Fall

by Candice Fox

  If she was, Eden suspected she was not the first.

  She sat on the bench by the water and thought about victims. She tightened the laces of her runners, drew them tight, down over her now soft, pampered feet, gone to custard through her recovery. She’d enjoyed running once. Liked looking down at the hard yellow calluses that formed at the tops of her toes, her heel, runner’s feet, feet that could count kilometres, swollen and aching beautifully. Eden had not run in the street since Rye Farm. She stood and rolled her shoulders, looked at the gently jostling yachts in the harbour. She imagined herself as the Sydney Parks Strangler’s next victim. Anonymous female runner catching a couple of quick Ks before dinner. She opened a run-keeper app on her phone, hooked up her earphones as she watched the tennis court café bubbling and writhing, and parents with kids on the green. The evening night wind was slowly stirring. Eden stretched her calves and began to trot. Immediately the pain swelled in her hips, her abdominals. She pushed it aside. Think victim.

  There was something so blinding about running, she thought as she fell into an awkward rhythm, trying not to favour her left hip where the muscles wanted to bunch. The rhythm of her body locked her head forward, shook everything in her periphery. The motion seemed to want to dissolve all threats but that which was directly ahead. When she turned to look at families strolling the sandstone blocks by the water’s edge and couples taking pictures before the glittering city across the bay, her body wanted to slow, wanted to turn, like a horse being pulled sideways by reins. Running required concentration, self-focus. She listened to her breathing, her steps, her mental commentary of aches. This hurts, this hurts, this hurts, her ankle said. Stop, stop, stop, her shoulder pleaded. She forgot about the path ahead and ducked between two walkers. She only knew when a faster runner approached a second before they passed, a sudden colourful presence and then their calves in front pumping as they pulled away. It wouldn’t be hard, she realised, for someone to creep up on you like this. Mindlessly chugging along, slipping down a dirt path between the roadways and feeling a dull tap in your thigh. The sudden presence of another being behind her, and the glorious exhaustion of a run almost completed, suddenly and shockingly increasing, gravity turned up, legs buckling. The guiding arm of the stranger directing the drunken runner to the nearby roadside, to the open van doors. Keeping vertical would be struggle enough.

  She lifted her head and sucked in the cooling night air. Rushcutters Bay Park was not a likely candidate for the killer’s next hit – it was expansive and bare in parts, heavily populated by fitness groups, bordered on one side by dozens of yachts with their hundreds of gaping eyes. What trees there were mainly huddled at the roadside, the city sparkling between then, lighting hidey-holes between which possums crept and shuffled, babies gripping at their shoulders. Eden didn’t see herself accidentally running smack bang into the parks killer on the hunt, didn’t hold out Charmaine Lyon’s naïve hope. She just wanted to run. To get into the parklands. To try to understand the hunting grounds.

  She wondered at the brazenness of the attacks. What kind of hunter risked parks bathed in twilight for their playground? Eden understood parks as the wonderland of rapists – they were usually drunk or high when they committed the acts, and half the time were homeless, so the parks were where they got their food, shelter, rest. Why not their sex? Eden listened to the growing evening. It was quiet out. Children’s squeals of delight echoed across the water. A truck in the distant after-work rush for home shifted gear as it headed into the Cross City Tunnel. Lights came on in the pastel-coloured apartment blocks, one by one.

  As she trotted along, she reviewed the evidence over and over in time to her footfalls, hoping to see a pattern, a beat, like the tempo of her soles on the concrete.

  Black tracksuit. CCTV. Female runners. Bludgeoned faces. Lost identities. Strangulation. Revenge. Tranquilliser. White van.

  The white van might not have caught her attention, might have been lost in the mess of thoughts, had it not crossed right in front of her as Eden turned onto the long stretch of path between the water and New Beach Road, heading towards the dead end at the lip of the bay. Eden fell victim to her curiosity immediately. She lowered her head and sprinted across grass to the road, knowing the van would have to turn and head back at her before it could escape the loop. As she teetered in the uneven gravel near the roadside, she saw the van making a three-point turn in the cul-de-sac. Two joggers stopped and watched her as she leaped out onto the asphalt, speeding up to a bone-grinding pace as the van turned around a small roundabout and headed up the hill onto Yarranabbe Road.

  She stopped, her hips screaming. Eden gripped at her abdomen, at the ridges of pain that throbbed and felt splintered. She closed her eyes and briefly remembered the knife inside her, the blood running up her neck. It took a moment to realise the pair of joggers had crossed the road and were standing near her, nibbling at her attention with their presence. They were laughing. Eden tugged the headphones from her ears.

  ‘Thought you spotted the Sydney Parks Strangler?’ the man said. They were a couple. The shoes were his and hers versions of the same fluorescent green, scored in a two-for-one deal. The young man grinned at her, his glasses fogged with perspiration.

  ‘Couldn’t help myself,’ Eden said. The girl was delightfully curvy but painfully aware of it, tugging at her sweat-patched top now and then, trying to pull it down over the brown slit of flesh above her tights. Pixie ears and a sheepish smile. Eden licked sweat off her upper lip.

  ‘I thought you might have been onto a winner,’ the girl said. ‘Every time I see a van around near the park now I fucking freak. Are you a police officer?’

  ‘A watchful citizen.’ Eden started walking. ‘Bye.’

  ‘Wasn’t him.’ The male of the pair held up his phone. ‘He was just spotted ten minutes ago in Trumper. That’s why we’re here. We thought, they’ll chase him away. It’ll be safe. We haven’t been out since it all started. Jenny used to go alone, but no more. No more, Jenny.’

  Eden watched the boy shake his finger teasingly at the girl. Tried to recall if she had indeed just said goodbye aloud, and if so, figure out why they were still talking to her.

  ‘He’s like a shark,’ the girl commented. Looked to her partner for approval. ‘A shark going up and down the coast. Once you know which beach he’s at, you can go play at one of the other ones.’ She giggled at her cleverness.

  People liked to talk about things that scared them, Eden mused. Talk too much about them. She shook the fog from her head suddenly. The endorphins from the run were pumping through her, old friends missed. ‘Wait, did you say ten minutes ago?’

  ‘Yeah. Trumper Park.’

  Eden snatched the man’s phone, flashed her eyes over the crowdsourced news site. Her mobile rang in her sleeve.

  Frank was standing by the bonnet of one of the station cars, a map spread out before him, directing two uniformed officers. Eden parked in the mess of vehicles blocking Royalson Street and glanced at neighbours in the apartment buildings beside the oval. They were standing sentry on their stairs and balconies, arms folded, sceptical. A couple with a dog had taken a seat on a bench as close to the busy police officers as they could get. They sat transfixed, listening to the radio calls. The oval was empty. On the other side, the tree line was impenetrable. Trumper Park was perfect for the killer’s next hunt. Eden knew it well. The leafy tracks behind the residential buildings, dug in by the feet of hundreds of joggers. The shady ponds and wooden stairs leading deep into the undergrowth. She came up behind Frank and looked over his shoulder at the cordons he was trying to impose – an impossible gesture given the limited manpower – encompassing two dozen streets or more.

  ‘Lock up the CCTV for Ocean Street, Craigend, Glenmore, Hargrave and Jersey,’ he said into his radio. ‘If he’s gone to ground he’ll be in that ring. Secondary cordon from O’Sullivan to the Eastern Distributor.’ Frank looked at her for a second, hardly seeing. ‘Get someone down to Oxford Street in cas
e he went that way.’

  ‘Copy that.’

  ‘What was it?’ Eden asked as the officers went to work. Frank had changed his shirt since she’d seen him at the office. He’d been buried in paperwork and phone calls, now and then lifting his head to moan about how much he hated Caroline Eckhart. She’d hardly spoken to him all day. When she saw him on the smoker’s balcony he’d been listening intensely to a phone call from Imogen, who was doing most of the talking.

  ‘Could be a false alarm,’ he sighed. ‘Dog walker saw a person lingering on this side of the oval, in the trees over there. Black trackies, black hoodie. Doesn’t know what he was looking at. When he found himself being watched he fled to a van.’

  ‘Fled?’

  ‘Walked quickly, head down.’

  ‘What’s she doing on this side of the park?’ Eden squinted at the tree line, two hundred metres away. ‘The hunting ground’s over there.’

  Eden puzzled at it. The stars were emerging slowly from the burnt orange hue above the city. It was the right time of day. A good place to hunt. The description was accurate. Were people becoming hysterical? Or was the killer really here? Was this a reconnaissance trip? She realised after some time that Frank was staring at her. Her lips were still salty with sweat.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Me?’ Eden swiped a stray hair from her brow. ‘Jogging.’

  ‘Where? Here?’

  ‘No, Rushcutters Bay. I came in the car.’

  Frank looked past her, followed her gesture to her car. He averted his eyes quickly, cleared his throat as a uniformed officer came for more directions. Eden watched him. His hand fluttered restlessly by his eyes, scratching at nothing. The eyes did not come back to her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What?’ Frank sniffed.

  ‘You’re acting weird.’

  ‘Oh. Finally,’ he smiled crookedly. ‘My turn to act weird.’

  Eden watched him. He looked around at the officers busy working on maps, radioing in colleagues, following the progress of checkpoints. Nearby a woman with a dog was talking animatedly to a group of young female officers, pointing to a tree by the public toilets. Frank looked stressed. He tugged at the shirt. Eden only realised, as he touched it, how ridiculous it was on him. Too tight, salmon pink with a collar liner of little cross-hatches, peach, apricot, baby blue. He must have been on his way out to dinner with Imogen. No idea he’d be seen by his colleagues in it. He kept closing it at the throat to hide the colourful lining. Something twitched on the edge of his lips. Unspoken words.

  ‘Look at what you’re wearing,’ he finally said. Eden glanced at her tracksuit pants. Her hoodie. Black. She smirked, tried to meet his eyes, but they were locked on the trees.

  ‘Look at what you’re wearing.’

  ‘I’m just saying,’ he shrugged stiffly.

  Eden narrowed her eyes. Then she laughed.

  ‘You think I’m the Sydney Parks Strangler.’

  ‘Well, for fuck’s sake. Is it that much of a stretch? You’re some kind of killer, Eden,’ he snapped, his grey-blue eyes on her at last. His words were low, barely audible. ‘I don’t know what. I’ve never known what. I know you killed six men, at least. Benjamin Annous. Jake DeLaney. The others, their cellmates. I can’t prove it, but Eric trying to kill me for confronting him about it made it pretty clear that I was right. So then this murder happens up near Byron, while you’re away for the weekend, and the cops up there are saying the killer used a very sophisticated gun. Your best friend’s a hunting expert.’ He shrugged. ‘What do you want me to think?’

  ‘Whoa!’

  ‘Yeah. Whoa.’

  ‘Frank, I want you to think straight, that’s what I want. Think straight, and not like a fucking idiot for once.’

  ‘I called you, what? Three minutes ago? You’re saying you got from Rushcutters Bay to here in three minutes?’

  ‘Yes, actually. I’m sorry. Should I have stopped to pick up some milk along the way?’

  ‘You’re wearing a black tracksuit. I hear about murders in the news and I wonder if you did them.’ He shrugged again. Stiff and angry. ‘I can’t watch the news anymore. You know that? I sit there and it’s like, kid’s body found in a creek. And I think, was that Eden? Old man bludgeoned in an apparent home invasion. Was that Eden? Four bodies found in a van in Byron. Was that Eden? You disappeared six guys off the face of the earth without so much as a hair left behind. Am I supposed to think that was your first time?’

  ‘Frank.’

  ‘You’re the only killer I know.’

  ‘And that’s the key, the thing you’re forgetting,’ Eden snapped. ‘You know me, you fucking arsehole.’

  ‘I can’t even begin –’ He paused as one of the area chiefs walked by them swiftly, speaking into a radio. ‘I can’t even begin to list the things I don’t know about you, Eden.’

  ‘Okay, we’re going to stop this now.’ Eden walked back to her car and got in. She put her face in her palms. Her hands were shaking. Waves of prickles rolled up and down her back. In the airless warmth of the car, she hid in her hands and flattened her tongue against the roof of her mouth and growled. She had a strange surge of emotion when she heard the door beside her pop open and the familiar groan and sigh of her partner as he eased himself into the car. Emotion was not her friend in any form, but this brief and paralysing spark was not terror or rage. It was comforting, somehow. She felt comforted. Frank sat in the passenger’s seat, his usual place beside her, and looked at the mess of people moving before them, a sea of blue.

  ‘I’m trapped here,’ he said. Eden gripped the wheel and waited, but nothing more came. Frank stared at the dashboard.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean I’m trapped here, between Martina and Jason, and what he did to her and what I did to him, and you. Whenever I try to turn away from what happened between those two people, when I try to forget what happened to her, I open my eyes and there’s you. Sometimes I feel like I can move on, maybe pretend she never existed. It never happened. But it did happen, and it happened because I left her there. I left her there because I was chasing you.’

  Eden watched him. He stared down at his hands, lying open in his lap.

  ‘Martina is dead, and I killed someone, because of you. And every time you’ve killed someone since, I’ve been complicit in it.’

  ‘No you haven’t,’ Eden said. ‘Most of the time you don’t even know it’s happened.’

  ‘Did you kill those kids in Byron Bay? Those guys and those kids?’

  ‘What did I just say?’

  ‘There’s no denying it.’ Frank waved his hand, dismissed her. ‘I’m complicit because I know what you are and I haven’t stopped you. I mean, I’m not stopping you even now.’ He ran his fingers through his hair, made a mess of it. ‘For some fucked-up reason, I’ve never stopped you.’

  ‘You can’t stop me,’ she said. ‘We both know that.’

  He was silent. The restless hand fluttered at his eyes again, left a red mark on his brow when he scratched.

  ‘Why don’t you stop yourself?’ Frank turned in his seat and finally looked at her. ‘Give it up. You can turn away from it, you know. Maybe. You can leave it behind you. We both can.’

  Eden felt again that wave of something, of familiarity perhaps. Of home.

  She opened her mouth to answer. How to explain it all to him, a normal human man, someone with all his faculties, someone with all his emotions and neurological connections in order, someone with a soul. How to explain that at the core of her being, Eden killed people the way she breathed, the way she slept, that when she was hungry for blood it was as all-consuming as exhaustion for sleep, or the need for water to quench a thirst. Without the monsters that she hunted and caught and vanquished, she would suffocate. Flicker and extinguish. She ran on no other fuel. She was a consuming thing, and consume she must. To decide not to kill was to decide to die.

  I don’t want to die, she thought. I’ll kill you
before I let that happen, Frank. Because I’m a predator. That’s the core of it. There’s a beast in me, and it only knows how to kill and how to live.

  A uniformed officer tapped on Frank’s window. He rolled it down and Eden’s comfort was lost.

  Ruben lay in bed in the dorm past midday, which wasn’t like him at all. When people came into the room to retrieve things from bags, to change, to cuddle, he turned and pretended he was sleeping. At some point Donato came and went, and for an hour or so he heard the rhythmic smacking of his basketball on the court outside, the rumble of the loose hoop hanging below the windows. Thursday at the big house by the park was coming. He had begun to dread the day. Terrified all night before he went, yet unable to pull away from the work – strangely drawn forward into the house, pulled within the orbit of the attic door.

  As the sun began setting, he heard televisions come on throughout the building, the French girls upstairs with their reality television shows and the British boys catching episodes of Neighbours in the large living area off the bedroom in which he lay. On the edge of further frightening dreams, in which an unseen presence followed him from room to room around the big house as he furiously cleaned dirt and grime that would not shift, he heard a familiar voice. He wandered to the living-room door wrapped in his sweat-damp comforter, his hair mussed and eyes aching. The television sat like a blazing white campfire in a ring of couples, some of them sipping colourful bottles of alcoholic cola, some of them passing a joint slowly. An athletic-looking woman filled the screen, standing on the steps of a building that was out of sight, grey concrete her only backdrop. Her sunflower hair swished in a high ponytail as she talked. This was, without a doubt, the woman from the tapes in the attic room, the tapes that kept being stopped and re-started, certain words and phrases captured and replayed. The subtitles were in German. Ruben had excelled in German at high school and could follow along as the letters flashed and flickered across the screen.