The dissolution of Maggie and Ness’ friendship was, at least at first, only surprising in how long it took. Maggie had got used to people quietly cutting ties when they realised that her ‘intensity’ wasn’t some act calibrated to make her seem interesting.
For a while she had let herself believe Ness was different. There weren’t many people who could make Maggie laugh, or just feel slightly at ease, but something about Ness had achieved that from early in their friendship, some singular alchemy that made Maggie cling to Ness with a need verging on desperation.
But when Ness stopped replying to messages, only occasionally sending back brief, terse replies, Maggie suspected that this was a different kind of distancing. That Ness wasn’t pulling away because Maggie had scared or embarrassed her, but because things in her own life had taken a turn for the worst. It was obvious whenever she saw her at uni; Ness had lost weight and her usually lustrous hair was stringy. But nothing made Maggie more certain than the tightness in her face and the way her eyes looked either glazed or too sharp and darting. Maggie knew those looks.
She didn’t think Elliot had turned violent. Not physically, anyway. What Maggie suspected was that the little favours had turned into bigger favours, bigger and more frequent. Offloading a bit of product to help with rent had become a succession of parties at which Ness was being pushed to sell whatever Elliot had, pushed because that was what doting girlfriends did when they loved somebody. Pushed because maybe the lack of violence had started to look less like a given and more like an axe that would only need a slight provocation to fall.
Maggie didn’t know for sure. And she didn’t try to find out. She wasn’t entirely sure why this was. Maybe it was her sense that getting involved would disrupt the fragile semblance of a normal life she was trying to construct. Or else it was that Ness’s distance, whatever the reason, stung more than she cared to admit. Just another person Maggie had let herself love who had dropped away.
Then the call came.
It was three in the morning and Maggie jerked awake with the first vibration of her phone. Her heart raced and sleep vanished in seconds.
‘Maggie,’ Ness sounded breathless, choked. Wind and footsteps in the background – wherever she was she was moving fast.
Maggie said nothing. Her heart was yet to slow down.
‘Mags, I fucked up.’ Ness was crying. ‘I fucked up really bad. I was . . . oh God, I was at this gig and I was trying to . . .’ her voice caught. ‘There was a cop. Undercover and . . . and I ran but I think he knows who I am, I think he was tipped off and . . . oh fuck, fuck, Maggie, what do I do?’
Maggie slipped out of bed. ‘Get back to college. I’m on my way. Any gear you have in your room, toss it.’
A jumper and jeans tugged on in seconds and Maggie was out the door. She flagged a cab rather than record her movements with Uber, counting out the few notes she had in her wallet. Ness lived on campus and Maggie could walk there in half an hour, but they might not have that long.
As it turned out, they didn’t. Maggie saw the white and blue of the police cars parked outside the halls of residence well before the driver pulled over. She gave it a split second of thought then, as the driver went to indicate, told him to keep going another block. She kept her voice light, made it seem like an arbitrary request.
Hands in pockets, she had walked back towards the halls. Meandering, just a girl making her way home on a cold city night. She slowed a little as she passed the building. She identified the light on in Ness’s second-storey room. The shapes moving inside. The one cop waiting down in the car. Waiting for anyone who might have hurried to help.
Maggie didn’t linger. She walked back home. Sat on her bed and watched out the window until the sun started to come up. Her phone never rang. Then she had a coffee, a shower and headed into class as if nothing had happened.
Maggie had hoped that Ness would give up Elliot, but she never did. It seemed the police had hoped the same – they’d known for a while that somebody was running a pretty efficient operation on campus, and while they had their suspicions, they didn’t have enough to prove Elliot was anything other than a casual fling for Ness. He’d covered his tracks too well.
Ness stayed with her parents through the legal proceedings. She dropped out of uni before she could be expelled, not wanting to face the staring and the muttering and, inevitably, the laughter. Maggie had been questioned about the 3 am phone call but claimed Ness had been drunk and incoherent, something the police apparently accepted without question. She’d half-expected to hear from Harrison Cooper in the middle of this, given her tangential connection to what could have been a major drug bust, but she never did.
She visited Ness whenever she could but found the experience more frustrating than anything. Ness would sit on the bed, staring into space, and only shook her head when Maggie urged her to turn in Elliot. This made Maggie start to wonder what Elliot had on her. Photos, maybe. Or else something more, a dangling threat, implicit or not.
Whatever the case, it was Elliot who had pulled Ness into this, Elliot who was to blame for the fact that she could be facing prison time.
What made it all the worse was the fact that whenever Maggie saw Elliot at uni, he seemed entirely unfazed. One night, she even glimpsed him at the pub, getting cosy with some new girl, laughing and whispering something in her ear that made her blush. He didn’t notice Maggie. Not even when she started turning up in the same places as him, as she began to work out what exactly his routine was. He never so much as glimpsed her sitting with her nose in a book across from him on the grassy uni lawn or in the shadowy corners of pubs. Always with the rounders bat hidden under her jacket.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Melbourne came into sight just before midday. Cooper was driving; he thought it was better Maggie didn’t after the blow to her head. Maggie felt fine but kept quiet. She didn’t trust herself to hold the wheel steady when the towers came into view beyond the stretch of highway that had seemed never-ending.
The sky behind them was overcast, a dreary grey against which the buildings looked stark and unwelcoming. The weather made the fields and hills, interspersed with the occasional half-built housing development, appear washed out, like all colour had seeped away and the only thing with any solidity was those fast-approaching towers.
Melbourne was the kind of city whose aesthetic value varied depending on where you were standing. Or, perhaps more pertinently, who you were. Ness, for example, had regularly waxed lyrical about the beauty of the city. To her it was a bohemian paradise full of boutique cafés hidden away down artfully cluttered alleys, of tree-shaded walks along a river that shone in the sunlight, over which the towers of the city stood proud and gleaming. Sometimes, when they’d had a couple of drinks, Ness would drag Maggie to the bridge overlooking the Yarra to bask in the brilliant lights of the bars along Southbank that were so perfectly reflected in the water. She would tell Maggie that in that spot the electric possibilities of the city, the vivid life that characterised it, became all you could see. It was obvious that Ness was trying to win Maggie over to feeling that same love for the place. Maggie did appreciate the effort but that didn’t change the fact that all she tended to see were grimy swathes of worn concrete, a river that was muddy and full of rubbish and alleys that were more likely to be full of overflowing dumpsters and stink than hipster cafés and elaborate graffiti murals.
From here, watching the cluster of towers grow nearer, devoid of colour or conveniently reflected sunlight, her perspective seemed the right one.
It was hard to ignore the sense that she was heading straight into danger. There was no real reason to believe that this couldn’t be straightforward, that she wouldn’t be able to find an easy way to disappear the moment she had the hard drive, but a fitful uncertainty lingered. Uncertainty over Cooper’s motives, over her own ability to betray him, over whether a return to Melbourne had been in any way a good idea to begin with.
The fields vanished. The suburbs be
came all she could see, then the shops and train stations started appearing and soon Melbourne sprouted around them. Maggie felt the occasional spike of recognition seeing bars and restaurants she knew, parks she’d walked through, but it all seemed so unreal, like the set of a play she’d once appeared in but had since forgotten all the lines for.
Cooper pulled over near the bottom of the long, vibrant stretch of Sydney Road. Maggie tried to keep from looking around the worn kebab stores and ramshackle bars like a tourist. Faded furniture shops and convenience stores with signs that had not been changed in what seemed to be thirty years were jammed together with upmarket pubs and record stores that erred on the side of rundown but in a way that was all too self-conscious, like they were trying to project an air of underground authenticity. The combination of people on the streets was eclectic – hipsters in paisley shirts with immaculate quiffs and rolled cigarettes passed older men stumping along with their scowls and their stained aprons, back to wherever it was they were working. The mutual glances of disdain were all too obvious.
‘Home sweet home.’ Cooper glanced at his watch, then leaned back in his seat. ‘Still a while until we have to see the lawyer. I’m gonna head home quickly for a shower then we can meet at the pub.’
‘Pub?’
Cooper nodded. ‘Ms Darch likes a drink. I figure after a couple of glasses, she might be a bit more willing to help without too many questions. And I don’t want the meeting going on any record.’
‘For the police?’
‘For anyone. If we can get this all handled informally, then we’re good.’
‘How likely is that?’
Cooper glanced at the rear-view mirror. ‘Reasonably. She was your father’s lawyer for a long time, so there’s likely at least a bit of nostalgic affection there. Eric could be charming when he wanted to be.’
‘Guess I never saw him want to be.’
Maggie drove to an old motel that she knew from memory, up the other end of Sydney Road. It sat near a busy intersection, adjacent to a 7-Eleven across from a tram stop. It was a blocky, two-storey building shaped like a squared-off C, with carparks in the centre. It was plain and uninspiring, but she didn’t need much else. She paid for one night, then took her stuff to her room, on the second floor.
She sat on the bed and checked the clock. She felt wired, like she needed to burn off some excess energy. And she knew well enough that the only way that was going to happen was to get this meeting over and done with. So she sat and watched the clock, fidgeting until it was finally time to head across town. She considered taking the backpack with her, but instead left it under the bed. Although she didn’t like leaving her money behind, it was generally better not to carry thousands of dollars in cash.
The address Cooper had given her was a couple of blocks off the famously trendy stretch of Smith Street, which Maggie had avoided like the plague during her brief uni stint. Overpriced bars where the staff were clearly trained to be coolly unpleasant and ‘retro’ clothes stores that sold second-hand stuff for three times its original price had never, despite how Ness insisted, had any appeal for Maggie. She parked a decent distance from the pub, down a side street, before walking the rest of the way. The trees lining these streets were almost bare, the remaining leaves red and gold. The wind came in occasional icy bursts. It wasn’t winter yet, but autumn in Melbourne was very different from autumn in Port Douglas. Over the houses and phone lines ahead of her Maggie could see the towers of the city. She slowed, watching them for a moment and feeling the first flecks of rain. She could hear the trundle of trams nearby. Melbourne. Her home, until it wasn’t. Until it couldn’t be anymore. Maybe tonight that would change. She kept walking.
The pub Cooper had chosen seemed, at first, like a bit of a joke. It was a narrow corner venue with a strong stale beer smell in the air, low lights and decorations largely made out of empty bottles with skulls atop the taps. The bartender, a shifty-looking punk with a towering blue mohawk and a ragged denim jacket, gave Maggie a bemused stare as she walked in. Cooper was already waiting at a side table with a bottle of red wine and three glasses.
‘It’s close to her office and we’re not going to be disturbed,’ he said, by way of explanation.
‘Disturbed by who?’ Maggie eyed the bartender.
The door swung open and, nose wrinkled, a woman entered. She looked to be in her sixties, dressed in a pencil skirt and suit jacket, skin leathery, no makeup, hair silver and short. Her eyes landed on Maggie.
Cooper stood. ‘Ms Darch.’
‘Harrison.’ Her voice was low and gravelly. She walked over, taking the glass Cooper offered and sitting without hesitation. ‘Interesting venue.’
Cooper sipped his wine. ‘Cops get used to out-of-the-way places. The décor becomes a secondary concern.’
‘My concern is a bit more than secondary, but we’ll let it slide.’ Her gaze fixed on Maggie and for a moment they just looked at each other. She extended a long-fingernailed hand. ‘Stephanie Darch.’
Like a punch to the gut, recognition struck. Maggie didn’t take her hand. The memories were flooding in; she was eleven years old, the musty smell of the too-large courtroom, the judge watching with cool disinterest, her father shaven and sombre across the room, and beside him, this woman. Never once looking at Maggie, speaking about her as if she wasn’t there. She has a history of lying and emotional problems. My client is innocent. This woman had almost stopped the state from taking her to something close to safety, something that had seemed possible after her teacher finally noticed the bruises. Maggie had hated that voice, without any remembered name to give it, almost as much as her father himself.
‘I remember you,’ Maggie said.
Darch’s hand didn’t lower. Maggie felt Cooper’s eyes on her, felt the silent plea.
She took Darch’s hand. The woman’s skin was dry and brittle.
‘Look at you now.’ Darch touched her wine glass to her lips. ‘All grown up.’
Maggie put her hand around her own glass and held it tight.
‘Thanks for meeting us,’ Cooper said. ‘As I mentioned on the phone, we’re in a slightly precarious situation. It’s of the utmost importance that we access Eric’s estate quickly and quietly.’
‘For the inheritance?’
‘More than that,’ Cooper said. ‘It’s a police matter, but we believe somewhere in Eric’s possession is a crucial piece of evidence for an ongoing investigation.’
‘So get a warrant.’ Darch drank.
Cooper topped up her wine. ‘Our prime suspect is a dangerous and well-connected individual, and while I respect and expect the best from my colleagues—’
‘The police force and secrecy go together like water and a sieve,’ Darch said.
‘Call me paranoid, but a warrant causes a lot more noise than an heir receiving her inheritance.’
Darch finished her glass. ‘Depends on the heir.’
Cooper leaned forward. ‘I understand that this is out of the ordinary.’
‘Do you?’ Darch said with an expression of slack amusement that made Maggie want to punch her.
‘This goes beyond protocol,’ Cooper said. ‘This is about Eric.’
Darch’s eyes narrowed slightly, but she didn’t retort.
‘My working theory is that the suspect set up Terrence Adams,’ Cooper said. ‘That he used his influence to point the police in the wrong direction. The same wrong direction that Eric ran in.’ There was a bite of anger to Cooper’s voice now.
Any amusement was gone from Darch’s face. She watched him with something not far off fascination.
‘Eric was not a forgiving person,’ Cooper said. ‘It’s part of what made him such a great cop. At the start he was downright zealous. Didn’t rest until he’d got his man. And he usually did.’ Cooper raised his glass but didn’t drink. ‘But that inability to forgive extended to himself.’
Darch cleared her throat. ‘Eric—’
‘Is dead,’ Cooper said. ‘You don
’t need to defend him. What he became is not the man he started out as. If I’m right, then the person I’m looking for is the person responsible for that.’
Nobody spoke.
‘What I’m asking for,’ Cooper said, ‘is discretion. Maggie is the legal heir to Eric’s estate. There is no reason she shouldn’t be allowed to access it.’
Darch’s gaze flicked to Maggie.
‘I know you’re not naive,’ Cooper said. ‘You know the force isn’t perfect. Which is why I’m asking you to help me. Get whatever documents you need together, let Maggie sign them. I believe Eric’s possessions ended up in a storage unit somewhere?’
Darch nodded.
‘Then we just need the key. Without letting anyone else know about it. If I’m wrong, all you’ve done is your job. If I’m right, it’s justice. For Eric.’
Another stretch of silence. Cooper was watching Darch. Maggie kept her eyes on her drink.
Darch looked at Maggie. ‘You’ve been quiet.’
Maggie shrugged.
‘He was a charismatic man, your father.’ A playful note had crept into Darch’s voice. ‘I always thought he was like something out of a classic western. The take-no-prisoners sheriff. Shoot first, ask questions later. He was old-fashioned, in some respects, but chivalrous.’
A surge of billowing hot rage. ‘Yeah.’ Maggie could hear the tremor in her voice. She didn’t care. ‘He was really fucking chivalrous when he held my hand over the stove for dropping a saucepan. When I was seven.’
Darch’s gaze was steady. ‘Sometimes people misremember. They exaggerate.’
Maggie was up and out of her seat. Cooper’s hand was hard around her wrist.
‘The past is past,’ he said firmly. ‘What matters now is doing the right thing.’
Darch’s eyes gave nothing away. Through the throbbing rise of hate, it struck Maggie that this woman was a lot cleverer than she let on and clever, in this situation, meant dangerous.
Maggie sat. Cooper let go.
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