by Candice Fox
‘What are you two doing here?’ I asked Fischer. Her partner’s name badge said Smith. He wouldn’t meet my gaze.
‘We got a call from dispatch,’ Fischer said, watching Amanda. ‘Suspected suicide. People just drop like flies around you, don’t they, Amanda? You leave a trail of corpses everywhere you go.’
‘You didn’t respond to a call from dispatch,’ I said. ‘You were three minutes away. We’re two hours south of Cairns. You must have been following us.’
Joanna Fischer shrugged, squinted at me as though seeing me for the first time. Her eyes had a frightening kind of blankness to them. Amanda’s lack of emotion about the bike was also worrying me. It was as though only I had absorbed the gravity of the situation, Joanna’s previous attack on my partner and her presence here, the machine broken without explanation, Smith’s obvious guilt as he stood there like a dog with its tail between its legs.
‘She pushed the bike over, didn’t she?’ I said to Smith. He played with the radio on his hip.
‘The bike was on its side when we got here.’ Fischer smiled.
‘I wasn’t talking to you, Constable Fischer. I was talking to your offsider.’ My chest was prickling with rage.
‘He’s not going to tell you.’ Amanda gestured lazily at Smith. ‘His name’s not even Smith.’
Smith twitched. I tried to follow what that meant but the anger about Amanda’s bike wouldn’t leave me.
‘I want to see the squad car’s dash cam footage for the past five minutes. I believe a crime has occurred here. Vandalism of private property.’
Fischer laughed, a sharp, bird-like sound. ‘You want what? Who the fuck do you think you are, Conkaffey? You’re a citizen now. You can’t go around giving orders to the police.’
There was a pain behind my eyes, like a growing migraine, Kelly’s words echoing out of Fischer’s mouth. You’re not a cop anymore. Amanda put a hand on my arm, the fingers lighter than they should have been, cold and calm.
‘Get off the property, fuckheads.’ Fischer jutted her chin towards the roadside. ‘This is an official police crime scene. You’re to wait at the roadside there until I call on you for a statement. Go on, git.’
I stormed over to the roadside as the two officers went inside. Amanda wheeled her bike slowly, picking pieces of broken glass off the top of the fuel tank.
‘You’re not angry enough about this,’ I snarled at her. ‘That bitch knocked your fucking bike over.’
‘It’s just a bike.’
‘It’s not just a fucking bike!’ I knew I was getting in her face, that she didn’t deserve my tone or my furious breath fluttering the hair at her brow, but I couldn’t help myself. ‘It’s your bike. You’re my partner. It’s our bike.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘I know!’ I growled. The pain behind my eyes was suddenly blinding. ‘I know it doesn’t!’
Amanda watched me.
‘Who is she?’ I demanded. ‘I mean, what is her fucking problem? Chief Clark needs to get her off you. You can’t have someone stalking you because of Pip’s death. You didn’t kill Sweeney, Amanda, and you didn’t endanger her.’
Amanda scratched her nose.
‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this woman,’ I said. ‘She attacked you in front of the hotel, then she follows us here. You tell me if you run into her again.’
‘Ted, it’s just The Life,’ Amanda said, looking off towards the highway south of us, where the sound of sirens was rising. I’d heard Amanda talk about The Life before; the inescapable adjustment to existence that comes with having been shamed in the public eye, with having been incarcerated, separated from the everyman and then thrust back alongside him, a fox among the hounds. Resigning oneself to The Life meant accepting that things would never be as they were before the downfall. It meant accepting, even anticipating, hatred from other human beings, perhaps forever. Amanda believed she would never escape her crime. She had killed, and because of what she had done, because of the reputation she had in Crimson Lake, everyone would blame her for Pip’s death and for the peril that befell anyone who dared to be near her. She was a walking curse.
I hated to hear Amanda talk about The Life; always tried to change the subject or leave the conversation when she did. I didn’t believe it was what either of us deserved.
It seemed to take forever to get home. Amanda and I sat like naughty children on the bonnet of my car while police and paramedics dealt with the crime scene. We were questioned by a pair of detectives from Zeerich, who were aware enough of our reputation to treat us with grumpy disdain. They berated Amanda about the towel she had placed in the kitchen, me about walking back into the crime scene after Amanda had told me what had happened. We submitted to photographs of our hands for defensive wounds, and I paced the roadside with my fingers crossed on both hands, silently praying that they wouldn’t decide to bring us in for an official, recorded statement. The sun was low in the trees, and I was aware of the seconds ticking by that Val had to remain at my house with no idea when she would be relieved, and precious moments I could have spent with my child dripping slowly away.
I drove home like a madman, but still didn’t catch up to Amanda at any point. I looked for her at the roadside stops and petrol stations, but after zipping ahead of me on the turnoff to the highway she simply disappeared. I tried to play some Neil Diamond to calm my nerves, but almost as soon as I put the music on my phone rang, Sara Farrow’s name appearing on the screen.
‘I’m hearing some crazy stuff around here,’ she said. People were talking in the background, what sounded like a busy room. ‘We just did a press conference and I heard a couple of officers say there was a shooting down south?’
‘A suicide,’ I said, wincing. ‘Amanda and I were questioning a suspect in Richie’s disappearance, but there’s nothing solid to suggest at this point that he’s connected to our case.’
‘What do you mean, nothing “solid”?’ she asked. Sara Farrow was sharp, I thought. I’d had bosses across my time as a cop who would pick out singular words like that, hold them to your throat until you explained yourself. I told Sara about the boys’ clothes in the television set.
‘Can I get a look at the clothes?’ she asked. ‘This is … I mean, why so many sets of clothes? Richie’s not missing anything from his bag except the clothes he was wearing.’
‘I’ll get you pictures of the clothes. Can you do me a favour?’ I said. ‘If I send you a picture of Todd DeCasper, would you go back through all your photographs from the trip and see if you spot him anywhere?’
‘No problem,’ she said. Again, I was struck by the sharpness of her tone, the no-bullshit, work-to-be-done attitude of it. Maybe I had been wrong about Sara when I first met her. Maybe she wasn’t cold, but a woman running hot, an engine constantly turning over on her mission to find her son. She had become the investigator, setting emotion aside, doing what she could to contribute and not worrying about what it looked like to those around her.
‘I’m so glad you’re here to give me updates on what the police are doing, Ted,’ she said. ‘People are very careful, the way they talk to me. It’s like they think they’ll say something and bring me crashing down. I need a man on the ground.’
‘You’ve got it,’ I said.
‘It’s going to storm again tonight,’ she said. I glanced in my rear-view mirror at her words, and saw, almost on cue, a finger of lightning touching down on the black landscape. There was more ahead of me, flickers of sheet lightning above the mountains. I thought of a boy lost in the rain, of a body lying in the wet and decay of the marshlands, raindrops sliding down lifeless feet. I thought Sara was about to sign off with me, but instead she took a long breath that made the phone crackle.
‘Look. There’s something I need to tell you,’ she said. ‘I hit Richie.’
‘What?’ I glanced at the phone, as though I could see Sara through it as the machine relayed the call. ‘When?’
I scrambled for my phon
e in the passenger seat, trying to keep my eyes on the road, hitting the record app while Sara gathered herself for her confession.
‘When he was very small,’ she said. ‘We were having those monthly visits from child services, the ones they put in place after our first child died. Henry and I were fighting. We weren’t getting any sleep. We had to keep the house immaculate because they showed up unannounced. Every time I turned around, Richie was bumping into things, leaving bruises on himself, or totally trashing things. He got into the kitchen and spread flour everywhere while I took a phone call one day. I had my back turned for two minutes. Imagine if they’d turned up then?’
‘Was there ever a report made?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘But I imagine Henry will tell you about it.’
‘We’ve spoken to Henry. He didn’t say anything.’
She nodded. ‘When the news first came out, I asked him not to tell them about the time I smacked Richie, or about Anya.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘Because I was trying to protect myself, okay?’ she said, her words strained with exhaustion. ‘This is why I need you. I need you to help me pick the right moment to bring this to the police. Yes, okay, I’m a bad person. In the hours after my kid went missing, I’ve thought about protecting myself a few times. But I bet you wish you had, after you were accused. Right?’
We were quiet for a while. I tapped the steering wheel.
‘How hard did you hit him?’
‘Does it really matter?’ She gave a sad laugh, and a sniff, like she was crying. ‘Not hard. There was a little red welt under his eye. I just snapped. You’re a parent. You must get it.’
I thought about Lillian standing at the roadside, watching her mother and Jett drive away into the distance, that growly, squealy, breathless racket she had made. I hadn’t felt rage at the sound of Lillian’s crying in that moment, but I’d felt a deep, primal urgency to stop the noise at all costs, a tightness in my arms and chest like the muscles wanted to work of their own accord.
I told Sara Farrow I couldn’t talk, that I’d hit traffic and needed to concentrate, but in truth as I hung up the road ahead of me was empty. I floored it towards home.
As I walked up the driveway, a shopping bag in each hand, two small silhouettes appeared in the gold-lit hall behind the screen door. I hadn’t realised how heavy and stiff my face was until I felt the smile spread widely across it.
‘It’s Daddy!’ Lillian bashed the screen door with both hands, Celine spinning in circles beside her, barking. ‘Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!’
I had to nudge the two of them away from the door to get inside. I dropped the bags and grabbed my child, crushing her against my chest. She smelled of dirt and lollies.
‘That’s it!’ I roared. ‘You’re mine now. I’ve got you. I’m going to make you stay here with me and greet me at the door with kisses and hugs every day for the rest of my life.’
‘Oh no!’ she squealed as I covered her neck and face with kisses. ‘Oh no! Oh no, Daddy, no!’
I put her down and she ran away, a child’s furious, desperate love and sudden, shocking abandonment in favour of other entertainments. Val was in the kitchen picking up toys discarded on the floor, gathering them into a pile in her arms.
Lillian announced my entrance. ‘Nanna, Daddy’s here!’
‘Nanna?’ I snorted.
‘Old, female.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess that equals “Nanna”. You find that boy today?’
‘No.’ I put the bags on the counter, took the toys from her and hurled them indiscriminately into Lillian’s room. ‘Amanda and I threw in together and got you a little gift for the morgue table.’
In oblique terms I told her about DeCasper’s demise while I crouched and patted Celine, Lillian running up and down the hall, doing excited laps of the house. Through the screen door to the backyard I could see the geese crossing the lawn in a loose formation, pecking and tugging at the grass, their bodies making long shadows on the grass in the light of the porch. I plugged my phone into a speaker on the window and put on some tunes. There was a message from Kelly on the screen.
I’m sorry. I lied. I did forget to tell you about the strawberries, and I tried to blame it on you. I’m a bad mother.
You’re not a bad mother, I texted. We’ll work this all out. It’s just going to take time.
Val was putting away dishes that sat on the countertop. Lillian kept coming to me, desperate for me to see and approve of a seemingly endless collection of rocks, sticks, feathers and other things she had collected from the garden that day. I was tired, worried about Richie Farrow, and couldn’t offer much enthusiasm for her treasures. Bad father, I thought. I’d only had my child in my life mere hours, and I could barely scrape together intrigued sounds and expressions for the pitiful scraps of garden material Lillian had been forced to entertain herself with throughout the day. Val was on call, and preferred to stick around the house with the child in case she was needed suddenly at the morgue. Lillian couldn’t have been having a good first visit with her father. I wasn’t there physically, and when I was I wasn’t there mentally.
I thought about Sara Farrow and the young Richie trashing her kitchen after a long, awful day. Had she been tired, mentally checked-out, tense with guilt like I was, when she struck the child? Even as I thought about her, Lillian started begging Val for a chocolate from the fridge and I winced at the sharp whine in her voice.
Like a million parents before me, I dragged Lillian towards me, feeling somehow that she might have sensed my dark thoughts.
‘You’re a good kid,’ I told her, kissing her soft brow.
‘No, no, no,’ she laughed, pushing me away.
The Clattering Clam had been officially closed since Richie Farrow went missing, but unofficially it was open to approved investigative staff. Amanda hadn’t yet walked through the restaurant, but she found it amusingly gaudy. The cartoon clam of the restaurant’s namesake was everywhere: happily directing patrons to wait to be seated by a chipped, battered waiter’s station in the entryway, announcing the specials on a board above the bar, its buggy eyes brimming with glee. Throughout the sprawling room filled with empty tables and stacked chairs, the ceiling and pillars had been adorned with nautical artefacts – blue and green glass buoys strung with twisting white rope, and fishing nets hung with colourful plastic fish. Amanda took a seat at the polished mahogany bar and fingered a napkin holder shaped like a walrus while she waited for someone to notice her.
The potential someones in the restaurant to notice her were only two. Chief Clark sat on a stool three down from hers, a glass of some neat yellow liquid at his fingertips, papers spread across the bar two metres either side of him. There was a young female bartender texting near the windows. Amanda got her attention and ordered a Scotch, watching a wriggling vein pulse in Clark’s temple.
He turned to Amanda, and his face darkened. She watched as he stood and started gathering his papers.
‘You know who walks off in a melodramatic huff every time they run into someone they don’t like?’ she asked.
Clark was stuffing papers into folders. ‘Who?’ he grunted.
‘Teenage girls.’ Amanda sipped her drink. ‘Are you a teenage girl, Clarky?’
Chief Clark looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar, sighed again, and slipped back onto his stool. He emptied his drink and pointed to it to request another. Amanda dared to move one stool closer, strumming her fingers on her glass casually, like someone approaching a prospective love interest, not wanting to signal her intentions too obviously.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Amanda said.
‘Here we go.’ Clark rolled his eyes.
‘I have a theory that you really do like me,’ she said. ‘Secretly.’
Clark smoothed back his blond flat-top, almost stroking himself with consolation.
‘I mean, what’s not to like?’ Amanda continued. ‘I’m a crack investigator responsible for pu
tting two of your jurisdiction’s major cases back in black, both of which had international interest. I work privately, so my invaluable assistance on those cases didn’t even have to come out of your very tight budget, and best of all, I complement my services with a cheerful attitude and world-class comic relief.’
‘I don’t like you,’ Clark said. ‘I don’t like your “crack” investigation style, either. One of my officers was killed on your last case. You’re reckless, annoying and obtuse.’
‘Obtuse?’ Amanda laughed. ‘A footloose obtuse goose, ready to produce … ready to deduce!’
‘That’s putting it very kindly.’
‘You want to like me, Clark,’ Amanda persisted. ‘But you need a reason for Pip’s death. Someone to blame. Pip Sweeney was your protégé. You took a risk giving her a promotion she maybe wasn’t ready for, and you felt proud when she started proving herself. Maybe you felt a sense of fatherly pride. But then, suddenly, she’s gone. She walks into the middle of a fray without backup. Why? No reason. She knew to call for backup. She knew what she was doing was dangerous. Still, she’s gone. You can’t blame her. You can’t blame the victim.’
Amanda waited for a response from Clark. There was none.
‘I think you’d like to believe that I’m death herself,’ Amanda said. ‘Someone told me today that I leave a trail of corpses everywhere I go. It’s not a bad idea. If I’m death, or a trouble magnet, or whatever you want to call me, then you just stay away from me and it won’t happen again. The people you love will be safe. Hate me from afar. It’s easy. Everyone else does it.’
Amanda leaned over, looking at the side of the man’s head.
‘I’m not death, Clarky,’ she said. ‘I’m just a super-intelligent ex-con who likes to solve mysteries.’
‘Are you finished?’ Clark asked, looking at her out of the corner of his eye. The vein in his head had sunk back into place and stopped throbbing. ‘Because I’m trying to take the edge off here, and listening to you is like having razor blades pushed into my ear canals.’