Fall

by Candice Fox

  ‘Wait, wait, wait!’

  Eden didn’t wait. She gave the girl another good spray and watched her fall, listened to the satisfying clunk of the back of her head on the tiles.

  Waiting for Fiona Ollevaris was like watching one of those time-lapse documentaries when a camera is set up over the carcass of a dead rabbit and little creatures are captured rushing in, taking tiny pieces and scuttling away quicker than the eye can follow.

  I sat by her in the curtained-off section of the trauma ward at St Vincent’s and observed these many creatures coming and going, the doctors and nurses who monitored her vitals, poked and prodded her, put things into her and took things out while she lay swaddled in bandages from the neck up. Forensics people photographed her injuries, took swabs from her scraped knuckles, picked and bottled skin and blood cells from beneath her fingernails, measured her abrasions and marked things down on evidence forms. Patrollies and hospital staff pushed back journalists who posed as friends and relatives at the door and maybe reached the windows at the side of the ward and ogled a bit at her feet, which was all they could see from that angle.

  Her real family members arrived one by one and stood around uncomfortably – the older brother first, an awkward man with the kind of gravely set face that I’m sure wouldn’t have altered much if she were dead, a man who wanted to pace with his arms folded. The mother and sister came next, sobbing women who seemed to want to smother me with affection by way of coffees and baked treats from the downstairs café for my role in her rescue. Then came the father, another stern man who took up residence at my side as a kind of silent tribute, following me like a long-faced dog when I went out to make phone calls and send texts.

  When they took Fiona off to surgery, the family all stood around in the empty space her bed had occupied and talked about her, as though they’d not been able to in her unconscious presence. I learned she was an amateur mixed martial arts fighter who’d had a couple of bouts with other girls her size. That probably explained the skin under the nails, the blood all over the walls of the fire escape, patterns of hands and palms I’d glimpsed briefly in the torchlight as the paramedics attended to Fiona. It probably explained the thumping I’d heard, the scuffle while Fiona was being strangled, a hold she probably knew how to get out of – and was pretty close to getting out of when I arrived with Hooky. The mother berated the father about his aversion to Fiona taking up the sport, as though she’d always known that it would come in handy one day when a serial killer struck their daughter in the middle of a public running festival. He didn’t reply. I guessed they were divorced.

  All the while, as I was sitting there on the stool I’d nabbed from the nurse’s station, Fiona’s last words before she drifted into unconsciousness plagued me. No way that I tried to interpret the words made any sense. Hard face. Was she talking about the killer’s face? It was a strange message if she meant to tell me what the killer looked like so that I could identify him or her in my suspect pool. I was looking for someone stern? Emotionless? Someone old, deeply lined and weathered, like the hard-faced captains who came to visit headquarters every now and then to confer with Captain James? Fiona’s father and brother had pretty hard faces. That didn’t help. I’d be better off knowing for sure if the killer was male or female. What colour his or her hair was. What ethnicity, age.

  Was she talking about her own face? She was touching her face when she said it. Was she telling me the assault she’d suffered at the hands of the killer wouldn’t break her, wouldn’t destroy her beauty – that she had a hard face? A strange sort of thing to say to your rescuing cop on the edge of impending darkness, if that was what she meant. From the pictures her mother had shown me, tattered things she drew from the depths of her purse, Fiona didn’t have a hard face at all. She was a very pretty, soft-looking girl, an oval-faced beauty with long brunette curls she swept up in a high pony when she was fighting. She had big lips and a generous smile. There was nothing hard about her, I imagined, except for her right hook. I knew that from all the skin she’d taken off her knuckles in the struggle. She’d gone right down to bone.

  The day dragged on. I ate myself into a pot-bellied, languid state. I needed something to do with my hands and people kept bringing me treats, everybody’s favourite cat under the table lolling on its side, snapping up sardines. It was not a good situation. About four in the afternoon I was so frustrated with the ‘hard face’ problem I was talking to myself, staring at the floor.

  ‘Hard face,’ I murmured. ‘Hard … face.’

  ‘She’s got the same plastic surgeon that Renee Kelly had after the bus accident,’ Fiona’s mother was telling her father. ‘He did such a good job. You’d never know.’

  ‘What bus accident?’

  ‘Bus cleaned her up off the side of the road while she was waiting on George Street. She was mincemeat, apparently.’

  ‘Who’s Renee Kelly?’

  ‘The singer. Renee Kelly. God, you’re old.’

  Hard face. I turned my paper coffee cup around and around in my hands. It was stone cold. Hard face. Hard face. Fiona had had a lot of blood in her mouth. Maybe I’d only heard ‘hard face’. Maybe it was something else.

  I felt my heartbeat quicken. I watched the couple beside me as they argued.

  Hard race. Hard pace. Hard chase.

  I needed to be systematic. Fiona’s mother’s sigh was like a steam train. I could almost see her breath.

  Ard face. Bard face. Card face. Dard face. Eard Face. Fard face. Gard face. Hard face.

  I chewed my fingernails. They tasted like butter.

  Quard face. Rard face. Sard face.

  Scarred face.

  I stood. My coffee cup fell to the floor.

  The voices came first. Eden’s and what sounded like that of an old man, but Hooky could not be sure she wasn’t dreaming. She opened one eye and caught a glimpse of the floor she was lying on before her vision blurred. Tiles. Mismatched, laid in a complicated pattern, bathroom tiles with wave patterns and broken pieces of kitchen tile, ornate burnt gold tiles with upraised filigree. She could see a pair of legs close by. The voices came to her ears in bumbling tones, the words tripping over each other, sliding on top of each other, impossible to discern in order.

  ‘… really, really stupid.’

  Suddenly her hearing cleared, all at once, as though her ears had popped. She sighed through her nose, tried to moan through the duct tape on her lips. An animal came towards her – she felt the wetness of its nose in her ear, on her cheek, its hot breath against her nostrils. There were whispers brushing her eyelashes.

  ‘Jimmy,’ the old man said.

  The animal disappeared. She heard Eden sigh somewhere behind her. Hooky tried to move but her fingers were numb and strangely distant from where she expected them to be. They were at the small of her back and bunched together. She shifted her cheek against the cold tiles, the panic rising.

  ‘Asian would have been the very first thing I said,’ the old man was complaining. ‘When you asked me what did she look like, I’d have said, she was Asian, straight up.’

  ‘I guess I don’t think as racially as you do.’

  ‘Don’t be smart.’

  ‘Give me a break,’ Eden snapped. ‘We’re looking for a petite woman with short blonde hair who knows who I am. This one turns up at my place and spills her guts. What did you expect me to do? Turn her away? You’re telling me I should have expected there to be two –’

  ‘Where are her things?’ the old man asked.

  ‘Here.’

  Hooky heard something slide across the floor. She was losing consciousness again. The animal, whatever it was, was near her, one golden brown paw visible, tendons straining as the animal shifted.

  ‘Got any spare spots?’ Eden asked.

  ‘I’ve always got something.’

  Hooky slept. The sleep was so delicious, so welcoming, that it was only the pain in her neck and shoulders as she was dragged along the ground that drew her out of it. If
she’d been carried, she might have slept through the stars overhead, a thousand pinpricks of light peering between smears of cloud and gloom. When she became aware of the T-shirt bunching up at her back and her arms sliding in the dirt, she was snapped into a consciousness so complete she could feel every injury she had endured in the last few hours, from the bruises on her legs she must have got when she was being loaded into the boot of Eden’s car to marks on her wrists and ankles from the duct tape. Hooky twisted, tried to look around her, but all she saw were strange black mountains too close to be real mountains, strangely shaped silhouettes with spikes, bumps, ridges. She was in some kind of wasteland. The sour smell of rotting garbage assaulted her. She looked down and saw Eden dragging her by the left cuff of her jeans.

  Hooky kicked. Eden turned and grabbed both ankles and held on as the girl struggled.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said.

  They stopped by a hole in the earth. Hooky squirmed, caught a glimpse of the old man leaning on a cane, a squat creature with scruffy grey hair that was growing out of a short back and sides. A terrifying creature hovered by his side, like the skeleton of a dog reanimated, the eyes bulbous and black. Hooky looked at the neat edge of the hole, the pile of trash lying beside it, the great yellow excavator squatting behind the pile ready to shove the tyres, bags, pieces of lumber into the black cavern dug into the earth. Hooky felt a wave of nausea ripple through her insides and shudder in her throat. Her face was burning, damp with terror, the sweat coming from nowhere and suddenly drenching her clothes, making dirt tickle on her cheeks and neck.

  ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ she moaned. She tried to twist, to look up at Eden’s face. Her moaning rose to a scream. ‘No! No! No!’

  Eden grabbed Hooky’s shoulder and rolled her into the pit.

  I called the Parramatta headquarters while I ran through the car park behind St Vincent’s hospital, huffing my way down the concrete ramps. Trying to direct Gina through my desk in the bull pit was excruciating. For a receptionist at one of the biggest law enforcement establishments in the country, she’s got no ability to zero in from the big picture.

  ‘I don’t know. There’s stuff everywhere.’

  ‘It’s a photocopy of a newspaper article. I would have just dropped it somewhere there on the surface.’

  I heard drawers opening and closing. I reached my car and got inside, my shirt clinging to my back and sides with sweat. Paper rustled on the other end of the phone.

  ‘There’s a coffee mug here with mould in it.’

  ‘It’s a forensics experiment. Part of an investigation.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Keep looking.’

  ‘New laws sought after high-profile surgery mishap?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ I gasped, my heart thundering in my neck, half the run, half pure exhilaration at the chase. ‘Read it to me.’

  ‘The state government has called upon federal leaders to impose regulations to curb the growing number of young Australians seeking cheap cosmetic surgery overseas,’ Gina read. ‘The move comes as reports arise that Tara Harper –’

  ‘Tara Harper,’ I said. ‘Did it say what kind of surgery she had?’

  ‘It just says a great number at once,’ she said. ‘Are you onto something, Frank?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Maybe. Get me everything you can on the Harper girl.’

  I had a team assembled just down the street from the Harper house by the time the sun set – eight or nine Kevlar-clad specialists, two of them women, standing around a squad car tucked behind a huge fig tree. Cars took the roundabout near us slowly, heads turning, before pulling onto Lang Road, running alongside the park itself. The yawning sandstone gates to a car-lined hill were directly across the road from number 7. The house was a gigantic cream mansion that could easily have been divided into two profitable semis, the ornate front garden lined with sandstone and iron, maintaining the neighbourhood style. White block-out curtains were drawn over the French doors of all four balconies, and the only thing moving on the property was a sickly looking ginger cat that had taken up residence on the wall beside the house to watch the raid.

  I directed two of my team to the rear of the property. This involved barging through other people’s houses and commandeering their back porches so we could see if they had a view into the house. The few times I’ve done this myself I’ve found people to be more excited about helping the police nab the bad guy than concerned I’m going to judge them on their household mess or hassle them about the bong on their coffee table.

  When the two were in place, I received a report that the rear of number 7 was all curtained as well. There was a garage behind the property, accessed by a narrow driveway down the right-hand side of the house. One of the officers reported that it was secured with a huge padlock and chain.

  I sent two agents to the front of the house. They were wearing jackets over their police vests. After an initial walk-by, they reported that nothing stirred.

  By now we’d garnered plenty of neighbourly attention. A woman stood on her step with a couple of children, describing our operations into a mobile phone while the little ones pointed and gaped. It was not an uncommon reaction. People who spot a police operation in their street will invariably try to get close to it, and if they can’t will report it, sharing the experience with their friends, family, sometimes the media. Sharon! You’ll never believe this! There’s a SWAT team outside the Calverts’ house! Get over here – they’re still setting up. The kids obviously asked their mother permission to go down to the fence, and she allowed it. Their little heads poked up over the red brick fence, eager, probably wondering if I had any ‘Cops are Tops’ stickers in my pockets. Almost as though she’d heard my thoughts, another housewife burst out of the house next door and jogged through the front gates, up to the porch to join her neighbour watching the drama.

  ‘Alright,’ I told my team of four, ‘I’ve going to get those two to do a knock. You two take the sides, you two go in at the front.’

  They rushed off. I gave the two walkers-by the command to knock on the front door. When no one answered, I gave it a few seconds, then sent them in. I gave myself just a moment to be sad that I’d once been one of those hot-cheeked officers at the back of the raid team, wondering what was behind the closed door. Bellowing down the empty halls. Now I was too important for that. My ‘forensically trained mind’ was put to better use elsewhere and only the ‘grunts’ were allowed to do the front-line work, where they might brush up against any danger. I missed being a grunt. It was exciting.

  The two housewives had a better view of the front door than I did. When the team busted through it, they clapped and the children cheered. I spotted a couple of teenagers by a tree on the other side of the park gates. One was filming the scene with her phone.

  I’d learned all I could about Tara Harper while I got approval for the raid, both from what Gina phoned in over the next hour and a search on my phone. There wasn’t much about the girl going around. She had no social media presence whatsoever, which was strange. There wasn’t a tried and failed Twitter account, a blog, a jobseeker profile – so far as I could tell she’d never had a job. There wasn’t a picture of the girl anywhere, not even on a memorial page dedicated to her father set up by the company he’d worked for. Her mother, a stunning blonde woman with perfect cheekbones, was pictured frequently on society websites. Whippet-thin and eagle-eyed, she never smiled fully – she had discovered her perfect angle to camera and worked out a half-smile that made her look both powerful and coy, and she stuck with it. She’d been a sports model in her late-teen years, and then had met her sugar daddy and settled down to being a mother – which seemed to mean acting on the board of charities, drinking champagne, shopping and going to premieres. She ran. A lot. Half the paparazzi shots of her were snapped for ‘Celebrities without make-up’ – cheekbones exaggerated as she inhaled, mouth a supple O, the picture itself buried low on the page. Because even free of make-up, Joanie H
arper was what I would, as a young man, have called a ‘honey’. She was fantasy material. A visual feast of human genes at their fittest and fairest. I didn’t know what kind of surgery her daughter had sought in Thailand – all that was bottled up in media privacy laws – but I couldn’t understand, if she shared even a portion of her mother’s genes, why she’d sought any at all.

  I was immediately struck by the smell of the house, the shut-in stink of mould and accumulated dusts, carpets that needed airing out and food that had gone off and dried. Dead flower water, perfume reaching through stink and being pressed down. The place was immaculate and gave the impression that was because nothing ever moved. A cabinet full of ornate tea sets near a sideboard that was bare except for an empty wooden bowl. The signs of life were missing – keys, newspapers, letters, pens that should have been set down where they were used, left behind to be used again. There were no magnets on the fridge and nothing in or around the sink. When I opened the kitchen cupboards, I found there to be no plates.

  All the plates, it turned out, were in the attic room. The specialist team members called me straight there. I saw the top of Ruben’s head from the stairs. He was lying as though a gust of wind from the windows had blown him right over, but the window was shut and the curtains were drawn. I ordered the team out of the room and stood in the doorway so as not to disturb anything.

  I looked in. Ruben had been stabbed a bunch of times in the chest – for a second that made me wonder if I hadn’t accidentally stumbled on an isolated murder and not found the Parks Strangler. The Parks killer had never penetrated skin, which for the novice doesn’t sound like a substantial advance in technique. It is, however. There’s a big difference between strangling and stabbing – the bloodlessness is the main thing, but the real distinction is in effort. It’s difficult to stab someone. There are all sorts of thing in the way. Clothes and ribs and, usually, the person’s arms as they grab and flail and try to stop you. And people make all sorts of awful noises when they’re stabbed. They wheeze and cough and gurgle and scream – they panic and run around. Until that moment, Tara – if she was the Parks Strangler – had been dealing with half-subdued victims, and she close-fisted bashed in faces before fitting her hands around necks almost pre-made for the job. I crouched at Ruben’s head, turned his face slightly with the tip of my pinky finger. The face was barely touched. She’d knocked him down and gone for it. When I peeled his wet shirt back from his chest, I saw the wounds were many and shallow. A surprise attack, meant to be over quickly.