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Epub ISBN: 9781473539976
Version 1.0
Published by Arrow Books 2019
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Copyright © Candice Fox 2015
Cover image © Shutterstock
Candice Fox has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain by Arrow Books in 2019
(First published in Australia by Bantam in 2015)
Arrow Books
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784758363
Candice Fox is the middle child of a large, eccentric family from Sydney’s western suburbs. The daughter of a parole officer and an enthusiastic foster-carer, Candice spent her childhood listening around corners to tales of violence, madness and evil as her father relayed his work stories to her mother and older brothers.
Candice won back-to-back Ned Kelly awards for her first two novels, Hades and Eden, and her third novel, Fall, was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly and Davitt awards. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed Crimson Lake and co-writer with James Patterson of the Sunday Times No.1 bestsellers Never Never and Fifty Fifty set in the Australian outback.
Fall is the third novel in Candice Fox’s acclaimed Archer & Bennet series.
If Detective Frank Bennett tries hard enough, he can sometimes forget that Eden Archer, his partner in the Homicide Department, is also a moonlighting serial killer …
Thankfully their latest case is proving a good distraction. Someone is angry at Sydney’s beautiful people – and the results are anything but pretty. On the rain-soaked running tracks of Sydney’s parks, a predator is lurking, and it’s not long before night-time jogs become a race to stay alive.
While Frank and Eden chase shadows, a different kind of danger grows closer to home. Frank’s new girlfriend Imogen Stone is fascinated by cold cases, and her latest project – the disappearance of the two Tanner children more than twenty years ago – is leading her straight to Eden’s door.
And, as Frank knows all too well, asking too many questions about Eden Archer can get you buried as deep as her past …
‘Definitely a writer to watch.’ Harlan Coben
‘A bright new star of crime fiction.’ James Patterson
‘A fast-paced, expertly crafted read with a cast of colourful characters.’ Guardian
Crimson Lake series
Crimson Lake
Redemption
Archer & Bennett series
Hades
Eden
With James Patterson
Never Never
Fifty Fifty
Black & Blue (BookShot novella)
For Danny, Adam and Jess
BEFORE THE BLOOD, before the screaming, the only sound that reached the car park of the Black Mutt Inn was the gentle murmur of the jukebox inside. It was set on autoplay, tumbling out a cheerful line-up of greatest pub hits one after another, but there was none of the growly sing-alongs of usual pubs, no thrusting of schooner glasses, no stomping of heels on the reeking carpet. The jukebox played in the stale emptiness of the building, and by the time it reached the car park it was no more than a ghoulish moan. It was windy out there and the stars were gone.
The Black Mutt Inn attracted bad men, and had been doing so for almost as long as anyone could remember, as though the ground beneath it had somehow hollowed a vent to hell, the men who frequented it drawn in by the familiar heat of home. Nightly, at least, a bone was broken on its shadowy back porch over some insult or breach or another, or a promise was made there beneath the moth-crowded lamps for some violence that would occur on another night. Sometimes a plot was hatched there – the corners of the inn’s undecorated interior were very good for whispering, and the walls seemed to grow poisonous ideas like vines, spreading and creeping around minds and down necks and along legs to the rotting floorboards.
The staff at the Black Mutt saw nothing, said nothing, but they absorbed secrets and requests, their ears and palms always open, their lips always sealed. They were loyal to no one and this earned them respect.
On this night, Sunny Burke and Clara McKinnie entered the Black Mutt with their laptops and bags of chilli jerky and bright, suntanned smiles. The man behind the bar said nothing, saw nothing. He just served the drinks.
Sunny and Clara brought their smiles into the Black Mutt, and though their Macleans glimmer didn’t reach any farther than the murky light above the door, the two carried this weak glow to the bar and set up shop there under the mirrors. Three men sat against the wall whispering, and another two stood at the pool tables watching the two travellers fresh from Byron, stamped with its optimism and cheap weed stink. Clara ordered a champagne and orange juice and downed it quickly, and Sunny nursed a James Squire and rubbed her legs.
Into the dim halo of light stepped a man from the pool tables, and from that very second, although the bleach-white smiles remained, things in the world of Sunny and Clara began to get very dark.
‘G’day, mate,’ the man said, thumping Sunny between the shoulder blades. The man was tall and square and roped with veins, and the two hands hanging from his extra-long arms looked all-encompassing. Sunny looked up, appreciated the density of the man’s beard and smiled, swallowing envy.
‘Hey.’
‘Just down from Byron, are we?’
‘We’ve been there a week,’ Clara beamed.
‘I can see, I can see.’ The man brushed the backs of his fingers against the top of Clara’s shoulder, a brief brotherly pat. ‘Sun’s had its way with you, beauty.’
‘We’re just on our way back to the big smoke,’ Sunny said.
‘If you ask me, you’ve just come from the big smoke,’ the stranger jibed, and nudged Sunny in the ribs, hard. ‘Tell me you’ve got some grass for sale. Please tell me.’
Sunny laughed. ‘Sure, mate.’ He glanced at the other figure in the shadows, the man by the table leaning on his cue. ‘No problem.’
‘I don’t get up to Byron often enough. Me back’s no good for the drive.’
Sunny nodded sympathetically. The stranger threw out a hand and Sunny gripped it, felt its concrete calluses against his palm. ‘No probs, no probs. How much are you after?’
‘Aw, we’ll do all that later. Hamish is the name, mate. Can I invite you to a game?’
‘Yeah! Shit, yeah. This is Clara. I’m Sunny.’
‘Me mate over there’s Braaaadley, but don’t you worry about him. He don’t talk much. Plays a rubbish game of pool, too, don’t you, Brad? Ay? Wake up, shithead.’ The man squawked back towards the pool table but roused nothing in his partner. ‘Excuse me, miss, excuse me, but me old Bradley’s prone to leaning on that pool cue till he drifts off and no amount of slapping can get him back, if you know what I mean.’
‘Right,’ she laughed.
‘You want some jerky?’ Sunny asked.
‘Nah, mate, nah. I’m all good. Me chompers ain’t no good, as well as me back. I’m falling apart at the seams here, mate.’
They racked the balls while Clara and the silent one watched, now and then letting their eyes drift to each other, the hairy man in the dark struggling beneath the weight of his frown, the young woman rocking awkwardly, swinging her hips, holding onto the cue. She finished her second champagne and wanted another, but the men were talking and laughing and making friends, and Sunny always had trouble making friends, so she didn’t interrupt.
‘How about a little wager, just to make things interesting?’ Hamish asked.
‘Yeah, sure.’ Sunny puffed out his chest, ignoring a warning look from Clara. ‘Where do you, I mean, what do you usually –?’
‘Five bucks?’
‘Five bucks?’ Sunny laughed, coughed. ‘Sure, mate, sounds great.’
They played. Clara was the most excitable, howling when she sunk the white ball, cheering when Sunny scored. There was plenty of kissing. Rubbing of backsides. The men in the booths watched them. The happy group at the table were cut off from the rest of the world by the cones of light that fell upon them.
‘Very good, young sir,’ Hamish said, offering his big hard hand again. ‘How about another?’
‘Twenty bucks this time,’ Sunny said. ‘You can pay me in labour, if you like. The van needs a wash.’
‘Sunny!’ Clara gasped.
‘Listen to this guy, would you?’ Hamish laughed. He squeezed the young woman on the shoulder, made Clara’s face burn red. ‘What a cocky little shit. You’re lucky you’re so goddamn beautiful, Sunny me old mate. No one’s gonna knock that gorgeous block off no matter what you say.’
They laughed and played again. Hamish was hard on Bradley. The balls cracked and crashed and rolled in the pockets. Clara was good. She’d always been good. Her daddy had taught her the game young, bent over the felt, his hips pinning her against the side of the table. But she knew when to sacrifice a shot so that she didn’t lean over too far and give Bradley a view of her breasts, her arse.
The man looked at her funny. Made her ache inside.
‘One more?’ Sunny said. The bar was empty now but for the bartender, who was motionless in the shadows. Sunny won, and won again.
‘One more, little matey, and then it’s off to bed with you. What say we make it interesting, huh? Everything you’ve won, you give me the chance to win it back. We go even. I lose, you take the notes right outta my hand, no hard feelings.’
‘Mate,’ Sunny drawled, ‘you win this and I’ll give you double what you owe me.’
‘Sunny!’
‘Oh ho. Just listen to this guy,’ Hamish laughed.
‘Sunny, no.’
‘Cla,’ the boy drew her close, ‘they haven’t won a game all night. It’s fine. I’m just having a laugh.’
‘Sunny –’
‘Just shut up, would you?’ Sunny snapped, giving her that look. ‘I’m only having a bit of fucking fun.’
Clara shut up because she knew what men could do, and it began with that look. She watched the men shake hands, rack the balls. When the game began, it was all Clara could do to keep those lips shut as Hamish leaned down, took aim and began sinking balls.
The table was empty of Hamish’s balls in less than two minutes. And then he sunk the black in a single shot. Sunny never got a turn.
‘Mate,’ Hamish said when it was done, straightening and leaning on his cue, the smile and the charm and the humour forgotten now, his eyes lazy as they wandered over Clara. ‘Seems you owe me quite a bit of cash.’
In the car park, Bradley walked behind them, glancing now and then towards the Black Mutt, although no such careful eye was needed. Not here, not where a hidden hole drilled straight to hell warmed the air as it breezed across the asphalt and ruffled Clara’s thick dark curls. Hamish’s hand on the back of her neck was like a steel clamp. They approached the Kombi van, the only one in the lot. It was parked out in the middle of a huge barren wasteland so that the young couple would be safe from whatever might be lurking in the towering wall of dark woods when they returned. Clara put her hands out to stop Hamish slamming her into the side of the van and turned. Bradley had let a steel pipe slide down from where it was hidden high up inside his sleeve.
‘Give me an inventory,’ Hamish said.
‘There’s the CD player, some cash, and Clara has some jewellery,’ Sunny was saying, fumbling with his keys. ‘There’s the weed, too. You can take it. Please, please, I’m asking you now not to hurt us.’
‘You go ahead and ask whatever you like, you snotty-nosed little prick,’ Hamish said. ‘You bring out whatever you can from in there and we’ll see if it’s enough, and if it’s not, I’ll decide if anyone gets hurt.’
‘Take them up to the ATM,’ Bradley grunted. Clara jolted at the sound of the silent man’s voice. She turned and found him staring at her, eyes pinpoints of light in the dark.
‘Sunny,’ Clara croaked, tried to ease words from her swollen throat. ‘Sunny. Sunny!’
‘Shut up and hurry up,’ Hamish snarled.
‘I’m going. Please. Please!’ Sunny was pleading with anyone now. Clara heard the pleas continuing inside the van, heard the rattling of boxes and drawers. As soon as the boy was out of sight she felt the man with the concrete hands slip his fingers beneath her skirt. Hamish smiled at her with his big cracked teeth and pressed her into the van.
‘All this excitement getting you wet, is it, baby?’
‘Sunny! God! Please!’
‘Your pretty boyfriend better come up with something very special, very soon, baby cakes, or I’m afraid you’re footing the bill on this one.’
‘How about this?’ Sunny said as he emerged from the van, hands full, thrusting the items at Hamish. ‘Will this do?’
The knife made Hamish stiffen, made his eyes widen slightly as they dropped to the items in Sunny’s hands, which all fell away and clattered to the ground, revealing the leather handle they concealed, the leather handle attached to the long hunting blade that was now buried deep in Hamish’s belly. Sunny, as always, didn’t give the man a moment to appreciate the surprise of the attack. He pulled the knife out of his stomach and plunged it in again, pushed it upwards into the tenderness of Hamish’s diaphragm and felt the familiar clench of shocked muscles. Clara slid away as the young man went for a third blow, took her own knife, the one she kept flush against her body between her breasts, and went for Bradley. The hairy man backed away but Clara’s aim was immaculate. She set her feet, pulled back, breathed, swung and let go. The knife embedded in Bradley’s back with a thunk right between the shoulder blades, and he fell and rolled like roadkill on the tarmac.
She went to the silent man and pulled out the knife, wiping it on the hem of her soft white skirt. Bradley was still alive, and she was happy because it would be a long time until she was finished with him. Clara liked to play, and though it wasn’t really Sunny’s thing, she thought maybe because they were on holiday he would indulge her just once with some games. She turned and looked at him, Bradley still gurgling against the asphalt under his cheek.
‘Baby.’ She turned on her sweet voice for her killer partner. ‘What if we took this one home and –’
A whistle and a shlunk.
At first it seemed to Clara that Sunny had fallen, until she felt the wet spray of his blood on her face. She tried to process the noise she’d heard, the whistle and the shlunk, but none of it made sense. She crawled, shaking, and with her hands tried to piece back together the split halves of her boyfriend’s skull, grabbing at the bits of brain and meat sprayed across the asphalt around him. There was no putting Sunny back together again. She kneeled in the blood, both his and Hamish’s, and tried to understand, little whimpers coming out of her like coughs. Hamish was sitting up beside the van, his hands still gripping at the knife wounds in his belly.
A whistle and a shlunk, and the top of his head came off. He slid to the ground.
Clara looked around at the tree line behind her, a hundred metres or so away, and then looked at the trees in front, the same distance, dark as ink and depthless. The silence rang, and under its terrifying weight she crawled, tried to get to her feet, heading towards the bar. Another whistle, another shlunk, and her foot was gone. Clara fell on her face and gripped at the stump of her leg. She didn’t scream or cry out because there was only terror in her, and terror made no sound.
Clara lay and breathed, and then after some time began crawling again. She heard the sound of uneven footsteps, punctuated by a metallic clop, and looked up to see a figure coming towards her slowly, barely distinguishable against the dark of the trees from which it had emerged. The sounds kept coming out of Clara, the shuddering breaths through her lips, but through them the metallic clopping kept coming. A woman moved into the light of the van. Clara could see she was leaning on an enormous rifle, using the gun like a crutch.
The woman stepped quietly between the bodies of the men, and Clara lay in the blood and looked up at her. She thought, even as shock began to take her, about the woman’s black hair, how it seemed to steal some blue out of the night and hold it, like the shimmer woven through the feather of a crow. The woman with the gun bent down, used the enormous weapon to lower herself into a crouch. Clara wondered what wounds she was carrying, what gave the other killer such trouble as she settled herself beside the dying girl.
Eden looked at the trees, the bar, finally at the girl on the ground.
‘Just when you think you’re the deadliest fish in the water,’ Eden said to the girl.
Clara gasped. Her fingers fumbled at the wet stump where her foot had been. Eden sighed.
‘I admire the game,’ Eden said. ‘I really do. It’s clever. Two naïve little travellers just waiting to be picked on. You flounder around like you’re just drowning in your own idiocy, and you see which predators come to investigate the splashing. Who could resist you? You’re adorable. You lure them out into the deep, dark waters and then you surge up from below. Pull them down.’
Clara fell back against the asphalt, her mouth sucking at the cold night air, throat blocked by shock.
‘If I was well, this would have been more personal,’ Eden said, her leather-gloved hand gripping the rifle tight. ‘But I haven’t been at my best lately, so I’m afraid there’s no time for play.’
Clara tried to speak, but she couldn’t force words up through the whimpers. They came out of her like hiccups. The woman with the long dark hair rose up slowly, pushing the rifle into the ground, and when she’d risen fully she actioned the great thing with effort, once-strong hands betraying her as the bullet slid into the chamber.
‘I’m the only shark in this tank,’ Eden said.
The last gunshot could be heard inside the Black Mutt Inn. But no one listened to it.
THE VICTIMS OF Crime support group of Surry Hills meets every fortnight. The only reason I started going is because my old friend from North Sydney Homicide, Anthony Charters, goes there. If I didn’t have a friend there, I’d have never bowed to my girlfriend Imogen’s demands that I get counselling for the ‘stuff that has been going on with me’ the last few months. That vague collections of terms, the ‘stuff’ and its propensity to ‘go on with me’, frequently came between the beautiful psychologist and me in our first few weeks of dating, when she realised she’d never seen me completely sober. She said she couldn’t imagine me ‘relaxed’. Privately, I argued I was a lot more relaxed than Imogen herself. Imogen takes an hour and a half to get ready in the morning, and the first time I farted near her she just about called the police. That, ladies and gentlemen, is not ‘relaxed’.
But, you know. You don’t tell them these things. They don’t listen.
I’d started courting Dr Imogen Stone in the dangerous and electric place between my previous girlfriend being slaughtered by a serial killer and my partner detective almost getting herself disembowelled by a pair of outback monsters. Imogen liked me, but she was dealing with the psychological aftermath of both events. I was by all accounts an unpredictable, volatile and difficult-to-manage boyfriend. She couldn’t count on me to turn up on time, say appropriate things when I met her friends, drive her places without her having to worry that I was about to career the car into the nearest telegraph pole. She couldn’t be sure when I ducked out of the cinema that I wasn’t going to knock back six painkillers in the glorious solitude of the men’s room stall, or lose myself in thought and just wander off, turning up back at her apartment at midnight drunk and stinking. I was a bad beau, but I had potential, so she didn’t give up on me. Ironically, I understand that the ‘fixer-upper boyfriend’ that I seemed to be is just about the perfect model for the worst type of man you can be attracted to – according to the psychology textbooks I’d perused in her office, it was the cute, broken bad boys who became abusers.
Nevertheless, Imogen took me on, and Imogen started nagging me to get help. So I started trudging with all the huffing melancholy of a teenager at church to a basement room of the Surry Hills police station every Sunday to sit under the fluorescent lights and listen to tales of horror and fear. It made Imogen happy. It made Anthony happy. I considered it my community service.
Somewhere, sometime, somebody set up a support group in a particular way and now all support groups are set up like that, whether you’re trying to get over being sexually assaulted in a public toilet or you’re addicted to crack. You’ve got the grey plastic fold-out tables pushed against one wall, the veneer pulling away from the corners and the top stained by the rims of coffee cups set down meaningfully, mid-conversation, to indicate concern. You’ve got the two large steel urns full of boiling water for coffee and tea, the ones that will, if you go anywhere near them, even so much as to fill in your name on the sign-in sheet, mercilessly burn some part of you. There’s no avoiding the coffee-urn burn. To this you add a collection of uncomfortable plastic fold-out chairs forming a circle just tight enough to inspire that quiet kind of social terror made of things like accidental knee-touching, airborne germs and unavoidable eye contact. And voilà! You’ve got a support group.
There were fifteen chairs set out on the industrial grey carpet and Anthony was sitting in one when I arrived. I responded to his presence with a wave of paralysing nausea. Getting over a painkiller and alcohol addiction makes you respond to everything with nausea. You get nausea in the middle of sex. It lasts for months.
I’d worked with the bald-headed, cleft-chinned Detective Charters and his partner for about two weeks when my former partner committed suicide and the bigwigs were trying to find me someone else as a playmate. I’d have liked to have stayed with him. He was inspiring – not in the cheesy internet quote way, but in a real way, a way that gets you out of bed. He was somehow still enthusiastic about justice and the rule of law and collaring crims like it was a calling, even though his own seventeen-year-old son was in prison for five years for accidentally leaving a mate with brain damage from a one-punch hit at a New Year’s Eve party. I figured if Anthony could get out of bed after that, I could get out of bed after Martina being killed (me allowing her to be killed) and Eden almost dying (me standing there doing nothing while Eden almost died). If Anthony could keep on keeping on after everything that had happened to him, maybe I could get over all the women I’d failed in my life, eventually. Maybe I could get over not doing anything about my father’s long, slow emotional abuse of my mother. Not saving Martina. Not saving Eden. Not being there when my ex-wife had a stillborn child.
Anthony had been as powerless to save his own son. And yet here he was, smiling at me as I came to sit by his side. Maybe being powerless was okay.
When I’d asked him, Anthony put his unshakeable spirit down to the support groups. He attended one for drug addiction, one for victims of crime and one for anxiety. I thought I’d give it a whirl. It would shut Imogen up.
‘Francis,’ he said. I cradled my coffee and licked my scalded pinky.
‘Anthony.’
‘How’s the comedown?’
‘I think I’m past the shakes.’ I held out my hand for him to see, flat in the air before us. My thumb was twitching slightly. ‘I’d still murder you for a scotch, though, old mate.’
‘I reckon scotch might be on your trigger words list, mate.’
‘Probably. It’s a big list.’
Some recovery groups don’t let you say particular words, ‘trigger words’, because some members are getting over a level of addiction so great that even the sound of the name of their drug of choice can send them into a relapse spiral. Even if you’re not an addict, but you’re in a support group parallel to addiction groups such as Victims of Crime or After Domestic Violence or Incest Survivors, you have to acknowledge that some members of the group might also be enrolled in addiction groups, so for their benefit you don’t say the words.
The first rule of Drug Recovery Group is that you do not talk about drugs at recovery group.
It sounded like a whole lot of bullshit to me. I wasn’t sure all the tiptoeing around really helped anyone. I’d tested my trigger-happiness, said ‘Endone’ loudly and slowly alone in my car, like a little kid whispering a swearword at the back of class. I had not gone and started popping pills. But I was a rule-follower by nature, so I didn’t say ‘Endone’ in or anywhere near the meetings I attended. I didn’t say ‘scotch’, or ‘bourbon’, or ‘cocaine’, or ‘ecstasy’, or ‘Valium’, or ‘oxy’, all guilty pleasures of mine at some time over the previous months. I mentioned that I had a variety of ‘drugs of choice’ at my first meeting when I introduced myself, but I hadn’t shared since.
In fact, I hadn’t said anything. Imogen had told me to ‘go’ to the meetings. She hadn’t told me to ‘participate’.
People stopped milling around the treacherous urns when the facilitator, a hard-edged little blonde woman named Megan, came into the room with her large folder of notes and handouts. About twenty-five of her photocopied handouts were in the bottom of my car, boot-printed and crumpled, hidden in the undergrowth of a forest of takeaway containers and paper bags. Their titles peer at me from beneath old newspapers and cardboard boxes. Six ways to beat negative thoughts. How to tell your friends you’re in danger of self-harm. When ‘no’ means ‘no’. Sometime after the first meeting, I lost my eight-step grief diary. I hadn’t even put my name on it. Diaries are for little girls.
When Megan was in place the people around me joined in the opening mantra in a badly timed monotone reminiscent of the obligatory and dispassionate ‘good morning’ we used to give Mrs Towers in the third grade.
‘I am on my way to a place beyond vengeance, a place beyond anger, a place beyond fear. I am on my way to a place of healing, and I take a new step every day.’
I didn’t say the Victims of Crime mantra. It was way too cuddly for me. I didn’t know what Megan’s story was, but if she’d made up the mantra herself it sounded to me like she was making a big deal of being bag-snatched or something. There is no place beyond anger. Everybody’s angry to some degree. Nuns are angry at sinners. Kindergarten teachers are angry at the government. When you’ve come up against violence, real violence – you get punched by your husband for the first time, or someone pulls a knife on you in the regular, sunny traffic of a Thursday morning commute – you realise there is no place beyond anger. It’s in there. In everyone. No matter what you put on top of it, no matter how long you starve it or lock it up or deny it. Anger is primal. It’s in our DNA.
‘We’ve got a couple of new members with us tonight,’ Megan said as Justin, the group kiss-ass, brought her a paper cup of green tea. Justin had been gay-bashed to within an inch of his life on Mardi Gras night when he was twenty-one. Victims of Crime was his life. ‘This is Aamir and Reema.’
The Muslim couple with their backs to the door nodded. Reema was looking deep into her empty paper cup like she’d found a window out of the room. I was jealous. She adjusted the shoulders of her dress nervously, and her husband sat forward in his seat, a big man, his hands clasped between his knees.
‘Hi, Aamir,’ everyone said. ‘Hi, Reema.’
‘Now you don’t have to share,’ Megan assured them. ‘No one has to share in these groups. Sometimes it can be healing just to listen to the stories from those around us and to recognise that the trauma we have experienced in the wake of serious crime is not unique, and neither is the journey to wellness. Sometimes we like to start the meeting with some “triumphs of the week” or with some readings. But it’s a pretty fluid structure here.’
‘We don’t mind sharing,’ Aamir said. He shrugged. The anger tight in his shoulders and jaw. I could see it. Anthony, beside me, could see it. You get to know the look of a man on the edge of punching someone when you’re a young cop wandering among groups of homeless in the Cross, Blacktown, Parramatta. Bopping around the clubs on George Street while groups of men hoot and holler at women from cars. It becomes like a flag.
‘Well, good.’ Megan smiled. ‘That’s great. Like I said, there’s no pressure. Some of our members have never shared.’ She glanced at me. I felt nauseated. ‘This is a supportive environment where we have attendee-centric mechanisms –’
‘I’ll share.’ Aamir stood up suddenly. He was even bigger standing. No one bothered telling the huge man that standing wasn’t part of the group dynamic, that in fact it intimidated some of the rape survivors. He rubbed his hands up and down the front of his polo shirt, leaving light sweat stains. ‘I’ll start by asking if anyone here in the group knows me? If you know my wife?’
I was confused. It was great. I hadn’t felt anything but nausea and boredom in all the sessions I’d attended, so this was a novel start to the night. The group members looked at each other. Looked at Aamir. Aamir shrugged again.
‘No? No? You don’t know me? You’ve never seen me before?’ Aamir’s stark black eyebrows were high on his sweating brow. He did a little half-turn, as though members might recognise his back, the little tendrils of black hair curling on the nape of his thick neck. His wife wiped her face with her hand. No one spoke. Anthony examined the man’s face.
‘I don’t think they underst–’ Megan chanced.
‘My son Ehan was abducted one hundred and forty-one days ago,’ Aamir said. He went to his chair and sat down. ‘One hundred and forty-one days ago two men in a blue car took my eight-year-old son from a bus stop on Prairie Vale Road, Wetherill Park. He has not been seen since.’
He paused. We all waited.
‘You don’t know me, or my wife, because there has been little or no coverage of this abduction in the media. We’ve had one nationally televised press conference and one newspaper feature article. That’s it.’
Aamir was a lion wrapped in a man. The woman across the circle from him, who’d been in a bank hold-up and now suffered panic attacks, was cowering in her seat, pulling at her ponytail. Megan opened her mouth to offer something, some condolence, some segue back into the normality of group sharing, but Aamir raged on, a spewing of well-practised words with which he had assaulted anyone who would listen since his son disappeared.
‘If Ehan was a little blond-haired white boy named Ian and we lived in Potts Point, we’d still be all over the national news.’
‘Oh, um.’ Megan looked at me for help.
‘We’d have a two hundred thousand dollar reward and Dick Smith flying a fucking banner from a fucking blimp somewhere. But we’ve had nothing. Two days the phone rang off the hook, and then silence. I forget sometimes that he’s gone. Every night at eight o’clock, no matter where I am, no matter what I’m doing, I think, It’s Ehan’s bedtime. I have to go say goodnight.’
Megan widened her eyes at me.
‘What are you looking at me for?’ I said. The sickness swirled in me.
‘Oh, I wasn’t.’ Megan snapped her head back to Aamir. ‘I wasn’t. Sorry, Frank, I was just thinking and you were in my line of sight and –’
‘Are you a journalist?’ Aamir turned on me. I didn’t know how I’d been brought into the exchange until Megan buried her face in her notebook. The same thing she’d done when I signed on to the group.
‘No,’ I said. I looked at Aamir. ‘No, I’m not a journalist. My girlfriend was murdered. I’m the only other person in the group who’s here for murder-victim support. That’s why she’s staring at me. She wants me to say something hopeful to you.’
‘Our son wasn’t murdered,’ Reema said.
‘Well, Megan sure seems to think he was.’
‘I never said that!’ Megan gasped.
‘Your girlfriend was murdered.’ Aamir sunk back down to his seat. He was so far on the edge of it I didn’t know how he was upright. He hovered, legs bent, inches from me. His huge black eyes were locked on mine. He knew his son was dead. And he was angry. White-hot-flame angry at everyone he laid eyes on.
‘She was murdered. Yes,’ I said.
‘What was her name?’
‘Martina.’
‘And what happened after she was murdered?’ Aamir asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What happened?’ he insisted. ‘What happened then?’
‘Nothing,’ I shrugged. Everyone was looking at me. I licked my lips. Shrugged again. ‘Nothing. She was murdered. She’s gone. There’s nothing … afterwards, if that’s what you mean.’
Aamir watched me. We could have been the only people in the room.
‘Nothing happens afterwards,’ I said. ‘There’s no … resolution. You go to work. You come home. You come to these groups and you –’ I gestured to the coffee machine. ‘You drink coffee. You say the mantra. There’s no afterwards.’
Everyone looked at Megan to deny or confirm my assessment. She opened her folder, shuffled the papers, collected her thoughts. One of the urns started reboiling itself in the taut seconds of silence and I heard the spitting of its droplets on the plastic table top.
‘Let’s look at some handouts,’ Megan said.
Anthony was waiting for me by the vending machine after the meeting. We walked up the stairs and onto the street.
‘That was a bit harsh,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The whole “there’s no afterwards” thing.’
‘Reality is often harsh,’ I said. We paused to watch Aamir and Reema walking to their car. The big angry man glanced back at me as he opened the passenger door for his wife. His expression was unreadable. It was the first time that his expression had been unreadable since I had laid eyes on him an hour earlier. The rage was gone, replaced by something else. His shoulders were inches lower. I didn’t know what had taken over from the boiling hot fury that I saw in the meeting room, but whatever it was, it was cold.
‘Do you really believe that?’ Anthony asked me. ‘That it means nothing?’
‘Murder?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do. You don’t get over it. You don’t realise the mystical fucking meaning in it. You don’t accept that it, like everything, happens for a reason. Come on, Tone,’ I scoffed at him. He exhaled smoke from his cigarette.
‘Every night at eight o’clock that guy tries to say goodnight to his dead kid.’ I nodded at Aamir’s car as it pulled into the street. ‘And he’ll be doing it until the day he dies.’
SHE ALWAYS FELT better when night was falling. The darkness folded over her like a blanket, protective. Light had never been a friend to Tara. It seemed to fall on all of her at once, seemed to wriggle into her creases and folds and dance around her curves, to expose her every surface. Tara always had plenty of surface. She’d never been able to keep track of all there was of her, and Joanie was there to point out the parts she forgot, those bulges and bubbles and handles of flesh that slipped and slid from under hems and over belts.
Pull your shirt down, Tara. Pull your pants up, Tara. Pull your sleeves down, Tara. Jesus. Everyone can see you.
Everyone can see you.
At the dinner table Joanie would grab and pinch and twist a slab of flesh Tara didn’t know was exposed, a roll above her jeans or the tender white flesh on the backs of her arms. You couldn’t cover Tara with a tent, Joanie said. She could feed an African village. Getting downstairs to dinner became a journey she couldn’t take, so she began to take her meals up in her attic bedroom, staring at the park, the runners going round and round between the trees. Sometimes getting from the bed to the computer was too much. Tara simply lay between the sheets and dreamed about African people cutting her up and sharing her, carving down her thighs in neat slices like a Christmas ham until there was only bone – gorgeous, strong, light bone. Bone that shone, redemptive and clean. Tara lost herself dreaming.
The girls at school giggled at her bulges, the blue bruises that peppered them. Though decades had passed, their voices still bumped and butted around the attic room, red balloons of hate floating.
Why do you call your mum ‘Joanie’, Tara?
Doesn’t she love you?
Tonight Tara stood by the windows looking over the park and watched the night falling, the bats rising, and remembered her mother. It was nine months since Tara had woken from her coma, nine months since Joanie had gone, but Tara could still hear her voice sometimes, hear her footsteps in the hall as she readied herself for some party or dinner or charity function, as she pulled on her silk-lined coat and checked herself in the hall mirror. Joanie with her elegant ash-blonde hair falling every-where in filigree curls.
In time, all the light of the warm day dissipated, replaced by a wonderful darkness. Tara stood by the window and watched the runners on the paths in Centennial Park recede into shadows, only blinking lights indicating their jolting journeys as they continued, round and round, round and round. Then rolled away.
The Tara who watched them now was very different from the one who had watched them when her parents were still alive. Tara hugged herself in the little window, let her fingers wander over the new landscape of her body. Bumps and ridges and flaps of flesh as hard as stone, lines of scars running up her arms where the fatty flesh had been sucked dry, cut, pulled taut, stapled. Bones poked through the mess at her hips and ribs and collarbones. Her face was a mystery. She hadn’t looked at herself since that first glimpse as she was waking from the coma. She spent the first month in the hospital in silence, lying, feeling herself. Neurologists came and played with her, confirmed that she could, indeed, understand them. Then a nurse had emerged from the fog and quietly told her what she’d done to herself. Tara had looked at her new self in the mirror. Touched the glass, made sounds. To her it had been laughter, but to the nurse it had sounded like snarls.
I STOOD IN the kitchen of my house in Paddington and looked at the burned walls, the fingers of blackness reaching up the bricks to the charred roof beams. The tiles had fallen and disappeared, revealing blue sky and orange leaves. I smiled. The oven had been cleared away, the cupboards stripped off, the sink unscrewed and discarded, leaving black eyeholes in the wall. The flames had warped the floorboards leading down to the bathroom and tiny courtyard. I folded my arms and looked at it all, smelled the plasticky taint of melted things.
I’m well aware that traditionally first houses are purchased by people much younger than me, and in much better condition than this one. The terrace in William Street was a write-off, advertised to attract developers who might be tempted to buy the row, knock it over, put in a flashy deli and be done with it. The kitchen was a bombshell, the backyard a wreck and the upper floor wasn’t safe for human habitation. The elderly owner had let the place go for decades, and the floorboards had taken it the worst. By order of the City of Sydney Council, I wasn’t even supposed to be sleeping in the building, and I was supposed to be working on it wearing protective gear. But I ignored that. My home base was the front bedroom, where I’d dragged a mattress and a few laundry baskets of clothes, my phone and some snack food. The bathroom worked. I still had the apartment in Kensington and there was always Imogen’s place. But for a couple of nights a week I had been sleeping in my new house, just so I could drift off listening to the creaking and cracking of the building, the unfamiliar noises of the neighbours coming home from work, their kids playing in the street. City ambulances racing for St Vincent’s and drunks singing as they wandered home. Rats scuttling somewhere close. It was dingy, but I owned it. I’d committed to something. That was big for me.
Committing to things. Listening to my girlfriend. Getting off the drugs and the booze. Yes, I was going somewhere, even if it wasn’t some mystical place beyond anger that couldn’t possibly exist. Because I wholeheartedly believed what I’d said to Aamir. There is no ‘after murder’. There is no reasoning, bargaining or manipulating with murder – when someone close to you has been slain, something enters your life that will always be there, a little black blur at the corner of your vision that you learn to ignore as naturally as you do your own nose. But, stained as you are, you have to go on and learn to see again. Build things. Change things. Own things. Martina wasn’t coming back. It was time to return to life.
As I was standing in the morning sunshine from the informal skylight, I heard the front door open and close, and Eden’s uneven gait on the unpolished boards. She was walking with a single aluminium crutch with an arm cuff and a handle. She’d worked her way down from two of them. I’d seen her at the station gym a couple of days earlier trotting awkwardly on the treadmill, somewhere between a jog and a walk, now and then reaching for the console to steady herself. The problem was her core strength, I thought, but I wasn’t sure. A pair of serial killers had slit her open from sternum to navel on their way to cutting her right in half. She’d lost most of the hearing in her left ear from having a gun fired in her face, and her nose wasn’t straight anymore. But despite all her new little imperfections, to look at her now it was hard to imagine how close she’d come to dying in my arms. When I found her on that farm she had been a red mess.
‘Oh look, it’s the invalid,’ I said. Eden had to be the world’s most beautiful cripple, but I knew that underneath her whippet-lean frame and deep gothic eyes hid a creature who was far from anything like beauty. I had no doubt, standing in her presence, that though Eden couldn’t run yet, that she was easily wearied and had lost some of the sharpness of her brutally dry wit, there was a very dark power residing in her still, and she was as much a threat to me as she was to the killers, rapists and evildoers she spent her nights hunting. She came up beside me and took in the black walls, raised her head slowly and looked at a pigeon as it landed on the edge of the roof hole.
‘Why didn’t you just tell Hades to keep the money?’ she asked, sighing. ‘He’d have been smarter with it.’
Eden’s father, Hades Archer, ex-criminal overlord and the world’s cleverest body disposal expert, had given me a hundred thousand dollars to find out what had happened to the love of his life. Sunday White had gone missing before I was born, and Hades had hired me as much to get one of her relatives off his back as to find out himself what had become of the lost young woman. I put the cash together with my inheritance and bought the terrace on William Street. Eden shifted papers around on the floor with one of her fine leather boots, shook her head.
‘I can’t believe you, of all people, fail to see the potential in this place. Things of beauty are made of forgotten places like this, Eden.’ I started mapping the kitchen with my hands. ‘Stove there, stainless steel benches here, big kitchen island with one of those cutting board tops. You know the ones? Drawers underneath. Rip all this out and put a big window in. Fucking brilliant.’
‘Stainless steel is so 1990.’
‘Marble then. Wine rack over here.’
‘You’re a recovering alcoholic.’
‘My cooking wine, Eden. My cooking wine.’
‘Who do you think’s going to do all this?’ She squinted at me.
‘Me.’
‘You can’t change a light bulb without adult supervision and a stackhat.’
‘You, then. Come help me. You’re handy.’
‘No.’
‘You’re just jealous.’ I shook my head. ‘There’s no need to be cranky, Eden. You can come and visit my brilliant new house whenever you want. Take photos of yourself in it to show your friends.’
The pigeon sitting on one of the roof beams ruffled its feathers and crapped on my floor. We both looked up at it.
‘We’ll have dinner parties,’ I said.
‘Look at you. Less than a year ago your plates were getting dusty from disuse and the local Indian takeaway guy had invited you to his wedding. Now you’re planning soirées.’
‘I like the word “soirée”. I like soirée and nostalgia.’
‘It’s a commitment, I guess, even if it is a shithole,’ she sighed. ‘That’s a big deal. Congratulations.’
‘I’ve been a big deal for a while now, Eden. You just haven’t noticed.’
‘You could go on a commitment streak. Marry that mind-quack and have freckly children with abandonment issues.’
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.’
As though she’d heard herself being spoken about, my girlfriend Imogen opened the front door and clopped into the hall in her second-favourite lavender velvet heels, her upturned nose already wrinkled at the smell. She had an Ikea bag in each hand. What a sweetheart.
‘Sorry, Frank, I didn’t realise you had company,’ she beamed. ‘How are you, Eden?’
‘Dr Stone,’ Eden said. The tone had no warmth in it, I noted, and then reminded myself that, like an old gas heater, Eden took hours just to get to room temperature. Still, something passed between them. Eden’s eyes fell to my missing kitchen cupboards and Imogen’s stayed on her, searching, almost, for something. I coughed, because I’m like most men – completely ignorant of women and their looks and tones and inferences and what they really mean. The two could have been about to launch into a mid-air kung fu battle or hurl each other to the ground in a passionate embrace. I didn’t know. I hoped the cough would delay whatever was going on until it made itself obvious or went away. Imogen excused herself to wash her hands. There was something sticky on the front doorknob. I didn’t know what.
Eden stood playing with a live wire hanging from the ceiling, twisting the plastic casing around her finger.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I jutted my chin at her. ‘Someone asks how you are, you don’t say their name and qualification.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. Should I have responded with a list of neurotic compulsions I may or may not exhibit?’
‘You’ve been colder since Rye Farm, Eden. I’ve noticed it. You’re weirder, if that’s possible.’
‘It’s always possible.’
‘I don’t want you to get any weirder than you already are.’