by Candice Fox
Joanna’s advance towards Superfish was halted when he slid the gun on his belt from its holster, lifted his arm and shot her in the face.
Amanda and Superfish lay in the dark for what seemed an eternity, Superfish on his elbows, feet sprawled, the gun still in his hand. Amanda had turned to pounce on Joanna from behind, but the sound of the shot had stopped her. She sat, flopped on her side, looked at the body of her nemesis curled on the earth. It seemed to Amanda that if she lay there long enough, Joanna’s chest would start to rise and fall again with breath. She looked at Superfish, and he looked back at her, the two of them marking the seconds since Joanna had died silently in the night. In the distance, boats puttered towards them, voices calling and no one answering. Somewhere a chopper thumped through the heavy air.
When Superfish spoke, Amanda realised she had almost been dozing, lying bleeding and exhausted, curious crabs beginning to emerge and wander at the edge of her torch beam.
‘I told her to stop,’ Superfish said. ‘I’ve been telling her for months.’
It was clear to Amanda that this was Superfish’s first kill. She was too tired to assure him that he’d get used to it, all of it: the stares, the whispers, the strange sudden memories of his victim through the coming years. Amanda was wet, wounded, covered in mud and mosquito bites, and she was pretty sure she’d broken a finger somehow in the fight. She could comfort Superfish later, or, ideally, not at all.
Amanda held her hand up to the moonlight, appreciating the interesting new angle her right pinkie finger now took from the second knuckle. It was then that she noticed the strange shape in the tree near them.
She stood and walked over to the tree and looked up at the shape in the dark, stood as still as she could to measure if it moved.
In time, she put her hands on her hips.
‘Well, fuck me,’ she said.
Richie Farrow had spent the day in the sunshine. It was a beautiful, blue, sunshiny day from the moment he opened his eyes in the hotel room, rolled out of bed and saw the aquamarine sea beyond the white strip of sand across the road. A day full of brilliant colours – vibrant orange egg yolks at the hotel buffet breakfast and a thousand shades of green in the rainforest as they drove out to the crocodile farm. Richie couldn’t believe it was actually happening. Ever since he’d spied a brochure with a grinning croc on a stand in the hotel lobby he’d been whining and complaining and poking and prodding at his mother about visiting the farm. She’d promised she would take him there. Richie had wanted to go that very second, but it hadn’t been ‘practical’, and it wasn’t in the next day’s plans, either. Richie remembered once on a group trip to Dubbo in the Outback, his mother promising that he could sleep on the top bunk in the kids’ room on the third night – the bigger kids got the top bunk first. But they’d only stayed two nights. Richie had learned of her betrayal in the car on the drive home. So it was possible that when his mum said – promised – they were going to the croc farm that in fact another Top Bunk Lie was at play. Richie had been sceptical until he saw the gates of the park.
He tried to rein in his excitement, but he did all the things he wasn’t supposed to do. He whooped and squealed and kicked the seat in front of him in the car, banged on the windows, went ‘hyper’. His mother usually screamed at him when he went hyper. He’d tried to learn to control it, let it out only when it was safe, when he was at his dad’s. But his mum didn’t seem to mind it today. She smiled as he ran up to the gates of the park, high-fived him. So weird. She was in such a good mood. He didn’t have time to wonder why she was being so cool. He was too excited.
It was great. So great. Richie could see himself being a crocodile wrangler. He liked the khaki uniforms and the utility belts the men wore, liked their suntanned faces and hairy arms. Richie imagined he’d be an awesome crocodile trainer – he was awesome at most things. He’d wear a big knife on his belt, get it out and chop the crocs if any of them tried to attack him. He’d be able to train the best crocs to accept pats along the nose, perhaps be bridled like a horse and ridden around. Richie’s crocodile training skills would be world-renowned. He’d watched the crocodile feeding display, trying to ignore his mother’s odd questions.
Since his parents had decided to live in separate houses, the weird questions happened quite a bit, from both of them. Mostly they were about the other parent – his mum wanted to know if he loved his dad more than he loved her, and his dad wanted to know if his mum seemed happy. Today the questions were coming hard and fast and they weren’t about his dad at all. Did Richie think he’d had a good life so far? Had he always had fun, felt loved, felt safe? Did Richie really love his mother – love her no matter if she did bad things sometimes, or if she would do bad things in the future? Richie couldn’t figure out what had got his mother into this strange, thoughtful mood and tried to show her the crocodiles and how amazing they were and get her to stop with the crazy wonderings before they had to leave and she would have missed all the great animals. His mum was a bit silly sometimes.
It was after the park that things got strange.
Richie had asked if they were going for ice cream – she’d promised that they would – but his mum wouldn’t answer and wouldn’t take her eyes off the road to look at him. They drove and drove, with him asking questions and his mum not answering, and eventually Richie just assumed she was tired or still suffering whatever weirdness had come over her at the park and would shake it off soon. Richie’s mum got into strange moods sometimes, and they could last for days, but they always went away in time. He went to sleep. When he’d awakened they’d been bumbling along a dirt track into the forest, and it sure didn’t seem like they were heading for an ice cream shop but Richie liked the look of the place anyway. He saw water, and eventually they parked on a strip of firm sand.
‘Are there crocs around here?’ Richie had asked as he wandered in the mangroves, his sneakers squelching in the mud. He saw fish jumping in the water through the trees. ‘We’d better be careful.’
Something happened. Richie wasn’t sure what. Later he thought it must have been an explosion, a bomb maybe, hidden in the mangroves nearby. There was a big red flash and a pain in the back of his head that was so bad it made his knees go weak. He hit the sand, and then there was another red flash, and then darkness.
When he opened his eyes, it was dark, and he was alone, lying on the sand with his hand tangled in something around his throat. It was wet and heavy, and in time he pulled it away and realised it was a plastic shopping bag tied at the back of his neck. He pulled the bag off and rolled over but didn’t seem to be able to stand. He knew only that he was alone, that the water was higher now and lapping at his sides. There were mosquitos. The darkness came into his brain again.
He was aware of some things, but not others. Richie knew that the sun went over the top of him once, and that the water came and lifted him, and that when it set him down again he’d walked some way, calling out for his mother and receiving no answer. The night came, and he was tired, and his legs wouldn’t work properly. A half-full bottle of red Powerade floated by and he drank some of it. Richie couldn’t remember if his mother had said there were crocs in the area or not, but he decided that if his legs did start working again he would climb a tree. The sun went over, blazing on him, and when he woke again it was hammering with rain. He pulled himself to the base of a tree, then pushed and pulled with all his strength until he got up on a branch. His arms hung down, trailing in the water. The sun, when it came again, blistered on his back so badly it was like he was being poked with sticks of fire.
The boy spent the next day pulling himself up onto a higher branch, and then another. He nestled into the tree, sleeping peacefully even while ants walked along his arms and things rustled in the leaves above him. He called his mother now and again when he could, but his voice was soft and raspy. Wherever she was, she probably couldn’t hear him.
I learned what had happened to Richie Farrow like everyone else did – in frantic
, hour-by-hour news bulletins on every available television channel. I sagged in my kitchen chair with a glass of Wild Turkey and listened to the medical reports changing as they came through. Richie had been found by the infamous Amanda Pharrell, sagging in a tree, severely dehydrated, covered in insect bites, and with life-threatening cerebral haemorrhaging from blunt-force trauma to the back of the head.
Over the days after he was discovered, the boy was put into an induced coma while the blood clot in his skull was drained. It was thought that the boy would suffer some long-term paralysis on one side of his body, but he was soon awake and capable of telling his story. Police believed Sara Farrow had bashed her son’s head with a rock or other blunt object, placed a plastic bag over his head and left him to the crocs. Richie had likely torn the bag off in some autonomic reflex while he was unconscious.
There were lots of headlines about miracles. The miracle of a boy lying unconscious in a mangrove for days and not being approached by a single crocodile when his mother was eaten, it seemed, within minutes of leading me to the same spot to kill me. The miracle of the boy having the strength necessary to rip open the plastic bag his mother had placed over his head after she struck him with a rock. The miracle of the enormous blood clot in Richie’s brain settling at the base of his skull and not swelling, not pushing on his spinal cord, not cutting off his small, tenacious life.
Of course, Amanda told me this same story in a phone call, and Val came and visited and discussed it with me, but I wasn’t good company in the forty-eight hours after the event. The moment I took Lillian back into my arms after we were abducted, I knew what the responsible thing to do was, and I did it. A part of me wanted to simply lie to Kelly about what had happened, tell her that our child had been perfectly safe for the entire time we spent together and that nothing eventful had occurred. But that wouldn’t have been fair. Lillian was her daughter, too. So I had a police officer drive me and the child directly to the mountain-top resort where Kelly and Jett were staying, and I told my ex-wife exactly what had happened in the mangroves.
There was screaming. A bit of shoving from Jett. Kelly snatched a sleeping Lillian from my arms exactly the way I’d snatched her from Amanda; with the desperate, furious, aching relief only a parent with a child fresh out of danger can understand. I listened to their tirade as Lillian cried. I’d risked our child’s life. I’d put her in peril for the sake of a case. I was a psychopath. A monster. I’d never see my child again. The whole situation was not aided by Lillian calming down long enough to examine Jett’s T-shirt, which he’d obviously bought somewhere local. There was a crocodile on the chest. Lillian pointed directly at him and said, ‘Tiny cock.’ The veins in Jett’s temples stuck out like noodles on his sweat-slick skin.
I went home and moped for a couple of days, sleeping on the porch with Celine, lying on the lawn with the geese. I sat on the back step and talked to Woman, the mother goose, for hours, trying to find the words to explain to the great white bird how empty and ashamed I felt. I got drunk, seriously drunk, so worryingly drunk that Celine followed me everywhere whimpering and pawing at my chest.
On the third day, I was feeling mildly better about everything when Kelly called me to tell me that Jett had flown home to Sydney. They’d had a fight. He’d taken their scheduled flight, but she’d stayed behind. I was sitting on the couch on the porch with my morning coffee, Celine slumped across my legs, her pointy ears pricked.
‘Don’t fight about me,’ I told Kelly. ‘You’re good for each other. I don’t want to be an issue between you.’
‘How arrogant,’ Kelly said. ‘We could have been fighting about anything.’
I managed a tiny laugh, no more than a snort.
‘He knows exactly how he feels about what happened,’ Kelly said. ‘And I don’t.’
‘You don’t?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I mean, yes, your job endangered our child. You endangered our child by not keeping it away from her. You should have taken the week off and spent time with her. But then again, a boy was missing. And he was found because of you. What am I supposed to think?’ She laughed humourlessly. ‘That’s the thing. No one’s had an answer for that question since you were arrested. I used to just jump in and feel the first thing that came along. Go with the flow. But I … Maybe that’s how I lost you. By not giving it time. Trusting you.’
I gripped the phone and listened. I could barely hear Lillian singing in the background.
‘When are you going back?’ I asked.
‘Well, that’s kind of why I was calling,’ Kelly said. ‘You didn’t really get your time with her. Proper time. I know it probably doesn’t make up for it, but … if you have no plans today –’
‘I have no plans today,’ I said. It was a lie. I’d intended to go see Amanda, battered and bruised and cut up the way she always seemed to be at the end of our cases, as though her very skin marked out our journeys, a map of violence in progress. She’d been the one to find Richie Farrow, so I also owed her a cake.
‘Let’s spend the day together,’ Kelly said. I could hear the smile in her voice. ‘It’ll be like old times.’
Chief Damien Clark finished another report and stretched his neck, hearing cracks and pops in the bones and joints as he rolled his shoulders. He was unsurprised to see that the clock on the wall of his office read nine in the evening. It had been a solid day of reporting on the occurrences that brought Richie Farrow’s disappearance to an end. There was still so much more to account for. Constable Joanna Fischer’s death was the second duty-related death in the region in less than a year, a score that soared above the national average, and a good part of Clark’s morning had been spent trying to relate into the report the actions of one of the officers under his command, Lawrence Supevich, in releasing an arrested suspect against command’s orders. In the middle of all the chaos, one of his lead detectives on the Farrow disappearance had to be stood down a day before the boy was discovered. Detective Ng had failed to account for a substantial sum of money missing from the station evidence locker, seized in a drug raid he’d led only a month earlier. It would look to the outside world as though Clark’s handling of the Farrow case had been haphazard and chaotic, his staff unreliable and underhanded. Certainly the true crime books that would come out about it would portray it that way. All Clark could do was try to make sense of it all on paper and hand those accounts over to the higher authorities.
As he packed his things into his bag and shut off the light in his office, he tried to decide how he actually felt about the case, and found he was not as down in the dumps as he expected to be. Yes, an officer had lost her life, but he suspected investigations into her passing would reveal that there was more to the Pharrell–Supevich–Fischer incident in the mangroves than simple officer misconduct. Everything about Amanda Pharrell was clouded. Her whole history was impossible to lay out in a straight line – it was more a collection of sharply angled pieces that appeared to fit while held in a certain light, and did not in another.
Clark had reached a point of exhaustion with his involvement with Amanda Pharrell that defied the sadness and anger he’d felt over Pip Sweeney’s death. He felt calm. He had given the woman a second chance, and in doing so, a missing boy had been found. Clark had visited the child in the local hospital the previous evening, finding the boy’s father asleep in an armchair by the bed. Clark had quietly informed Henry Farrow that his ex-wife’s remains had not yet been discovered, but that searches would resume in the morning.
Clark walked out of the station, waving goodbye to the two officers manning it overnight, and slung his bag over his shoulder. The lights in the garden that led to the parking lot were being battered by moths and strange, elongated insects with shimmery blue wings. The sound of a couple of motorbikes roaring off in the distance reminded him of the rumour he’d heard that morning that, during the case, a few of his officers had become involved in a fray with a group of local bikies. Something to do with Pharrell and her
disagreement with Fischer. More of Amanda’s mysteries, Clark supposed. If he knew one thing about bikies, it was that they didn’t let go of grudges, and if there’d been some kind of attack, retribution would have come already. He was sceptical that his own men would be so stupid as to tangle with the local gangs, but he knew there was always some truth to rumours. It might have been that the bikers and his guys had traded insults at a local bar or something. There weren’t many of those, so sometimes it was necessary for soldiers of different camps to rub shoulders.
He went to his car in the middle of the long, rectangular lot and unlocked the door.
The first car went off by the gate to the car park, fifty metres from where Clark was standing. The explosion came from under the bonnet but quickly engulfed the midsection of the vehicle, blowing the roof off in a huge ball of white and yellow flame. Clark felt the searing breath of the explosion on his face, watched the roof of the patrol car peel back and the red and blue lights splinter on the concrete. By the time the second car went off, this one across the lot from him, directly in line with his own, he was cowering with his hands over his head, wincing as the heat rushed over him, glass and debris falling on his back and arms. In mere seconds, it seemed, every patrol car in the lot had thumped with an internal explosion and burst into flame. Clark stood and looked around him in wonder as the ten cars crackled and ticked and groaned with flames, popping and bursting with secondary explosions as his colleagues rushed into the lot and dragged him away from the danger.
The three officers stood outside the lot and watched the cars burn, their mouths hanging open at the spectacle before them.
The first time I knew of her presence was when Celine perked up at a sound I couldn’t hear, rushing off around the side of the house and into the growing darkness. I was sitting on the step with a glass of Wild Turkey on my knee, sunburned and salt-washed and exhausted from my day out with Lillian and my ex-wife. My phone was full of pictures Kelly had taken of Lillian on my shoulders, walking under the sprawling trees by the beach, the two of us sharing ice cream, Lillian asleep in my arms as I carried her back to the car. I had been sitting, remembering my beautiful day, as the sun set. I was thinking of putting the geese away, watching them wander in the grass chasing off cane toads and tugging at the ground, and that got me to thinking about Laney Bass.