Fall

by Candice Fox

  Imogen inferred two things from this. One, that Sue Harold did not own any mementos of Eden and Eric’s early life because she had not, in fact, been there to experience it. Two, the records Maggie had were pristine and contained in the same envelope because they’d never been removed from said envelope, because they were fakes. There was no proving either of these things beyond reasonable doubt, however. Imogen had thanked the old woman, sweetly enjoyed a cup of tea beneath the stained-glass windows of her little house in Scone, fondling the plastic tablecloth, avoiding eye contact. Why didn’t Maggie have any mementos of her grandchildren? she asked. Any photographs? Any children’s books she’d read to them before Sue handed them off to their father? They’d not been close, the old woman said. Her daughter had always been unstable. Flighty. All over the country chasing men. The ancient woman’s eyes wandered the walls, evasive, a little nervous. Imogen thanked her and left.

  Imogen spread out the photographs she had of Eden Archer – one leaving her huge boutique apartment and studio in Balmain, one of the beautiful detective getting her nails done at a local salon, one of her standing outside the Parramatta headquarters smoking a cigarette. Eden hadn’t been a smoker when Imogen began tailing her – had something rattled her? Did she feel herself being watched? Eden had slipped away over the weekend, out from under Imogen’s watchful eye. Did something happen? Did she know, in fact, who she was – was she willing to protect her secret, if that’s what it was?

  As the story went, Sue Harold had dumped Eden and Eric off on their biological father, Heinrich ‘Hades’ Archer, when the girl was seven and the boy was nine – the exact ages that Morgan and Marcus Tanner were when they were abducted. The two grew up in the care of the decidedly older parent at the Utulla tip, surrounded by mountains of the city’s discarded household waste – and, it was rumoured, the city’s discarded souls. Eden’s father was an interesting character. An underworld figure seemingly retired when the two children arrived, living the quiet life in his garbage wonderland. If he had been the one responsible for organising the Tanner murders, why on earth did he keep the children?

  Imogen unfolded all the news reports she had on the Tanner case and spread them over the top of the photographs of Eden, a layer of black and grey sadness. The joyous faces of the Tanner parents on their wedding day, his hand on the belly of her pristine satin dress, lips by her ear. A whisper, a laugh. Had Marcus, or Eric, been in there, already conceived? A cheeky secret, the doctor and the artist knocking boots before the formalities, before the families approved of the union. The faces of the children in close-cropped pictures beneath the heavy headlines: BROKEN GLASS, SHATTERED LIVES – INSIDE THE TANNER FAMILY MURDERS.

  Theories swirled through the papers, of Dr Tanner’s academic rivals worldwide, his incredibly flush research funds, Mrs Tanner’s questionable friends during her youth. Some were sure the two children had been snatched up to be sold into international sex rings – they’d appeared with their father in a photograph in Scientist Weekly, looking like beautiful, vulnerable porcelain dolls. Had someone fallen in love with the two of them there on the cover beside Daddy? Morgan’s shy, downturned eyes, Marcus’ devilish grin at the camera.

  There had been four to six men involved in the incident at the Long Jetty house, when the children’s parents had been slain and the children disappeared off the face of the earth. Bikies, the police insinuated, had been the ones who did it – smash-and-grab kidnappings were decidedly their style. But how did this connect to Hades Archer? The old man had never been involved with bikies. And using hired muscle to do his dirty work wasn’t him either. He’d always been a sort of gentleman overlord, a fixer of problems and mediator of disputes, too high up, too detached, to hire people to go after the petty cash of a civilian couple staying with their kidlets at their overly extravagant, barely used holiday house. The whole thing made no sense.

  WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN? the headlines roared.

  Bikies were the scapegoats, Imogen decided. An international sex ring was a long shot. But so was Imogen’s growing sense that the two had been adopted by Hades Archer, raised as his own to be police officers, unaware – or perhaps tight-lipped – about the lives they had lived before. The Tanner family fortune had remained untouched. If it was an unsuccessful murderous kidnapping, why would Eden and Eric remain quiet about it? Is that why Eric had been killed? Had he been on the cusp of revealing everything?

  Senseless. Senseless. Imogen stared at her untouched coffee, at the foam top adhering to the edge of her cup in caramel clouds. The whole thing was senseless – but she had faith that the right clue would fit all the pieces together. Imogen had always loved puzzles. She never let one defeat her.

  No matter how little you have to present in a crime report to the captain, you always present it passionately. That’s the rule. If all you’ve got going from a twenty-person train carriage massacre is a toothpick maybe or maybe not chewed by the guy sitting next to the alleged killer, you present that toothpick like it contains the secrets not only to the crime you’re trying to solve but possibly the missing link in evolution, the world food shortage and next week’s Lotto numbers. If you come up bare and you’re not too confident about alleviating that bareness anytime soon, you’re asking to be removed from the case, hurled headfirst into the drug squad or something equally thankless, and usurped by someone younger, someone with a bit more hunger for that mystical cup of justice. It’s all politics and public relations. You’ve got to look mean and keen or they’re going to throw the bone to another dog.

  Eden seemed to forget this. She sat beside me in Captain James’ office staring at the floor while I squirmed around trying to talk about stuff I knew nothing about – barbiturates and gas-powered guns and running apps.

  We had four seconds of footage of the Domain victim, Minerva Hall. She was stumbling and falling, righting herself just as she left the frame. There was no indication of whether she’d simply tripped or if this was the moment she’d been hit with the dart. We had a witness saying she might have seen a white van at the Ashfield crime scene, and that possibly there was some yelling or screaming coming from inside the van, but she wasn’t entirely sure it hadn’t been a blue van playing music. She’d only ventured into the area in the first place because it was a nice secluded spot to shoot up heroin.

  I nipped at Eden for assistance during the briefing but she didn’t react. Just sat there thinking. I grabbed her in the corridor outside the captain’s office when he finally – reluctantly – let us get on with it. Sometimes physically touching Eden is the only way to get her to acknowledge you. She goes into these reveries which you couldn’t get her out of with less than the blow of a mallet.

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she shrugged. ‘I’m tired. Jesus. Lay off.’

  ‘No, you’re not right.’ I held on when she tried to wrestle her bicep free of my grip. ‘You haven’t been right since you got out of the hospital. You’re limping around without your crutches and you’re staring at walls. Is there something we need to talk about?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you hooked on something?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know I got hooked on Endone. It was easy. Ridiculously easy.’

  ‘I know. I was there.’ She peeled my fingers off her. ‘I don’t need you mothering me.’ She began walking. I followed her, keeping close, to shut our words out of the ears of the beat cops who were all around us. Beat cops love rumours. They feed off them, like parasites.

  ‘I reckon I remember saying the very same thing to you when I got hooked and you tried to mother me.’

  ‘I wasn’t mothering you, Frank. I was trying to get you in touch with reality. It still hasn’t worked.’

  ‘This isn’t a reflection on you. On your … I don’t know. The whole ice queen thing you carry on with.’

  ‘Frank, if you don’t –’

  ‘Eden –’

  ‘If you don’t drop this I’m go
ing to hurt you.’ She whirled around and shoved a finger in my face, her back teeth locked. ‘I’m going to punch you, hard, right in your fucking head. I’m not hooked on anything. I’m not hiding anything and I don’t need your help. Back. Off. Frank.’

  I let her walk on a couple of steps ahead of me. Felt better. The flashing in her eyes had definitely been the old Eden. The deadly Eden I knew. Well, sort of knew. Was familiar with. I was pleased to know she was still in there, inside the strange storm-cloudy exterior she had adopted. She went to her desk and started pushing things around assertively. I slowly, carefully, perched on the edge of the desk, out of the range of her swing.

  ‘Let’s run with the tranquilliser thing then,’ I said.

  ‘I’m waiting to hear back from my source.’

  ‘You’ve got a tranquilliser source?’ I scoffed. Eden ignored me, did some things on her computer.

  I looked up and saw Hooky walking towards us with a manila folder in her hands. She dragged a chair up from an adjacent desk and sat right beside Eden, a funny little lizard sidling up next to a lion. Her outfit was right in line with the strange rock-punk Japanese goth thing she’d been doing since I met her – leather pants I’d never have let my seventeen-year-old walk out the door in, a floppy waist-length shimmering green shirt covered in beads and spangles and little pieces of mirror. A bone through one ear and a cross on a chain. Black fingerless gloves. Her nail polish was chipped where she’d chewed. She’d been a chewer since the early days after her parents were slaughtered. She used to sit by my desk while I worked on the case and chew my pens into fragments. Little slivers of blue and white.

  Eden barely gave her a glance.

  ‘Want some pictures?’ Hooky said.

  ‘How did you get in here?’ Eden asked, typing something, frowning at her screen.

  ‘I’ve got connections.’

  ‘Eden, this is Amy Hoo–’

  ‘I know who the girl is.’ Eden gave me a warning glance.

  ‘What pictures?’ I asked, trying to defuse something I was sure was about to erupt. Women and their little seismic trembles and twitches. I didn’t know what might go wrong here, but I didn’t need Eden and Imogen both going after Amy, especially if she was going to be this helpful. Hooky opened the folder and finally drew Eden’s attention. They were screenshots from Hooky’s personal computer. I recognised the minimised windows at the bottom of the screen. Chat rooms for under-sixteens. ‘Tweener Talk’ and ‘LolChat13+’. I hadn’t known the department was letting Hooky fish for predators on her personal computer. That seemed a bit much. Was she going out on her own? Was she freelancing? I opened my mouth to ask, but she cut me off.

  ‘I crowdsourced photos from around Centennial Park the evening Ivana Lyon was grabbed,’ Hooky said, spreading pages over the desk. ‘There were a total of forty-seven pictures uploaded to various social media sites in the hour before she was taken. Mostly selfies. But some shots of kids on the field at Queens Park.’

  Eden took the picture nearest to her. I leaned over to see it. It was a selfie of two South American girls in matching white running shirts with WeWill! printed on the chest.

  ‘WeWill! is a cancer research foundation. They raise money and awareness training people to be competitive runners,’ Hooky said. ‘They were having a training run there that evening. Lots of photos for the promo page.’

  ‘How did you get all these?’ I asked.

  ‘I did a geographical and time-based search of image files in the deep web.’

  I stared.

  ‘The deep web,’ Eden said to me. ‘The web behind the web. It’s like the backstage of a theatre production. Where the code that drives the surface internet lives.’

  I had nothing.

  ‘Never mind.’ Hooky grabbed the page from me. ‘Look here. See?’

  There was a white van parked behind a bush near the girls in the picture. The edges of the image were dark. I could see a slim figure dressed in black, blurred as it moved towards the front of the van. I picked up another image from the pile. Runners in the matching white shirts coming down the footpath beneath the trees. A shape crouching in the brush near them, still murky and pixilated, barely more than a smudge.

  ‘This is the best one,’ Hooky said. She showed me a photograph, another selfie, taken by a couple sitting on a park bench. The photo had been edited, lots of little love hearts spattered around their heads, the image tone cast in sepia. But behind them, passing between the trees, there was a figure walking. A black tracksuit. A hood pulled up over a bent head. The figure was right beside a ‘Do not feed the wildlife’ sign. If we could find the sign, the techs could use the photograph to calculate a bunch of things about the suspect. Height, stride distance, even gender maybe. They did some groundbreaking stuff with those types of calculations in pinning Bradley John Murdoch to the murder of Peter Falconio in the outback, using only a single streak of CCTV footage of Murdoch walking from his truck into a petrol station. It was tricky business, but in a single move Hooky had doubled what we had on the killer.

  ‘Good work, Hookleberry Hound.’ I grabbed her by the neck, rattled her skull. ‘Oh, she’s ruthless. Nothing slips by her.’

  Hooky clawed me off and shoved me hard. I wrestled with her a little. I know very well that Hooky hates being treated like a seventeen-year-old but sometimes I can’t help myself. She’s exactly as I’d have liked my own daughter to be. Feisty. Smart. I’d almost had a daughter once. If you play with Hooky long enough she gives in and wrestles you back, puts an elbow into your stomach and a foot in your hip. There’s still a kid in there. I take a sort of pride in being able to get it out.

  ‘Stop fucking around, the both of you.’ Eden gathered up the photographs and gave them back to Hooky, who was breathless, her clothes askew. ‘Get these to the tech department. See if you can get an original of the couple on the park bench. Frank and I’ll be out all day today, but you’ve got his number, haven’t you?’

  ‘I have.’ Hooky tucked the folder under her arm and left us, knocking my arm with hers as she went.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked Eden, gathering up my stuff. I patted my backside and found my phone was missing. I wondered if I’d left it in the coffee room.

  ‘To see a friend,’ she said. ‘I just got a text. He can see us.’

  ‘A friend? You’ve got a friend?’

  She didn’t answer, turned on me and left. Something twisted strangely in my stomach, some animalistic alert that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Eden had never mentioned having a girlfriend, a boyfriend, an acquaintance, a confidante. Anything. I might rightfully have assumed once that her brother and her father and I were the only human beings she’d ever consensually interacted with. I jogged back to the coffee room to get my phone and felt oddly light-headed, and the sensation carried on as I followed Eden out through the huge double doors in the foyer.

  It was a shock to run into Caroline Eckhart on the steps. She was dressed in immaculate running gear. I wondered if she owned anything else. Eden passed her without so much as an upward glance.

  ‘Mr Bennett,’ Caroline said. I offered my hand instinctively and she crushed it in hers so hard I was sure she meant to hurt me, to tell me something about my manhood. ‘I was hoping we could have a chat. I’m Caroline Eckhart.’

  ‘It’s Detective Inspector Bennett,’ I said, watching journalists jogging up the stairs behind her. ‘And I can’t imagine what we have to chat about.’

  ‘You men and your titles, huh?’ she quipped before the cameras arrived. I licked my teeth, made a sort of clicking sound. It was as close to a ‘fuck you’ as I thought I had time for.

  ‘I was at the Minerva Hall crime scene yesterday in the Domain.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I want to assist your investigation in any way I can.’ Caroline glanced at the cameras as they surrounded her, flipped her ponytail through her fingers and did a little head shake to assert herself. Shoulders back, chest out, chin up, ladi
es. ‘I believe the Sydney Park Strangler is targeting women interested in fitness. Women with agency. I’ve got a broad influence with these women. I like to think of myself as their spokeswoman. Their voice. I want to make sure they have a say in the hunt for –’

  ‘Ms Eckhart.’ I struggled for words, looked around for Eden but could find only the black eyes of cameras burning down on me, exposing my masculinity, my selfish, brutish repressive male spirit. ‘You’re a fitness professional. I don’t know why you see yourself as having the … the need, or the right, or even the training, to interfere in an active police investigation.’

  Caroline drew a breath, her turn to speak again finally at hand. I saw the bones in her chest flex beneath the muscle.

  ‘Women have been scorned for interfering where they are not wanted for centuries, Mr Bennett, and only the strongest of them have ignored the command.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I started walking down the steps. The journalists around me gasped at the action. Cameras clicked. I frowned at them all, couldn’t comprehend the drama and intrigue that they obviously saw in the incredibly annoying Caroline Eckhart being incredibly annoying to someone. I was sure it happened all the time. She was still carrying on when I stepped onto the street.

  ‘This guy, whoever he is, is targeting –’

  ‘That’s where we stop.’ I put a finger up. The cameras whizzed and flashed. ‘You’re perpetuating unfounded rumours about the crime in the media. I don’t know why. I wouldn’t have thought women’s fitness and murder had anything to do with each other. But when you want publicity, I guess you’ll jump on any wagon.’

  Caroline herself gasped now.

  ‘What you’re doing is irresponsible. It’s basically fearmongering. There’s nothing at this stage to suggest that a man is responsible for these murders, or that the cases themselves are even related. This man, and his targeting, are your invention, Ms Eckhart. Not mine.’ I turned the finger on her. The journalists around me shuffled, forcing their tiny microphones at my chest. ‘Now look, honey, I’ve got to go.’