Surrender Read online

  As I waited for the lights to change, I thought about the last time I’d seen Niki. Not that time in the coffin. That wasn’t Niki any more. The last time Niki and I had talked, we’d argued. Well, actually, I’d argued and she’d gone quiet. She’d done that since she was a little girl whenever she was upset or frightened: she’d just pull into herself and go very still and silent. Inaccessible. It used to drive me mad. I hated the way she could remove herself so totally like that, and it just made me yell at her even more. Twelve months ago she was removed for good. No amount of yelling was going to change that.

  I slid the car through the intersection and up Pirie Street. Wolf whimpered with desire as he breathed in the aroma of greasy fried chicken from the KFC. It’s never had that effect on me, but then Wolf has a similar response to week-old possum carcasses so maybe that says something about the Colonel’s secret ingredient.

  Niki and I had argued about her working at the club. When she’d first told me she was occasionally dancing at a strip club for extra money, I’d given her the lecture about how women who sold their bodies undid all the good work of women before them. How women had fought to be treated as equals, not property to be bought, sold and discarded. How it was soul destroying to sell your body for money. I might even have mentioned slippery slopes and thin edges of wedges.

  Yeah, exactly. I’d never learned to keep my mouth shut or my opinion to myself, despite that being suggested to me on a regular basis by a number of people in my life. Niki wouldn’t remember what our mother had sounded like because she’d died when Niki was born, but I was six years older than my baby sister and I remembered. When I did that slippery slopes speech I suspect I sounded just like her. By default, when our mother died I’d taken on the role of Niki’s surrogate mum. I don’t know which of us hated that more.

  When my lecture ran out of steam, Niki peered at me in what I suspect was a mirror image of my own squint, and told me that actually she found dancing ‘empowering’. I guess she’d heard me use the word and was using it right back at me for effect, but maybe not. Maybe dancing around a pole while a whole bunch of men drooled into their laps did empower her. What did I know? She’d invited me to come along and watch her some night. She said she was ‘a really hot dancer’ and guys loved her.

  At barely twenty with a girl-next-door face and a gorgeous, sexy body, it was no surprise to me that the guys loved her. Or that she was a hot dancer. What did surprise me was how much I hated her doing it. I’m far from being a prude and I had plenty of girlfriends who’d stripped and danced ‘exotically’, though I’d be hard-pressed to explain exactly what made sliding up and down a pole ‘exotic’. I’d always been cool when friends did it, but for some reason I hated that my little sister did.

  I pulled into a park outside Gemma’s place and wound the back windows up enough so Wolf could still stick his nose out and sniff the breeze. He gave a whine of displeasure when he realised he wasn’t coming with me but then settled down for a nap. Wolf is much better at waiting than I am.

  Gemma lives alone in a two-storeyed wooden house, squeezed between two impressive turn-of-the-century villas perched on the slopes of Mt Victoria. The way Gemma’s place has been built, just forward of and on a rise above the houses either side, makes it appear to be leaning into the wind like the prow of a ship. An assortment of men’s work and tramping boots lay scattered in the porch at the front door. Either Gemma was making the most of her suspension and having a lot of fun at home this morning or she’d put the boots there to ward off would-be burglars. Although I hoped for her sake it was the former, I was pretty confident it was the latter.

  Gemma opened the door on the first ring. She looked untidy, weary, bad tempered and emotionally bruised. That was fine. She’s looked like that all the time I’ve known her. When she saw it was me, her mouth contorted into a great big toothpaste commercial of a smile, only on Gemma it looked more like a photo from a medical text of facial deformities.

  ‘It’s okay. Sean’s told me everything,’ I said quickly.

  The smile was replaced by her normal scowl.

  ‘Thank Christ for that. Come in,’ she said, turning her back on me and heading into the house.

  I followed her through the hall to the back, picking my way through a maze of stacked magazines, odd pieces of discarded furniture, and what looked like a pile of broken toys. The toys were a strange addition because not only does Gemma not have kids, but I’d known her to recoil from them.

  I’d ask about the toys some other time. It was unlikely I’d get a satisfactory answer from her anyway. Despite, or maybe because of, her slender frame and delicate features, Gemma comes from the ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ school of women. She’s one of the guys. It’s pretty hard to be anything else if you’re a female cop.

  I manoeuvred the jug around a sink full of dirty dishes, filled it and plugged it in. Gemma never offers coffee so I knew this was the only way I’d get one. She’d wedged herself between two piles of books on her sofa and was studying me.

  ‘So does it lay any ghosts? Make you feel better knowing you were right?’

  I ran a couple of cups under the tap before answering. I knew there wouldn’t be any clean ones in the cupboard. I’ve known Gem for about five years but there are still things about her I can’t reconcile. She has one of the most disciplined, ordered minds I’ve ever known, yet she lives in total domestic chaos.

  I thought about her question — in fact I’d been thinking of pretty much nothing else since Sean’s visit.

  ‘No. It doesn’t lay anything at all,’ I said. ‘Certainly not the ghosts.’

  Gem wouldn’t lie to me, but she wouldn’t necessarily tell me all the truth either.

  ‘Snow did it, Diane. You can trust me on that,’ she said, giving me that direct, eye-contact look they teach new recruits to use on juries but which in Gem’s case comes naturally.

  I sat at the table on the one chair not piled with junk. It put me at an odd angle to her and I had to twist my neck around to meet her gaze. It made me feel at a disadvantage. She didn’t seem to notice, but with Gem it’s always hard to tell.

  ‘Any idea why he did it?’ I asked.

  She walked to the steaming jug, keeping her back to me. I saw her shoulders shrug, the delicate blades like the promise of wings beneath her thin cotton shirt.

  ‘I gave up years ago trying to figure out why scumbags do things. As they say, that way lies madness. Why do they burn little kids’ legs with cigarettes? Beat the crap out of some poor kid delivering pizzas for a living? Rape little old ladies? Who knows why they do anything. Who the fuck wants to know?’ She poured water on to the instant coffee, spilling a fair bit on the bench and ignoring it.

  ‘He didn’t give you any reason? He just killed Niki for the hell of it — because he could?’

  Gemma put a cup on the table in front of me, pushed a pile of books on to the floor and sat on a chair opposite. For the first time I saw the faint sketching of fine lines around her eyes. The signs of ageing in friends always bring out the best in me but that’s probably just me making some kind of unholy pact with the future.

  Gem nodded at my mug as if daring me to drink. ‘How are you these days, babe?’ she asked, and peered at me through her coffee steam.

  ‘Great,’ I lied. ‘Really great in fact,’ I elaborated. I took a sip of the coffee, giving Gem time. I knew she was watching me, checking me out. For the first three months after Niki died I’d totally lost the plot, then three months after that I’d lost Sean, though in a very different way. Actually, I thought, maybe not so different. Separation is a kind of death, as any dog watching its owner leave the house would tell you if they could. Since Niki’s death my behaviour had been pretty ropey and Gemma knew it. Plus she’d witnessed my uncontrolled showdown with McFay that had lost me my police work.

  It wasn’t that I’d now come to terms with Niki’s death or anything as mature as that, but I’d learnt how to keep my reactions hidden fro
m everyone. Even my friends. I made a point of taking another casual sip of the ghastly coffee. Real nonchalant. It’s unlikely I fooled Gem but she let me play it out.

  Gemma flicked through some CDs in a drawer beneath the stereo and then slid one across the table to me. I looked at the label: Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. My heart was thumping and not because I have a liking for ’50s swing. In fact I hate it. That girl from Ipanema could just keep walking as far as I was concerned.

  ‘You made a copy?’

  Gemma looked away and shrugged. ‘No way. McFay would hound me off the job for good if I’d done that.’

  I grinned at her as I dropped the disc into my jacket pocket. ‘I’ll borrow old Herb if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Be my guest. I hate swing,’ she said, dropping one eyelid in what I hoped was a wink. Or else she’d just had a little stroke. Either way, it would be bad mannered of me to draw attention to it.

  We chatted about inconsequential things while we finished our coffee but neither of us is good at small talk and we were drying up long before the coffee did. The CD was burning a hole in my pocket, and there were the unspoken thanks I owed her for risking her job to get a confession out of Snow. Risking her life too.

  I tried a hug and murmured thanks as I was leaving, but Gem gave me a pat on the arm that I’m likely to carry the bruise of for some time to come, and assured me she didn’t need to be thanked. We stood companionably shuffling and avoiding eye contact for some time until I finally made the move and headed back to the car. Christ — and they say men aren’t good at showing emotions. Still, I hoped she knew how grateful I felt. I owed her big time.

  I drove the remaining fifty metres up Pirie and parked beside the Mt Victoria bowling club. From the shrieks of laughter I could hear coming from the green it was obvious the old silverbacks were having themselves a whale of a time. I let Wolf out and whistled him quickly through the kids’ playground, ignoring the glares from protective mothers who wanted so badly to lecture me about dog leads and the use of them on the dog rather than looped over my own neck. Wolf zigzagged ahead of me up into the first set of pines. I filled my lungs with the balmy, pollen-filled, late-afternoon northerly, and followed Wolf who, head up into the breeze, was being reeled in by an invisible line of scents.

  I kept my hands deep in my pockets as I walked. My left hand scratched at the fluff accumulated in the seam; my right tapped at the casing of the CD — not the Tijuana Brass as the label warned, but a recording of Snow telling Gemma how he killed my little sister. It made me sick just thinking about it but I knew I had to listen to it — had to know the ghastly details of how she died. Surely the reality couldn’t be worse than my nightmares, I told myself, knowing that was bullshit.

  As I watched Wolf lumber up the slope in search of a pine cone to chase, I remembered a film I’d seen about a guy killed and eaten by bears he’d been filming. His camera had been running at the time of the attack but the lens was pointed in the other direction so no images were caught on film. But the microphone had picked up every last yell and scream as he tried to fight off the attack, and then every last bone crunch, lip smack and slobber as the bear consumed him. The tape recording had ended up in the possession of the dead guy’s girlfriend but she’d never been able to bring herself to listen to it. In the film I saw, the director listens to the tape and then tells the girlfriend she must never, ever play the tape. It’s just too horrible. And in the film, the girlfriend agrees to lock the recording away, unheard.

  I ran my thumb along the edge of the disc. I guess that girlfriend and I are just different.

  CHAPTER 3

  Heaps of people go missing. Some do it deliberately and don’t want to be found. Others go missing for the prime purpose of being found: they want the reunion. They want to hear that all is forgotten or forgiven. My job is to locate the missing people and find out to which of those two groups they belong. The deal is that once I’ve located them I get to decide if I hand over the details of their whereabouts to the client paying me, or not. Either way I keep the deposit and my integrity. I take on jobs for individuals, for PI firms, for lawyers looking for witnesses to crimes, insurance companies, television companies, all sorts really.

  Until my showdown with McFay the police service had been a good source of work. I guess being married to a cop for five years inevitably meant I’d end up doing work for them. The police jobs were not usually about finding a missing person, but about finding the people who should be missing them. When bodies or sometimes bits of bodies turned up on beaches or were unearthed in pine forests, I got the enviable task of trying to find out who the corpse might once have been.

  Mostly they were suicides and it was a matter of going back, sometimes as far as fifty-odd years, through police archives, to try to match the remains. Often there was nothing more than the record of a phone call to police to say someone had gone missing. Sometimes not even that. They’re the saddest ones. Those poor buggers unnoticed in life and unmissed in death.

  The police work, which until recently was my staple, means I’ve ended up with office folders packed with photos of corpses in various states of decomposition. Yeah, I know, nice work if you can get it. But decaying bodies have never really bothered me. Well, not dead ones anyway. Still, I’ve learnt from experience that it’s best for me to view work material during daylight hours. I’ve also learnt not to leave photos of corpses lying around on the kitchen table where Girl Guides can see them and go complaining to their parents who then pay me ‘a serious visit’. After that particular sobering little event I made two vows: one, to keep all the ugly work stuff in my office, and two: never to open the door to Girl Guides.

  I decided to approach Snow’s confession as if it was just part of my job. Ugly work stuff. I didn’t want him invading the rest of my home, and anyway I reckoned he was in good company with the rotting corpses. So, early morning, still in my pyjamas and dressing gown and clutching my small percolator of coffee — okay, Sean’s percolator of coffee — I checked my emails and then, as if it was a routine job, I opened the plastic CD case, dropped the disc Gemma had given me into my laptop and clicked on play.

  I squashed in beside Wolf, who was curled like a shell on the small sofa, ready to spend the morning contentedly sniffing his own farts. For at least thirty seconds the only sounds were the whirr of the CD drive and the thump of my heart. I was about to get up and check the player when Gemma’s voice filled the room.

  ‘So how will I know when you’ve done it? Will you contact me?’

  Wolf lifted his head long enough to check Gemma wasn’t in the room and then continued with his previous preoccupation. He needed to get out more. Obviously Gemma had given me an edited version of the original recording and for that I was grateful, but there was going to be no gentle lead-in and I readied myself for the hard stuff.

  ‘You’ll know because he’ll be dead.’

  I recognised Snow’s voice immediately. For a big man he had a surprisingly whiny, high-pitched voice. Gemma’s next question suggested she was thinking the same thing.

  ‘How do I know you’ve got the balls to do it?’

  Wolf’s head shot up optimistically at the word ‘balls’. Despite the nausea I was feeling I couldn’t help but smile. I’d have let Wolf chase Snow’s balls any time he wanted. In fact, I’d have paid good money to watch.

  ‘Lady, your husband won’t be my first, you know what I mean? Knocking over hubby with a car will be like eating peanuts. The last one I did was up real close and personal. I watched her eyes roll back when I stuck the knife in. They were pretty eyes, but they went real flat-looking once she was dead. So don’t talk to me about balls because I got them all right. Nice big ones.’

  There was a rustling sound that no doubt was Snow grabbing Gemma’s hand and shoving it in his crotch. Nice. Knowing Gemma, it would have taken real restraint for her not to use the opportunity to twist them right off.

  ‘Okay, I’m sorry. I’m just a bit nervous. It
’s not like I’ve hired a hit man before. That’s the correct term, is it? Hit man?’ Gemma laughed, a bit unconvincingly, but like Sean said, no one ever accused Snow of being smart. I could hear Snow shifting in his seat, readjusting himself no doubt.

  ‘You can call me whatever you like. It’s not like we’re in a long-term relationship or something. You pay me cash, I do the job, and we never see each other again. That’s the deal. I’ll be like an enforcer.’ Snow chuckled as if that was real funny.

  Gemma’s voice cut in. ‘If you don’t mind my asking, was that a job, too? The one you just mentioned, I mean. Were you hired to do that? It’s just that, I imagine, being hired to … remove someone is quite a different thing from, well, a personal killing.’

  Gemma had adopted a breathless ‘posh lady enjoying a bit of rough’ tone that seemed to be working on Snow. She was inviting him to brag.

  ‘What is this — the This is Your Life show or something?’

  Snow’s question was wary but it didn’t sound like he was on to Gemma. Not yet, anyway. Gemma giggled — something I’d never known her do in real life. I heard the plastic seat covers creak, then Snow, languid now, enjoying himself.

  ‘I don’t do personal and I don’t do freebies. Like that guy with the funny hair says, it was just business. She was a whore. Dumb too. Thought she could walk away when she felt like it. “I don’t want to do it any more”,’ he mimicked in a girly voice. ‘Well, it doesn’t work like that. But, you know, up-market nice-looking lady like you, I might be prepared to consider a discount.’

  I was pretty sure this wasn’t a threat. He even sounded a tad begrudging.

  Gemma spoke up quickly. ‘Listen, money’s not a problem. I’ve got it here.’ I could hear rustling. She must have had the cash ready in a paper bag. ‘There’s five thousand dollars here, all in ten and twenty dollar notes like you said. And I’ll give you the other half when you’ve done the job. That seems fair. Because I don’t have any proof that you can actually see this through. I mean, despite what you say, I don’t really know you’ve killed anyone before. You could drive away with my five thousand and that’s the last I’ll hear from you. You could have read about that girl, the prostitute, in the papers and then gone around telling people you did it, so as to — well, I don’t know, to impress them.’