by Tara Moss
And then Makedde saw something that made her freeze in her tracks.
Out of the corner of her eye, a familiar sight. Something that didn’t belong here. Something she didn’t want to see in this garage, in this farmhouse, in this horrible place. It was the tips of a pair of shoes. Pointy shoes. Black pointy shoes.
She choked.
No.
Silently, tears began to fall from her eyes. She did not even notice them. She did not wipe them away.
Black shoes were poking out from a bundle wrapped in plastic. Familiar shoes. Wrong. This is wrong. This can’t be. Her instincts registered the horror before her brain did. She clambered towards the shoes, and kneeling, began to unwrap the plastic sheath. It was the shape of a body.
No.
No!
She tore at the plastic, desperate. Pulling away the layers of her grim find, she began to make out the features of the dead body inside.
Black hair. Glasses. Leather jacket.
Bogey.
Bogey, Bogey, Bogey, Bogey, Bogey…
She had known the instant she saw those shoes that it was Bogey, and that he had somehow tried to save her, that he was dead now, because of her, and it would be the final nail in her coffin. In that moment she knew with certainty that she could never return to a normal life. Not with what she had seen, what she had experienced. Makedde loved this man, she had found new love with him and he had shown her new possibilities, new emotions, the chance of a new life. It was precisely because he loved her that he was now there in front of her with his throat cut open. His eyes were open, unseeing, sunk back into his pallid face. His beautiful lips were dotted with smears of blood. He had been dead for at least a day in that garage, or days, while she had been chained up in the cellar just below him, wishing so badly to be near him.
I’m going to go mad.
Perhaps she had gone mad already. This life of hers was madness. Everyone who had ever told her that things would be okay—Everything will be okay, Mak—was wrong. Everything in her world was wrong. A trembling began all through her body, and she found herself temporarily unable to act. She wanted to crawl inside his plastic shroud and hold his body, and die there with him, let the flames engulf them both. She realised the danger. If she kept standing there looking at Bogey’s body she would die.
Numb, moving like an automaton, Makedde walked to the car and popped the trunk open. Inside, she found cash, jewels and what she recognised to be a sniper’s case and the tools of a hitman. The man who had abducted her had been a professional. She had known it, and now she knew in her guts that the Cavanaghs had set the man loose on her, and that they would not be satisfied until she was dead.
With an unnatural strength powered by adrenaline, Makedde lifted Bogey in her arms, and bore his body to the open car. With a tenderness too late, she laid him in the trunk, gently closed his stiff eyelids, and kissed his cold lips. She closed the lid and took a breath. Around her, there was more glass smashing, and the sound of cracking. The garage was heating up. The blaze outside was getting bigger now. The whole farmhouse would go. It was time to leave.
Makedde got into the driver’s seat, gripped the stick shift, put the car into gear and drove.
Blind to everything save the winding road before her, Mak drove through the French countryside for hours without stopping until sheer exhaustion made her pull the car over. She fell asleep across the front seat with the doors locked, the loaded Glock near to hand, and the stick shift digging into her ribs. She woke thirsty, bruised and in darkness, a bloodstreaked leather jacket wrapped around her. The Mercedes clock glowed the hour of 10:10.
She remembered driving away in the car. At some point she had woken, shaking violently, and had removed the jacket from Bogey’s cold body and wrapped it around herself for warmth, along with his scarf, which was now bundled in the back seat, dark with dried blood.
It took her a moment to orient herself, and seconds later, the tears began. She ignored them. She wasn’t interested in tears. She was interested only in revenge.
The man she loved was dead in the trunk of the car, and she had enough weapons, jewels and cash to make a new life, under the radar, a life where the Cavanaghs and their thugs could never find her.
They wouldn’t need to.
She would find them.
It was not the life she had wanted, not the life she had asked for. It was the life she had to lead.
EPILOGUE
In his thirty-two years of performing autopsies, Dr Auguste had never before come across a fully grown man folded neatly into a small box. Puzzled, the Chief Forensic Pathologist ran through the case notes in his mind as his assistants removed the ornate wooden panels of the contortionist’s stage box, within which the deceased was tightly folded. With considerable care, the panels were cut away, leaving the exposed remains on Dr Auguste’s autopsy table, balled up like a bloated fist.
The deceased, apparently, had been an accomplished contortionist.
Mr Arslan Gosulja had been missing for just over two weeks, and appeared to have been dead nearly that long. Sheltered from the elements, his body’s decomposition had not been rapid, but had clearly taken hold. The once slender physique had ballooned to the shape of the box, and the deep black-purple discolouration of post-mortem lividity was evident along all the lower extremities, strongly suggesting that he had died in this position, trapped in the box.
Dr Auguste could not help but imagine his final days. Within the first twenty-four hours the man would have felt a desperate hunger and thirst, and increasingly unbearable pain in his muscles and joints. Delirium would surely have set in early. He would have experienced giddiness and hallucinations. His tongue had split open from dehydration. As he neared death, his eyelids likely would no longer close, and he would have spied the dark world around him through the holes in his box, helpless. There would have been little else for him to do in the hours leading to his death than watch his mother, the notorious and disgraced actress Bijou, while she went about her routine, covering her grief and bewilderment in an alluring layer of powder and perfume and jewellery, believing her son to have abandoned her. Terribly distraught, she had called the police when she became aware of the terrible smell in her bedroom.
The assistants manipulated the deceased across the table, laying the remains flat. Removed from its deadly container, the body moved easily, rigor mortis having long since passed. Had this man expired from dehydration, a form of positional asphyxia, or death due to one of the complications of prolonged immobility, such as a pulmonary embolism or the pressure effects on skeletal muscle? It might prove difficult to determine.
‘Passez le scalpel,’ Dr Auguste ordered.
The case, which became famous once Bijou’s scandalous relationship was leaked to the papers, was one of the strangest in Dr Auguste’s illustrious career. He later sought out and purchased a handsome out-of-print book on the subject of contortion and entérologie—or ‘packanatomicalisation’ as it was sometimes called in English—and it sat on the shelf of his office for many years.
He never did find the time to read the text, nor did he again come across a case involving such strange practices, but whenever a visitor noticed the book he retold the story of the curious man in the box. Of all the confounding aspects of the case, the single question that continued to trouble Dr Auguste was this: having voluntarily placed himself in the box, why had this Arslan Gosulja not cried out to his mother for help once he had become trapped and recognised the seriousness of his position? His death would have been agonising. And he had been just a heartbeat from her for days.
Silently watching.
THE END
A Note About The Grand Guignol
I conceived of writing about my fictional troupe, Le Théâtre des Horreurs, after watching a documentary about Paris in the 1920s, a time when the Grand Guignol was patronised by the likes of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. Sadly, I discovered that the theatre at 7 Cité Chaptal, though still standing, bears little
resemblance to the notorious venue of the Grand Guignol, which performed ‘naturalistic’ horror plays there from 1897 to 1962. Investigating the tiny theatre in Paris (at the time of writing it was the International Visual Theatre, staging plays for the hearing impaired), I was saddened to find the original interiors gone, including the oft-written-about carved angels left over from its earliest days as a chapel, and no reference to the theatre’s incredible past except for a little plaque on the corner of Cité Chaptal and Rue Chaptal making mention of its once notorious and yet seemingly near forgotten past. In this novel I have taken literary licence by restoring the venue to the splendour of its heyday, angels and all—my homage to what once was.
Acknowledgements
It can be very difficult to be close to a writer finishing a novel. I would be truly remiss not to acknowledge my friends and family, and thank them yet again for the incredible patience they have shown in supporting my writing, particularly over the three years it took me to complete Siren. I would also like to thank HarperCollins Publishers Australia, and particularly Linda Funnell, for the ongoing support of my work. Thank you so much for believing in me. Thank you also to Bolinda Audio, who, like HarperCollins Australia, have been there with me since my first novel was published in 1999. And thank you also to the readers and publishers around the world who allow me to do what I love for a living.
I have the good fortune of having the most wonderful literary agent, Selwa Anthony. Thank you for your guidance and friendship from day one, and for making my dreams of becoming a published writer come true. Thank you also to Mitch Kaplan and KSGB Literary Agency in Los Angeles for the support and belief in me. Big thanks also go to Michael Schenker and Rob Dorfmann at 2 Roads Pictures, Craig Schneider of Pinnacle PR, Martin Walsh and Chadwick Management, Saxtons, Sisters in Crime, Karen Phillips, Di Rolle, magician Adam Mada, contortionist Arslan Gusengadzhiev of Zumanity (who is nothing like the twisted Arslan character in Siren, despite the name), SWAT leader Doug Martin for correcting my ‘mash’, ‘Big’ John McCarthy for choking me unconscious for Makedde’s Catacombs scene, and West EFX for literally setting me on fire for research for my farmhouse scene. I was gratefully unsinged. I am also grateful for the assistance of Chief Forensic Pathologist Dr Jo Duflou, forensic polygraph examiner Steven Van Aperen, Carl Donadio of Once Blue, Tony Zalewski and the Australian Institute of Public Safety, and Mike Evans and the Australian Security Academy where I completed my Certificate III in Investigative Services in 2008.
I would like to acknowledge French writer Maurice Level, author of Le Baiser dans la nuit, translated as The Final Kiss, and first performed at Le Theatre du Grand-Guignol in 1912, and the invaluable book on the Grand Guignol, Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror, by Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, University of Exeter Press, 2002. The fragments of play dialogue I’ve used were adapted from translations in this book. I would also like to acknowledge American writer Jack Kerouac and his novel On The Road, quoted in this book.
And to my gloriously patient friends Alison, Gloria, Mindy, Liz, Amelia, Desi and Robert, Manual, Tracey, Misty and Alice, Nafisa, Lionheart, Joel, Erica and Stephen, Linda (Miss J Forever), lovely Hugh for the quote, the Literary Salon crew, the Hillbillies and the Poets, and especially Berndt, Dorothy, Nik and Annelies. I thank each of you for showing support and for being there for me in your own way during these recent roller-coaster years. I love you all.
To Dad, Lou, Jackie, Dave, all the Moss, Carlson, Bosch, Hooft, Hartman and Sellheim clans—love.
Mum, I never forget you.
About the Author
Tara Moss is a novelist, TV presenter and journalist. She began penning stories for her classmates at the age of 10 and went on to an international career as a fashion model before pursuing professional writing. Tara is renowned for her in-depth research. Her work has been short-listed for both the Davitt and the Ned Kelly crime writing awards and made her Australia’s #1 selling crime writer several years running.
Tara is a mum and has been an ambassador for the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children since 2000, a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2007 and UNICEF Patron for Breastfeeding for the Baby Friendly Heath Initiative since 2011, advocating for better support for breastfeeding mums in hospitals, the workforce and general community.
Visit taramoss.com
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
First published as Fetish in 1999; Split in 2002; Covet in 2004; Hit in 2006 and Siren in 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers
This combined edition published in 2011
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited.
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Tara Moss 1999, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2011
The right of Tara Moss to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Fetish
Split
Covet
Hit
Siren
About the Author
Copyright