Wincing, she crouched and started gathering them up in handfuls. She kept a hold of the machete as she did. Moving along the walkway, stuffing notes into her pocket, her vision blurred. Her head spun. It occurred to her, distantly, that she might have lost a large amount of blood. She glanced back, saw the trail of moonlit black she’d left and as she did another man came up the stairs.
She didn’t need to think twice. His face was covered and in his hand was a gun. He raised it as Maggie threw the machete.
It spun through the air. The man went to move; it bounced off his skull with an audible crack. He made a guttural noise and staggered. One hand went to where the blade had hit as the other lifted the silenced pistol again.
Maggie dived to the side as he fired. The gunshot was muffled but the bullet hitting concrete behind her wasn’t.
Veering widely, the man fired again.
Maggie ran towards him. Her eyes on the fallen machete.
Another gunshot. A yell from one of the rooms. The man was less than two metres away.
She ducked his next shot and grabbed the machete just as his hand caught her throat. She had no time to attack as he pulled her upwards, his grip strong, so strong, impossible to fight. The baby still crying. Everything was spinning; she was moving fast; she couldn’t breathe. She kicked out, hit metal and realised that he had hoisted her over the balcony, holding her by the neck.
She tried to draw breath but it was impossible. Black spots filled her vision; the biggest among them could have been his face, featureless and terrible but for the wide eyes in the holes that now leaked blood.
Brief clarity. He had her in his right hand. His left, wavering, lifting the gun.
At that moment Maggie remembered the machete.
She swung wild and hard. She didn’t know if she would hit anything until she did, until the man let out a strangled, gurgling cry, she saw the blade half-buried in his neck, and his hand let go of her.
She grabbed for whatever she could, whatever was in reach. She felt the top of the stocking that covered his head and the hair beneath it as she fell. She held tight and her fall stopped part way. Her legs flailed in empty air. Her fingers were slipping. She tightened her grip as best she could and as she did she heard a horrible, wet tearing sound that made her look up.
The man’s neck was bent over the bannister, head wrenched down by Maggie’s hold, the machete lost in the chaos. His open wound pointed upwards, gaping, red and widening by the second.
‘Oh, fuck,’ Maggie managed as the wound tore, the head came off, and she fell in a shower of blood.
There was a brief rush of blurred light and colour and then came the impact that raced through her body, turned the pulsing pain into something overpowering, something that blasted all thought from her mind as she tried to move but couldn’t. She knew she had to stand but wasn’t sure for that moment what standing was.
Vision returned. The empty sky above. Something clutched tight in her hands. And around the fringes of her vision the lights and the slowly closing circle of gasps and whispers and screams.
She stood. Her left leg buckled and she was down again. She didn’t even feel the impact this time. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth and tried again. She was up, the world tilting on either side. She lifted what she held and looked into empty eyes and blood. Her grip had mostly pulled away the stocking. She could see his face. Not one she recognised. She threw the head away. She saw shapes approaching, shapes that warped and grew in her fractured vision. Then she was moving without knowing how, away from the motel, away from the lights and the shouts, away.
Maybe there were sirens. Maybe people were staring at her. She moved into shadows and bushes. She moved in the wrong direction until she didn’t think anyone was looking and then it was the dark streets and the looming houses and finally, she registered with a rush of relief, her car. She dug her keys out of her pocket with a shaking hand. She shouldn’t have been driving. She was anyway. Streetlights and headlights, the stretch of empty road, a beeping horn, then the dark late-night houses of a different street in a different suburb. Lights grew in her vision, colours changing, shifting into new and terrifying forms. The road ahead tilted, the windscreen rippled and everything beyond it was grey and formless. She couldn’t feel her hands around the wheel.
She needed to be gone, back north. But she was moving out of the car and through the long grass of a forgotten lawn until she found the loose brick to the left of the door and the key behind it. Hand on the doorknob, then the dark of the hall, the smell of mould and mildew, the foot of the stairs in shadow. She didn’t close the door behind her. She fell. She looked at her hands. Dark. Maybe the night, maybe the blood.
Up the stairs then, half-crawling, half-walking until she reached the landing and passed it, passed the doors she knew until she reached her own. Her room was empty. There was no sign of the little girl left. Cobwebs and dust. She collapsed on the floor. Sleep reached up and took hold of her, so gently that the pain started to slip away and all that was left was the darkness and then the little girl she’d left behind.
Huddled in the wardrobe, eyes on the door. She could hear the heavy footsteps up the stairs. They stopped two doors up, at his room. Then they kept coming. She closed her eyes. The creak of the wardrobe door. She wondered what she had done, what he would do and then the sobs, so quiet she almost missed them, so strange a sound that she opened her eyes and looked at him and he looked at her and then he collapsed and held her as he wept into her shoulder and again and again whispered that he was sorry while she stared at the wall and thought about the day she would kill him.
CHAPTER TEN
Maggie had bought the rounders bat because of its size. Easy to obscure, relatively light but still solid. Still wood. She liked the weight of it in her hand. She liked that she could have it tucked in the back of her jeans, hidden by a jacket, then out and swung hard and fast in seconds.
But the night she made her move, she didn’t hide it. She didn’t need to. She had placed herself in an alley, dressed in black and with a balaclava over her head, the shape of her body disguised by an oversized hoodie. By then she had worked out that after a round of smokes with his mates out the front of the pub, the prick tended to walk home down quiet back streets by himself. Sometimes he’d have a girl with him, but that wasn’t as often as he probably liked.
She would have preferred to have placed herself inside the pub, or at least to walk past it a few times to be across anything that might be outside the ordinary, but she didn’t want anyone to later be able to place her. She was fairly good at not being noticed if she wanted to, but a girl drinking alone always stood out at least a little to anyone who cared to look. Luckily, Elliot never had.
Standing in the dark shadows of the alley, Maggie rocked back and forwards on her heels. She hefted the bat. She felt the comforting weight of the Swiss Army knife in her pocket. Just in case. She was about to check the time again when she heard footsteps. Heavy and uneven. She sank back. Waited.
And there he was. Cigarette in mouth, laughing at something on his phone as he walked. He passed the alley and was gone. Maggie lingered just a moment, then stepped out. The night was cool. Elliot’s head remained down. There was no-one else around.
Light on her feet, Maggie moved. Elliot didn’t even know she was there. She brought the bat hard across the back of his head. With a yelp, he staggered forward, his phone falling from his fumbling hands as he hit the pavement and then Maggie was on him, the bat coming down again and again – on his back, his legs, his arms. He wailed something incoherent, cried, tried to roll over. Maggie let him and then cracked him across the face. He spat blood and teeth. His kneecaps were now exposed. In quick succession, Maggie hit both of them. Elliot screamed. Maggie glanced behind her. Still no-one. She looked down at him. Bloody and pathetic, trying to sob and beg and threaten all at once. She wanted to hit him again so she did. His cry was high-pitched. Maggie took out the knife.
The hate
had flared billowing and all-consuming, stoked by every sound the fucker made. This man who ruined lives and got away with it because he was charming and connected enough to pull the wool over all the right eyes. This man who had destroyed the only friend Maggie had ever had. Lured her in with his pretty face. He’d have a hard time doing that without those looks.
She hit him one more time to keep him down, then knelt. She took Elliot’s wallet from his pocket. The knife was already open in her hand although she didn’t remember doing that. She lifted it. Her hand was steady. The blade glinted in the glow of a streetlight. She lowered it.
Then, from nearby, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
Pounding feet came towards her and Maggie was gone.
She ran until she reached a better-lit street then tucked the bat away and pulled off the balaclava. She slowed but kept going, steady and casual and easy. Nobody worth taking any notice of. Once she reached the city, once the people started bustling around her and the lights turned bright, she dropped Elliot’s wallet in the nearest bin, followed by the bat.
The day before Ness’s court appointment, Maggie had gone round to her place. She found Ness lying on her bed, staring at the roof, eyes blank. Until she saw Maggie.
‘What the fuck were you thinking?’
Ness didn’t sound angry. Not overtly anyway. Closer to worn-out.
Maggie played dumb, but Ness wasn’t having any of it.
‘He didn’t tell the cops he thought the mugger was a girl,’ she said. ‘But he told me. You pulled a fucking knife on him?’
‘You’re still talking to him,’ Maggie said.
‘I wasn’t,’ Ness said. ‘Until I heard about the attack. And I had a feeling it might not just be some random junkie. So, again, what the fuck were you thinking?’
‘I was thinking this is all his fault. I was thinking you should have turned him in but since you won’t, someone had to do something.’
‘Someone had to – can you hear yourself?’
And there the anger was, wild and exasperated and finally erupting from under all the late nights and endless fretting about the future. Maggie didn’t move. She didn’t know what to say or do.
‘Maggie, it was my choice,’ Ness said. ‘Do you understand? Elliot didn’t force me to deal for him; he asked me and I said yes. Do you have so little respect for me that you think I’d put up with it if he tried to push me around?’
Maggie didn’t have an answer for that.
Ness slumped back on the bed. ‘Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. All this time I’ve defended you. Told people that you weren’t this broken, fucked-up mess. Maggie, he thought he was going to die. He thought you were going to kill him. Can you understand that?’
She could, but she didn’t voice the fact.
‘At what point,’ Ness asked, ‘are you just your father all over again?’
The words didn’t hit hard. Not at first. But over the following days Ness’s voice, as clear as if she was hearing it again, repeated in her thoughts. And as it did, something seemed to happen to the world around her. The old sandstone buildings of the university, the perfect green of the grass and the laughs of the students, became flimsy and artificial. Maggie moved through it all and with every step saw it for what it was, a performance of some half-arsed concept of normality that nobody could pinpoint the origins of because it had just been roundly accepted and these people let themselves believe that what they were doing somehow mattered, that their lives and pointless dramas and fractured fears meant something. That they didn’t all just contribute to the pretence, the smoke and mirrors, that convinced the easily led that the world was fundamentally good, that cruelty and danger were far away rather than occurring behind every second closed door.
She stopped paying attention in class. Then she stopped turning up. When Ness eventually called again, Maggie ignored it. She didn’t even know how the court case had gone. She never saw Elliot again. She just wandered through the collapsing artifice, and as she did, slowly, her thoughts turned to her parents.
Maybe they had done her a favour. Her father’s violence and her mother’s abandonment had disabused her of the false notions that the rest of the world lived by, the notion that fairness and decency would win out if you just followed the rules. But it was hard to feel grateful when Maggie wished with painful desperation that she could delude herself, that she could worry about marks and flings and mortgages. Not when she had been through what she had.
In those long, empty days without Ness, answers seemed impossible to find, as impossible as the idea that she could just go back to uni, pick things up and live a normal life. It had never once occurred to her not to hurt Elliot; just like, so long ago, it had never occurred to her not to trip into a fire the vicious foster brother who could also turn on the polite charm when he needed to. On both occasions she had felt justified. But after what Ness had said, she wasn’t so sure anymore.
She had assumed on some level that violence was her birthright. That her father’s capacity for harm and her mother’s carelessness were what had shaped her. That notion had persisted even during the time that she, at least at a surface level, had attempted to pursue a normal life. But if she didn’t want her past to define her, then what options were left to her? Could she ever overcome such ingrained instinct?
She left her job and her apartment. The university stopped emailing her. She scraped together what little money she had and moved into the dingiest share house she could find. And there an obsession grew. Because if what she was had been caused by her parents, then maybe the only way forward was to understand what had caused them.
Her father wouldn’t have answers. None he’d share, anyway. The last she’d heard he had descended fully into booze and incoherence. He’d sooner backhand her again than tell her anything.
But, she slowly understood, that didn’t mean he didn’t know anything. After all, his biggest fixation during the last years Maggie had lived with him had been finding her mother. For revenge, spite or love, Maggie didn’t know. But his need to find her had never shown any sign of abating. And on some level, he had once been a good cop. Which meant that if anyone knew where to start looking, it would be him.
The thought of seeing him again was unpleasant, tinged partly with fear but also with something else. Some vague sense of the potential to put things right.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The first thing she knew, before her eyes even opened, was the pain. It was everywhere, from the throb in her leg to the persistent tearing in her back to the pounding in her skull. She didn’t move. Minutes, maybe, crept past. Flashes of the night before returned to her. She couldn’t deal with them even if she wanted to, and she was a long way from wanting to.
She was in her father’s house. She was only partly sure of how she had got there and less sure of why. But here she was. Home. The thought would have made her laugh if laughing didn’t hurt so much. She shifted, slightly, and the pain swelled. She heard a whimper but wasn’t sure if it had come from her.
‘Easy, girl. You’ve taken more than your fair share.’
The voice was familiar and with it came a dull sense of warning.
‘Carlin,’ she croaked.
‘Stay still. I bandaged you up, but I’m no doctor and you’re in a state that needs a fair bit more than a couple of Band-Aids.’
She opened her eyes. Carlin was slumped against the wall, cigarette in mouth, eyes on her. She glanced down. Her shirt was gone but heavy bandages wrapped around her stomach and the wound on her lower back. Her bra and bloodstained jeans were still in place.
‘I didn’t send the bastards,’ Carlin said. ‘Before you start losing your shit. The obvious money would seem to be on Len Townsend. The machete tells me it was supposed to be messy. A warning to anyone who might try to pull the same shit you did. Between the lawyer’s office and the motel, cop radio’s been going crazy all night.’
Maggie closed her eyes. She wanted to sleep.
‘Sorr
y, love.’ Carlin poked her with his boot. ‘We’ve got no time for that. Far as I know, nobody’s officially linked you to the motel fuckery yet, but that’s only a matter of time and the first place anyone will look is here, if only to cover their bases.’
‘Fuck off, Carlin.’
‘Listen.’ His voice softened.
Maggie opened her eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Believe it or don’t, but there it is. I’m used to getting my way by putting the fear of God into brain-dead fuckwits scared of any police attention, official or otherwise. Instinct overtook sense. You’d have been long clear of that motel if it wasn’t for me.’
‘Good cop, now?’
Carlin snorted. ‘Fuck, no. My plan hasn’t much changed, girl. And if there’s anything worthwhile in this house you can tell me about – for example, a tucked-away hard drive packed with incriminating evidence – that’d be tops.’ He paused. Maggie said nothing. He shrugged and continued. ‘Still relying on the storage unit, then. Let’s hurry up and get you somewhere safe so I can find it. It’s just lucky that whatever conscience most will tell you I don’t have happens to line up with my self-interest. I don’t want you dying or arrested, and that means I need to help you get clear and get well. Either you trust me to take you somewhere relatively safe, or I’ll leave you for the cops or Townsend or both. That ain’t blackmail. It’s just what it is.’
Maggie rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling. ‘Who are you working for?’
‘I’m not,’ Carlin said. ‘The hard drive incriminates somebody I want incriminated. Now, are you coming or not?’
She closed her eyes again and exhaled. She wasn’t getting far alone, and if Carlin was about to betray her, then he had her in the perfect corner for whoever was paying the most.
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