by Jaye Ford
The last time Phil spoke to his cousin was at Stuart’s mother’s funeral. Stuart had talked about some groundbreaking research he was working on, something about human trials, being on the verge of multi-million-dollar grants and making a valuable contribution to science.
‘I couldn’t get a handle on what it was all about,’ Phil said. ‘Couldn’t tell if he was really smart or I was really stupid. And it turns out he was only a research student and his own father couldn’t get home from Europe for his funeral.’
Carly knew nothing about psychology but after hearing Phil’s stories, she’d found terms on the internet like ‘antisocial behaviour’, ‘narcissism’ and ‘self-serving cognitive distortions’ and figured there was probably an explanation there somewhere.
She’d suggested to Phil that the ropes and harnesses left in Stuart’s apartment be donated to his caving team – the Polaroid camera that had been stowed in a backpack she’d smashed and thrown away. After meeting two of his friends in the storage room one afternoon, watching as they picked over the equipment, Carly had understood a little more about Stuart.
‘It’s good gear,’ one of them told her.
‘So you guys worked with Stuart?’ she’d asked.
They told her they’d been pharmacology research students with him. The conversation got complicated with medical references but Carly got the gist. There were a number of long-term projects being run at the uni and an opportunity for students to shift between them, depending on funding levels. Two got her attention. The first was to do with developing new delivery methods for inhaled medicines – according to Stuart’s friends, there were several devices that were proving promising that they’d tested on themselves. The other was a comparative study on psychoactive properties in drugs, comparing manufactured substances to ones produced by plants. Carly remembered Stuart’s words in the tunnel, telling her she’d had consistently good responses, especially with the plant derivatives. Her assumption was that he’d made use of the plant-based and manufactured drugs being tested in the research and done his own comparisons on his human lab rats in the warehouse.
Both of Stuart’s friends were students and cavers, and Carly wondered if they knew what he’d been doing, or even if they’d been up in the ceiling with him. Stuart had told Carly he’d found that particular dream experience fucking mind-blowing and she’d speculated whether the three of them had trialled the drugs together – and whether one of them had broken Nate’s jaw. But both were a little like Stuart, not even close to brawny or thug-like, and Stuart had access to powerful drugs. She figured it was more likely he’d made other friends, the kind that had a market for his concoctions – and who knew how to use a metal rod on a man’s head.
By three o’clock, Carly had convinced everyone to go home. Except Nate, who was sitting on the new dining table swinging his legs when she returned. ‘Clean the table or reassemble the bed?’ he asked.
‘Am I insane?’ she replied. ‘Hosting a dinner party for eight the day I move house?’
‘Yes.’ He caught her with his feet, pulled her between his thighs and kissed her.
The police had conducted a door-to-door canvass of residents after Stuart was found, asking what they’d seen or heard in the days before his fall. Nate was in Carly’s apartment when Constable Dean Quentin came by.
‘I was here for the interviews, thought I’d talk to you myself,’ Dean told her, filling her threshold again.
Carly didn’t know if the body in the ventilation shaft had made him wonder about her story, but she invited him in like an old acquaintance, introduced him to Nate, his face still bruised and swollen, his knee surgery scheduled for the next day. They’d sat around her low table with coffee and some of Christina’s muffins.
That was five days after she’d climbed out of the ceiling filthy and shaking and shocked. True to his word, Nate hadn’t asked what had happened up there. Carly had told him, though, the next morning, after she’d scrubbed her skin raw and slept all night – a deep, black, uninterrupted slumber. And after they’d made love in the loft, naked and brazen, because Carly – the Carly she’d found in the darkness – refused to be shamed by the man who’d watched them. With no attempt to rewrite it or defend it, she’d told Nate everything. Then she’d told him how she wanted it to end.
Perhaps she had no right to decide. Perhaps the other victims had a right to cry and rail, make statements to police and talk about it, have nightmares and appointments with psychologists, be the subject of media scrutiny and targets for internet trolls, and never feel safe in their homes. But Stuart was dead, he couldn’t answer for his sins … and Carly knew what it was like to survive, how it felt to have her pain part of a collective memory, and how a person could lose their life without dying. And she thought Stuart’s victims deserved to keep what he tried to take for himself – their privacy.
Yes, it was for Carly, too. She didn’t want this on her record – the climbing around in the ceiling, the photos and drugs, the kick that had launched Stuart into the ventilation shaft. Charges, a trial, possibly a prison term. Nate didn’t give her an answer until Dean Quentin put questions to him.
‘I don’t remember much from around then. I was in the hospital with this.’ Nate pointed to the mass of bruising.
‘What about on the Wednesday?’ Dean asked.
‘I came home that day. Discharged myself early.’
‘So you were here?’
‘Yeah. With Carly. She told me I was an idiot then lined up the DVDs and kept me company.’ Nate looked at her, beside him on her sofa. ‘You worked on an assignment for a while, too.’
‘Yes, up at the table, sorting out those notecards.’ She smiled, relieved for her friends, for every resident in the warehouse. And for the look in Nate’s eyes that said he knew he hadn’t let her drown.
When Carly walked Dean out, he’d paused at the door. ‘I wanted to ask you a few more questions. On your own.’
She wondered then if he’d figured it out – the break-ins, no fingerprints, a man falling down a ventilation shaft. ‘Sure.’
‘How are you now? Last time we spoke you weren’t so good.’
The humiliating scene in the police station – she knew now the scratches were from Stuart and his drugs had still been in her bloodstream. Carly took a second to look embarrassed. ‘Yeah, that day. I’m sorry about that. I took your advice and got myself in to see someone, a psychologist here in Newcastle, and some meds.’ She hoped he didn’t ask who. ‘I’m feeling good and I’m all settled in and life is better now. Thanks for being nice when I was completely weird.’
He nodded, checking her over like he had on dark, scary nights. ‘I’m glad you got it sorted. It’s a better ending.’
‘It is, you’re right.’
Carly hadn’t been able to bring herself to get back into the ceiling while Stuart’s body was there, but a day after the police finished their interviews she climbed the ladder again. For two weeks, before and after classes, while Nate recovered from surgery, she trawled the entire ventilation system, checking every vent opening, removing every trace of Stuart. She’d found a file box above Christina’s apartment and a second one above her own, with photos of a woman with tight, dark curls – Talia. Carly emptied the contents of every one she found, prised off the latches and glued down the lids. Then she’d stood on Nate’s balcony and burned the photos and notecards in his barbecue.
At Carly’s first official meeting as supervisor, the body corporate had approved her suggestion that, in the wake of Stuart’s death, the vents be permanently secured down. Who would have guessed the apartments were open to anyone who decided to crawl around up there?
Dakota arrived for dinner first, bringing her new man, Bruno, and a huge bunch of flowers. ‘I wasn’t sure if these were what you wanted,’ she told Carly as she handed them over. ‘But they’re beautiful, aren’t they?’
A few weeks ago, when Carly told her about the supervisor’s job, Dakota had laughed. ‘Well, that
wasn’t on the list.’ Her kohl-lined eyes had widened at Carly’s news that she was going back to uni when she’d finished the small business certificate. ‘Wow, that’s serious.’
‘It’s not a disease.’
‘It’s seriously cool, though. So what will you do when you’ve got a social science degree?’
‘I’m still not sure.’
‘Excellent. The Big Long List lives on.’
They were all there by seven fifteen. While Bernard poured drinks, Christina glanced warily at Dakota’s thigh-high boots and the streaks that were now green, then patted her own neat hair as Dakota exclaimed how lovely her natural silver was. Dietrich, who it turned out also spoke Italian, shared a foreign-tongued joke with Bruno. Brooke swapped physio stories with Nate.
He wasn’t going back to the oil rig, and not because of his knee. It would be okay in time, according to his surgeon, but Nate didn’t want to leave now. He’d told Carly, he wanted to spend time with her. It was the closest they’d got to putting a name to what was between them. And that was fine, Carly thought. She was more interested in watching the changes in him, a slow and gradual shedding of his grimness, as though he was making sure the disaster was over, that he was on solid ground and no one had been left behind.
‘The lilies are gorgeous on the new table,’ Christina said, touching a fingertip to a pink bloom. ‘And Elizabeth’s vase is the perfect shape for them, isn’t it? Lovely her niece insisted you keep it. Lilies are what you bought for Elizabeth before … after … well, the ones she was so pleased about. She’d be tickled to see them here like this tonight, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, I think she would be,’ Carly said, glad Christina had remembered.
As her guests filled the seats around her table, Carly delivered platters of food and topped up wineglasses, enjoying the sense that they were here for her, knowing what she’d done for them, and that the knowledge was all she needed. Working her way around the table, she wondered again why she’d woken when others hadn’t and why Stuart had kept coming back to her loft after she’d reported the break-ins. Questions she’d never have answers for.
Talia, she guessed, had been trying to figure out what had been going on, but Carly wouldn’t be asking her – if that memory was something else Talia had lost in the accident, she should be allowed to live without it.
Carly’s memories of those long, shadowy tunnels had been transported into her dreams, new images added to her subconscious arsenal. And on nights when she tossed and turned or paced the apartment, she thought about all her years of restless, interrupted, uneasy sleep and whether they had made her respond differently to Stuart.
Or whether fate had just given her a chance to redeem herself.
Had she? Carly couldn’t answer that. All she knew was that she’d lain on the edge of another cliff, thrown something poisonous into its depth and waited for remorse and reproach to come back and engulf her – and they hadn’t. She’d waited six weeks and all she felt was firmer, stronger and less afraid.
Carly took her place at the head of the table and raised her voice. ‘I’d like to make a toast to my second beginning here with some wise words from Elizabeth.’ She lifted her glass, waited until the others had joined her. ‘Life is a long time.’
Like Elizabeth, Carly had changed her life. She was a friend and a lover now, things she’d denied herself and which now felt like gifts. She was a student again and an employee, although her role as supervisor felt more like a duty of care than a job, one that she was happy to have. Perhaps one she’d always wanted but had failed so badly to fulfil in Burden.
And she was a killer, she’d taken four lives. If she included the three babies that fate had stolen from her, there were seven souls on her account.
Carly understood now that she didn’t kill Debs, Jenna and Adam, not in the decisive way she’d ended Stuart’s life. The four of them had shared the decisions that took them over that ledge but Carly knew she was responsible for how it finished, as much for the fact that she was alive to bear the burden.
She tried not to lie to herself about Stuart. She killed him and she meant to do it. It helped that he’d intended to murder her, that he’d admitted his part in Elizabeth’s death and Talia’s accident, that her friends and neighbours were now safe. But she was guilty of taking a life – it didn’t cause her a lot of uneasiness, though.
She felt bad for that, mostly for what it said about her: that she could kill and walk away.
Would she do it again? She wanted to say no, that she’d seen enough death, that she would make better, worthier choices – but she wasn’t going to lie about that either. The truth was she would if she had to. The difference now was that she knew she could do it and live with herself.
Acknowledgements
Some books are more difficult to write than others and this one had more than its share of obstacles. I am massively grateful to my publisher Bev Cousins for wading through the mountain of words I sent her, finding the story I was trying to tell and pulling it back on track when I thought it had already fallen off a cliff. Many thanks also to editor Kathryn Knight for a smooth and happy process after the months of agonising, and to Virginia Grant for running her eyes over another one of my manuscripts.
Thank you once again to the rest of the Random House team for another fabulous cover and for the work behind the scenes to get this book onto shelves, around the internet and into readers’ hands.
Many thanks to my agent Clare Forster for her work on my behalf, and her much appreciated support and advice – and the nice occasional face-to-face chat when we manage to be in the same city.
Research is always fun, as much for the people whose brains I get to pick. Thanks to Sam Findley who helped out again on this one – I always enjoy talking travel, police and murder over coffee. Thanks also to Darren Shepherd for talking me through the job of a patrol officer and letting me run a few of the early crazy ideas past him, some of which made it into the book. Also to Robyn and Jenny for the tour around the fabulous renovated warehouse that became the inspiration for Darkest Place.
To my writing friends – a huge thankyou to Louise Reynolds for the Friday afternoon emails that started as a plotting experiment and ended up getting me through a rough patch. A big hug to Julia Nalbach for brainstorming ideas in random moments and seeing the best in a messy draft. My writing family – Chris, Isolde, Elizabeth, Melinda, Kandy, Carla, Simone and Carol – as always, it would be harder without you guys. And to the friends I didn’t see while I was hunkered down finishing this book – thanks for being patient.
Many thanks to Anne Long for donating her name to Darkest Place and, in doing so, raising money for the Hunter Westpac Rescue Helicopter Service.
And finally to all my family, who had to put up with me during the difficult process of writing this story. In particular, to Mark for using his engineering skills to help design the Darkest Place warehouse and once again making sure my fictional building won’t fall down in a stiff breeze (any mistakes are mine). To Claire for being a sounding board on too many versions of this story and not once rolling her eyes. And to Paul, who has always supported my dream of being a writer and then got stuck with living with an author on deadline. Thanks for reminding me to get out of the office, encouraging me to think of other things, listening and nodding and sometimes just nodding, and for enduring this one without complaint. I couldn’t do it without you.
Jaye Ford is the author of five chilling suspense novels: Beyond Fear, Scared Yet?, Blood Secret, Already Dead and Darkest Place. Beyond Fear won Best Debut and Readers’ Choice at the 2012 Sisters in Crime Davitt Awards. Under the name Janette Paul, she is also the author of the bestselling romantic comedy Just Breathe (available in ebook only). Her books have been published in nine languages.
Jaye is a former news and sport journalist, who worked in radio, print and television and was the first woman to host a live national sports show on Australian television. She ran her own PR business before turni
ng to crime fiction.
She lives on the shores of Lake Macquarie in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales.
Also by Jaye Ford
Beyond Fear
Scared Yet?
Blood Secret
Already Dead
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Darkest Place
ePub ISBN – 9780857985958
First published by Bantam in 2016
Copyright © Jaye Ford 2016
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