Fall

by Candice Fox

  It was an entertaining little test. Hades would stand on the doorstep of his little shack on the hill and look out over the fields, the trucks bumbling along in the distance spewing their black smoke into the air, and try to remember where he had buried this body or that one – and how deep. Ah yes, over there, by the fence behind the car shed, he’d buried the skinny rapist Denny ‘the Preacher’ Mills. East of the Sorting Centre, he’d planted Sharon the black widow. And just last week, in the north quadrant, he’d sunk some junkie punk whose name he never learned. He had felt a twinge in his back as he loaded the boy’s body onto the front of the digger.

  In a way, what Hades did was a lot like gardening. He’d heard gardening was good for retirees.

  That evening, as the old man watched the sun falling behind the round grey mountains of trash, he felt a certain pulling in his chest which told him that for all his activities, his gardening and his memory games, there was still something lacking in his life. There was only so much organising a man could do before there was nothing left to arrange. His nightly meals were cooked and frozen – hearty containers of lamb stew and shepherd’s pies and soy chicken stir-frys in their dozens. He was well into his next artistic project – a mighty wolf assembled out of hundreds of discarded black Singer sewing machines. Lots of welding work. Time-consuming and dangerous. But when he’d done all that, there was an unsettling stillness left behind. It was then that Hades let his eyes wander from the horizon and spied the men gathered down the hill beside the last truck to come in.

  As the old man reached the bottom of the hill, one of the men turned away from the gathering and walked by Hades swiftly. Hades was surprised to see the grimy character had tears in his eyes. His fluorescent orange vest was spattered with all manner of tip muck – garbage juice, ink, paint, grease. Hades said nothing to the young man. You didn’t acknowledge a man in his weak moments. Hades edged his way into the gathering.

  All heads were bowed. At first Hades thought the object of their attention was a young kangaroo. The dog had the bony, elongated figure of a gangly joey. But the colour was wrong and so was the size. The animal was the sunburned caramel of ice-cream topping and milk-chested, a mixed-breed thing with a long snout and a pink nose. It was far too thin for how long it was. In fact, it was starved beyond anything Hades had ever seen, and he’d seen the dingoes that frequented the tip get down to bones and leather during the wintertime when the tip seagulls went back to the shores and wild cats were hard to come by.

  The dog’s lips were puckered inwards, and its hips were a collection of intricate spikes and ridges pushing up against skin. It was lying lifeless, white eyes bugging from its skull. An open garbage bag lay beside it, spewing its contents onto the ground.

  A second man in the gathering walked away.

  ‘There’s got to be something in here,’ one of the men said. Hades looked up and saw him rummaging through a garbage bag identical to the one the dog had obviously been pulled from. ‘There’ll be a bill with an address. A piece of paper. Something.’

  Hades looked around as the men started rifling through the bags. Three of them remained, staring down at the dog.

  ‘You do it,’ one of them said to another.

  ‘I can’t fucking do it.’

  Hades bent down. He heard his knees pop and crack as he lowered himself beside the animal. To his surprise, the chain of furry bone links jutting from the dog’s hindquarters began to quiver, then to wag. Hades put his hand on the animal’s cheek, smoothed its hairless leather ear back over its bony head. The dog was colder than a live animal should have been. Its tail continued wagging.

  ‘Someone’s gotta do it,’ a man said. ‘We can’t just leave it like this. It’s cruel.’

  ‘Here. Here. Look. An address. I’ve got a fucking address in Lavender Bay. Let’s go. Let’s get the fucking pricks.’

  ‘It might come good,’ Hades said, more to himself than to the men around him. ‘You never know.’

  The men watched as Hades eased his big hands under the dog’s hips and shoulders, gathered the thing into his arms. It weighed less than a child might. The dog was long. Its impossibly narrow legs dangled limply over his arm, its head lolling. Hades looked at the faces of his workers as he got to his feet, each wavering helplessly between fury and despair, then he turned and laboured up the hill towards his shack.

  That night Hades sat on the floor of his tiny kitchen, his favourite things from the tip adorning the walls all around him. Taxidermied birds and framed dried flowers. Ten pocket watches hanging from their chains in one corner of the ceiling. Polished, renewed, ticking with life again, their engraved tributes reflecting in the light of several mismatched lamps. To Sam, On Your Graduation.

  The dog lay in Hades’ arms in a bundle of blankets and looked at all the things above him, not having expected, Hades imagined, to see anything again after the inside of the garbage bag.

  Plenty of things had come good for Hades out of the bottom of garbage bags over the years. The secret, he always believed, was seeing the potential when all was apparently lost. Potential was a sly thing. It hid in the darkest of places. When the dog wagged its tail at the centre of the circle of men gathered at the bottom of the hill, Hades had seen that potential. He’d smiled to himself. Now he held the dog to his chest, looked at his watch and decided it could have more water. He took the plastic syringe he’d found in his medical cabinet, filled it with water from the glass sitting on the linoleum beside him and squirted a little on the dog’s hairy lips. Slowly, weakly, the beast awakened from its half-delirium and began to lap.

  It would be a long night, but Hades had nothing better to do.

  Imogen Stone liked money, and she liked murder, and there was nothing wrong with that. If she’d been able to pass the intake for the police academy, she’d happily have been a homicide detective, like her boyfriend, the murder-police poster boy Detective Frank Bennett. But she’d been young all those times she applied, and once the stain of her late teenage ‘narcissistic tendencies’ and ‘lack of life experience’ had been recognised in the personality test, they stayed with her through all her subsequent applications. She’d outperformed on the aptitude tests, but this couldn’t shadow what the psychological report called her ‘grandiose sense of self’. It was ridiculous.

  At the time, eighteen years old and quick to anger, she hadn’t known what these terms meant. So she started researching how they were applied in psychology, and then started working towards disguising them, so that never again would they stand in the way of what she wanted. She became more reserved. More studied. She cultivated ‘shy’ and ‘sweet’. She played down the apparent ‘overconfidence’ she’d displayed in the academy interviews. She got so good at understanding her own psychological dysfunctions that she fell in love with the science of it. Being a cop psychologist was as close as she could get to that old dream of being the crime fighter, of rubbing shoulders with truly dangerous people, both in and out of the job – not just pretenders – and she’d whizzed through the interviews for that role. But sitting there day after day in her leather armchair under the city windows, putting the pieces of broken cops back together, had done nothing for her narcissism.

  Imogen loved herself.

  In the end, it was impossible not to. Imogen had taken her one and only failure in life and turned it into a thriving success. Sydney’s boys in blue looked to her as their saviour. They itched and twitched for her wisdom. It was Imogen they thought of deep in the night when sleep evaded them, sitting in the icy light of the bathroom, more comfortable among the razors and scissors than they were in their own beds next to their wives. It was Imogen they called. She was their triple-O. The first time she counselled one of the old boys who’d rejected her application as a young woman, she’d truly known what power was. Sitting there listening to him cry, she burned silently with hateful pleasure.

  And then her first murder case. The missing Cherry boy.

  George Cherry, eight, had gone miss
ing as so many little angels go missing, on a walk home from school, the shark-infested waters between the classroom and home where the number of kids getting into cars and walking hand in hand with adults masks the hunt of society’s nastiest. At first it was assumed the boy’s estranged father had him. As happens so often, the critical first hours focused on the wrong man. Hours in the interrogation tank. More hours turning over the family home. Panic after the first lead failed, scrambling, stupid moves, roughing up the town’s resident kiddie-fiddlers and the cultivation of myths in the media. More interviews. More rummaging through drawers and leading dogs around tiny yards. Little George Cherry tumbled through the cracks. But he landed in the minds of his three pursuing detectives and they never forgot him, no matter how hard they tried. Imogen had been counselling the detectives for four years before her curiosity was piqued. Home alone one night and bored out of her mind, she went online on a sheer whim and the first thing her eyes beheld on FindGeorgie.com was blazing red lettering announcing a two hundred thousand dollar reward.

  Imogen had taken on the case. And Imogen didn’t lose.

  She also didn’t follow the rules. She didn’t fill in reports. She didn’t respect privacy. Imogen was all about winning, and in some dark corner of her mind she knew this was because all her life she’d been terrified of ending up like her father. A thirty-year veteran of the same security firm. A pencil-thin, hopeless man, the butt of his friends’ jokes. Imogen’s father was all she had, and she’d spent too many childhood afternoons watching him clearing up paper plates and empty beer bottles while his mates stood around the fire pit in the backyard of their suburban rental, munching damp bread and laughing globs of it into the grass. When he died, Imogen discovered a funeral plan for the old man that provided funds for a ceremony so lavish, so extravagant, it appeared he’d been contributing to it all his working life. Imogen hadn’t accessed even half the funds for the ceremony she organised. As she’d predicted, only eight people attended.

  Imogen was her own crime-fighting superhero. She didn’t mind bending the law to get what she wanted, and that was what made Imogen so good at the armchair-detective game. Dr Stone put herself on the Cherry case and eight months later was leading a squad down an embankment on the Murray River to the child’s bones. She didn’t let them mention her name in the paper. That would have been narcissistic. Grandiose.

  Imogen had found something better than public recognition. She’d found murder money.

  After the first case, she was hooked. She began hunting across the internet for cold cases she could conceivably solve, or at least contribute to, gaining a tasty share of the reward money. Sometimes it required her to do some unethical things. She wandered around in restricted-access police archive rooms. Now and then she carefully plugged her clients for details on their cases, making them reveal things that wouldn’t necessarily be therapeutic in their revealing. She cultivated a network of administrative assistants, lab technicians and secretaries who now and then slipped her the information she needed. It wasn’t ethical – but it wasn’t hurting anybody. She told herself that all good detectives bent the rules.

  Imogen was far more powerful as an armchair detective than she might ever have been as a cop. Sometimes it made her feel sorry for people like Frank, with his constant phone calls about reports, warrants, codes, legislations – crime-scene handling and the endless, endless discussion of contamination. Contamination of crime scenes. Contamination of impartiality. Contamination of witnesses. Frank’s work in homicide had turned him into a physical and metaphorical germophobe. He wrapped the tasteless chicken and mayo sandwiches he took to work like they were radioactive. He wouldn’t talk about anything related to his cases, wouldn’t give her those tasty little tidbits she needed to fuel the hungry, voyeuristic thing inside her. Not until she begged him, anyway.

  Imogen was no germophobe. She got as dirty as she could in her perfect hobby. She loved the feel of grit beneath her nails from digging and digging for truth, like a happy little mole.

  After the Cherry boy, there’d been a few other half- and quarter-reward jobs, but nothing that had excited her like seeing the forensics team break earth above the boy’s grave, the dig marked out on her coordinates, on her intelligence. She solved the mystery. She caught the bad guy. She hadn’t felt that same exhilaration since. But now, sitting outside Maggie Harold’s house, Imogen believed she could feel that rush again.

  She folded the map in her lap and looked at the dusty windows of the little hovel outside Scone. Mynah birds tussled over territory on the lawn, hopping angrily in the grass, kicking up dust. It was dry out here. A nowhere place dotted with tiny towns where everyone knew everyone, punctuating huge distances where no one knew anyone at all. The house had been difficult to find, but now that she had, Imogen wasn’t leaving until she was certain the woman calling herself Eden’s biological grandmother was revealed as a fraud. One at a time, slowly but surely, Imogen would tick off all the lies of Frank’s partner, reveal her for what she really was. The missing Tanner girl.

  By the time she dropped this on the homicide department, there would be no keeping Imogen’s name out of the paper. Eden Archer would be her greatest catch.

  Eden’s mistakes at Rye Farm had left her with much more than a slit belly, though that was the worst of her physical injuries by far. The incision the killer made began just above her belly button and travelled upwards, deep enough to completely ruin all core strength she had previously possessed but blessedly not deep enough to spill her guts. In the violence before this injury, she had her nose broken, four teeth cracked, tendons permanently ruined in her neck and her left eye socket fractured. She compressed a disc in her lower back falling from the twine that had suspended her in the pig kill sheds.

  All of these things took time, and money, to fix. Some things Eden knew would never be right, not in the days in the hospital, or the weeks in the rehab clinic, or the hours she spent on massage tables trying to repair ruined bits of herself. Eden had trusted one of her attackers, a foolish young girl she thought she might be able to help. It would be the last time Eden let the human part of her grow through the cement cracks – that struggling, pesky weed had almost got her killed.

  She had let herself enjoy the company of another human being, feel genuinely connected. The girl’s laughter, her touch, her big, trusting eyes. Eden was shocked how easily she’d accepted the lies of another monster. It was frightening to realise that there were hunters out there even more skilled at killing than she was. Masters of disguise even she couldn’t pick.

  Never again. She would trust no one. She would let no one in. One person, and one person alone would touch her, and it would be Merri, her massage therapist. That was it.

  By the time Eden arrived at Pearl Massage in Vaucluse that evening she’d reverted to using both her aluminium crutches. The day had been nothing but waiting, but it had weighed on her shoulders so hard that she now walked bent in the torso, her neck twisted slightly to the side. Her eye socket throbbed. She and Frank had stood by the secondary crime scene for four hours while tyre tracks and footprints were cast, photographed and collected. Slowly, details about the girl at the park began to flood through their mobiles as forensics, photographers, beat cops and secondary detectives phoned in. They sat side by side, taking down details in their notebooks, pointing with their pens when something relevant came up. Ivana Lyon. Twenty-three. Flight attendant. Strangulation. Blunt force. Single. No bad relationships. No kids. Apartment. Coogee. No indications of SA.

  No indications of sexual assault. Eden paused at that one and tapped the paper a few times with her pen. She waved at Frank, the phone hot and wet with sweat in her fingers, and underlined the words. He frowned, but no time had presented itself throughout the day to discuss what that meant.

  Eden thumped into Merri’s brightly lit salon and received silent glances from three of the nail artists grinding at the fingernails of their middle-aged clients. Merri came out from the back room and s
miled at her, all dazzling white teeth. She was a short woman, Thai, the hard, high shoulder pads of her black jacket making her look like a tiny war general, a Napoleon with painted eyebrows far too long and square to appear even close to real. Merri was a brutal woman. Her words to the young nail girls were short, sharp and loud. One of the girls flew from her client, dropping her tools on the white towel on the table, and began making Eden a herbal tea.

  ‘Darl-eeng,’ Merri said, taking Eden’s arm in her cold, hard hands. ‘You need help. You come. You come now.’

  ‘I do. Thanks.’

  Eden followed the little woman into the candlelit back room. She stripped to her underpants in the warm glow, breathed in the lavender incense choking the oxygen out of the room. She lay on the towels and sighed, trying to control the physical twitches that always began when she knew she was about to be touched, the quivering in her calves, the chemical desire to flee. Merri gathered her long black hair, rolled it and tucked it into a towel. Merri was a small woman, but she was strong. It had taken Eden a long time to find someone who would push her as hard as she needed to find relief. She needed to go well beyond a normal client’s pain barrier. Far enough that the pain cancelled out all else – the worry and confusion over Ivana Lyon, the image of her ruined face on the grass.

  ‘Afterwards, we talk, darl-eeng,’ Merri said lowly, positioning Eden’s feet at the end of the bench.

  ‘Talk?’ Eden lifted her head from the towel. ‘About what?’

  ‘Not now. We talk after. We fix you first.’

  ‘No, tell me. What are we talking about?’

  ‘You quiet,’ Merri said and forced her knuckle into Eden’s sole. Eden felt the heavy air rush into her, let it ease out as she relaxed back onto the bench. It was never long enough. She needed to focus on every second.