not
crusty – overprotective perhaps. But I like that.”