Covet

by Tara Moss

  ‘Ya know anything about Cape Banks? Ya know, at Botany Bay National Park? Banks Battery. Whatever it’s called.’

  ‘Botany Bay? Boy, this guy sure likes to keep it local,’ Andy remarked. Ed had dumped the mutilated body of Mak’s friend Catherine at nearby La Perouse. Andy knew the place. ‘Yup, I used to get up to all kinds of shit there as a teenager before they wised up and closed the thing off. I tried to get lucky there once with my childhood flame, but she freaked out and wouldn’t go inside.’

  ‘Can’t say I blame her, you smooth-talkin’ bastard. What’s it like inside? It looks like Sydney’s arsehole.’

  ‘It’s pretty dark and disgusting, from memory.’

  Jimmy mumbled some incoherent curse in response.

  ‘There’s not much to it, though,’ Andy went on. ‘There are some rooms with short tunnels connecting them, but the tunnels don’t go far and it sure wouldn’t be too shit-hot now. All the entrances were blocked last I saw. Is that where you guys are?’

  ‘Yes, but please don’t go meeting up with us or they’ll have my head. Ed says he dumped a girl in there in black plastic bags.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Yeah, I was just wantin’ your thoughts.’

  Andy thought he sounded slightly uneasy.

  ‘He says it will only take about two minutes to get to the spot but I ain’t been in there before.’

  ‘How are you guys getting in?’ Andy asked.

  ‘There’s a hole in the gate. I might have to blame Angie’s cookin’ for keepin’ me out of this one.’ He laughed. ‘This fuckin’ hole is like the size of my damn navel.’

  ‘Can audiovisual squeeze the camera in?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Is Lewis calling for assistance, maps, anything?’

  ‘Nope,’ Jimmy said. ‘We’re going right on in to find ourselves a body.’

  ‘Mate, keep me updated. Let me know as soon as you find something.’

  ‘You got it, Andy. You shoulda seen Hoosier squeeze his sorry arse in through those bars. I think he just got a sandpaper enema.’

  Andy laughed. Now that was something he would’ve liked to have seen.

  CHAPTER 24

  ‘Sorry man. You alright?’

  Ed Brown stood doubled over just inside Banks Battery, coughing up sand. He spluttered and moaned for effect.

  ‘You alright?’ Lewis repeated.

  Ed had managed to squeeze through the hole in the gate with relative ease, considering they wouldn’t take his handcuffs off, but he’d caught his shoe just as Hoosier had before him. Unable to use his arms to brace his fall, Ed had done a face-plant into the sandy floor. Now he was playing it up for all it was worth. The muscly one in charge had picked him up off the ground and was dusting him off.

  ‘Sorry about that, man. We’ve gotta keep you in the handcuffs,’ Lewis said. ‘I know it’s hard going. We’ll take it slow.’ They had removed the ankle restraints, thankfully. At least he could walk normally.

  ‘Yeah…ahhh, that’s okay,’ Ed replied.

  As the shortest in the group, Ed could just about stand upright in the space. The ceiling was even lower than he remembered it. Or perhaps the sand had risen higher? He watched a skinny guy in a crime-scene suit toss a bag of gear and a shovel through the hole in the bars, then squeeze himself through quite easily. The sound guy was crouching so low he looked like he was defecating. The cameraman was recording everything, using a thin but intense beam of light like a powerful flashlight to illuminate the scene. Two more cops stood on the outside, squinting stupidly as they peered into the dark.

  Now Ed was inside the Banks Battery system with seven cops. So far so good. He’d gone from nine down to seven in one simple step, and he’d rid himself of the ankle cuffs.

  ‘Down there…ah…yeah,’ he told them, pointing with his cuffed hands down a steep staircase to the left.

  ‘Edward Brown has directed us to what appears to be a steep staircase with a railing along the left-hand side…’ The video camera light shone down the black passage. So much sand had seeped in over the years that the steps themselves were not even visible. It no longer resembled a staircase at all, but a steep slope of sand that disappeared into pitch black, a concrete garbage chute leading into damp nothingness.

  Behind Ed, the fat one was mumbling in some foreign language. He was still brushing himself off following his ungainly entrance through the bars. Ed did not know what his words meant, but he recognised the sentiment. He clearly did not like the situation. ‘Why don’t we get you in here,’ he suggested to one of the cops who had been standing outside the gate. ‘You can cover the top of the stairs and your partner can cover the entrance.’

  To Ed’s disappointment, the one in charge agreed. ‘Yup. Let’s keep this operation tight.’

  One of the two nodded and started the process of squeezing himself through the bars.

  ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  Now they would begin a slippery descent into the bowels of Cape Banks, where not a single ray of sunshine could reach. The dearth of light was so complete that even with all the torches on and the shaky light of the video camera, it was near impossible to see ahead.

  ‘Step carefully,’ Lewis said. Frustratingly, he kept a hand on Ed’s arm in a vice-like grip.

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘Ahhh, no worries,’ Ed said as a kind of reassurance. ‘Ahh, it’s not far.’

  No one responded. He could sense their nerves.

  For every foothold down the stairwell they slipped forward several inches in the loose sand, struggling to maintain balance. Most of the men clung to the rusted railing that extended down the left-hand side of the slope, but Ed, with his hands cuffed behind his back, did not have that luxury. Lewis caught him under the arms twice to stop him slipping and falling over. Torches shone at his feet, and flickered across the low ceiling above him, always moving in someone’s shaking hands, the changing light making it harder for Ed to watch his step. The group made painfully slow progress down the steep incline, stepping carefully over scattered garbage, rusted wire and even a damaged fire-extinguisher that looked like it had been tossed there years before.

  ‘What’s this?’ Hoosier asked.

  He shone a light across some heavy wrought-iron hooks that jutted from the wall down the right-hand side of the stairwell, four in a stack and repeated every few feet.

  ‘Would have been for cables I guess.’

  Yes. It was for cables.

  Ed knew they were on their way to the old engine room. He had only been here once before, but he had studied the maps well. Accurate maps of the Banks Battery system had been hard to come by, but the Prison Lady had obtained them from a convict with military connections in return for some banned publications. So far everything looked as he’d anticipated. It was just as she’d said. So far so good.

  ‘Yeah, this way,’ he said, but no one answered him.

  Now a couple of men had reached the bottom of the steep stairwell. Ed could just make out the flicker of their torches and the sound of their feet in water.

  ‘It’s fuckin’ wet down here. I should have brought gumboots,’ someone said.

  Almost there.

  The camera and sound men and three other cops were behind him, including the fat, suspicious wog, the idiot who wouldn’t stop talking while he drove, and the one in charge, always hanging onto him like a leech. Boss Man seemed to be having a much harder time of it now that they were crouching in a waterlogged tunnel. It was obvious that the surroundings were unnerving all of them. The loud bravado of before had disappeared. The blackness had all but silenced them.

  As a group they progressed down the seeping concrete hallway, water up to their ankles, stepping across heavy slabs of broken concrete scattered on the floor. Bits of wood jutted into the air. The wrought-iron hooks lined the wall at waist level, with another line closer to the floor. They were several metres underground now. They should be getting close.

  Where?

 
Ed kept searching in the dim light. This should be the spot…

  There it is.

  Light swung fleetingly across the wall and Ed spotted the package the Prison Lady had left for him, right at the end of the hallway, exactly where he had instructed.

  Perfect.

  It was an old, rusted letterbox with the top torn off, hung on the last iron hook, right at waist level. Ed paused with his back to it, and leaned against the wall. The recording guys and crime-scene investigators moved with the driver cop slowly into the remains of the engine room to the left, while the wog and the one in charge stayed glued to Ed’s side. Boss Man was still irritatingly close, but thankfully he no longer gripped Ed’s elbow like a vice. His fingertips were curled loosely against Ed’s arm, his mouth gaping open as he looked around him.

  ‘Can you hear us up there?’ the fat one called out to the man at the top of the stairs. ‘Hey! Up there! Can you hear me?’

  Of course he can’t hear you down here, you stupid wog. And your walkie-talkies won’t work either. Your communications are out.

  Ed smiled in the dark.

  Now a torch flashed in his face. He blinked innocently in the light.

  ‘I-I put her there,’ he gasped. ‘See the uh, plastic…there.’ He pointed into the engine room.

  The men moved forward a step, and someone shone their torch across the black plastic shape and then focused on it. ‘I think we found it, sir!’

  ‘Edward Brown has directed us to a form covered in black plastic…’

  Ed’s fingertips slipped silently into the top of the metal box, feeling inside for the handcuff key.

  There.

  The key was glued to the inside of the box with a wad of Blu-Tack. His fingers curled around it. Carefully, he pulled the key off the sticky substance and palmed it. It was a SAF-LOK handcuff key, the standard issue for police and law enforcement agencies in Australia. One key fits all. In seconds he had slipped it into his cuffs and was ready to pull them off, but the one in charge was still close enough to hear. The policeman’s fingers were now barely touching Ed’s shoulder as he leaned forward, curious to see the black shape on the watery floor. Ed waited for a distracting noise.

  ‘Hey!’ the irritating wog called again. ‘Hey, can you hear us?’

  Ed turned the key and slipped out of the cuffs in one rapid movement. Boss Man didn’t notice. Now his hands were free. And he was the only one who knew.

  ‘Let’s get this done as fast as we can,’ Lewis said.

  Flashbulbs illuminated the room like strobes as the crime-scene investigators went to work. The video camera beamed its light from corner to corner and settled on the black plastic.

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘Let’s get Ed out of here now. We’ve got what we came for,’ the wog suggested. But Ed didn’t want to leave just yet.

  Torchlight revealed that the men were standing over the bagged form. ‘Let’s lift her and get her up to ground,’ someone said.

  Ed closed his eyes and covered his ears.

  ‘It doesn’t smell so bad in here as I thought—’ someone began, but their words were cut short when the blinding blast ripped through the room.

  There was a bright flash, and a powerful whooosh. Ed’s chest was hit with a pulse of air.

  He opened his eyes to near blackness. The scene around him was one of chaos. One of the torches was still on, thrown to the far corner of the engine room. The camera light was not functioning. There was a loud, incessant ringing in Ed’s ears, and beneath it all the sounds of shouting, water splashing, people and objects crashing to the ground.

  Ed Brown was moving already. His senses of sight and sound were disabled for the moment, so he concentrated on the feel of the tunnel wall under his hands and clawed his way through the passageway to the right. He groped along the walls in the blackness, and after only a few metres tripped over an object that must have been leaning in the corner. The damn shovel! He fell hard onto his elbows and let out a sharp cry, landing painfully on the unforgiving handle.

  A strong hand gripped his ankle.

  No!

  Ed rolled over and swung out blindly with the shovel blade, slicing it through the air with as much force as he could muster. It made contact with something and he thought he heard the distinctive sound of exhalation, followed by an agonised moan. It was hard to tell with the ringing in his ears. When the hand let go of his ankle, he knew he had hit his mark. He was free! Ed dropped the shovel and edged away. In seconds he was up and running, slipping and battling his way along the tunnel, stumbling blindly towards the surface, the dark scene of chaos and panic in the engine room fading as he hit fresh air. No more hands like shackles on his arms, no more handcuffs holding him back, just the ringing in his ears and the beautiful, bright vision of the Pacific.

  Yes.

  Yes.

  Yes!

  He reached the surface and struggled through the half-blocked exit overlooking the raging ocean. In that moment, the wind in his hair was the most exhilarating sensation he had ever experienced. More exhilarating even than his first kill, which surprised him. More exhilarating than all his planning. The wind was fresh and real and it meant that he had won. After eighteen months he had won. It was not the stale, regurgitated air of his cell, but real air and real wide-open space. He could not be contained. He could not be beaten. This was proof.

  But Ed had no time to dwell on his euphoria. Almost as soon as he reached the surface he scrambled down the cliff, across the rocks and sand at the water’s edge, and ran due east along the shoreline in the direction opposite to the remaining police officers who might by now have sensed that something was wrong, or may even have heard the blast at their posts near the bunker entrance. Ed peeled off his clothes as he went, noticing a spray of blood across the fabric. Not his blood, he smirked. He stripped down to boxer shorts and undershirt, and carelessly tossed the rest in a heap behind some boulders, to be discovered by the police or some unsuspecting tourists in the hours or days to come. Before long Ed had reached the rocky point, his skin flecked with dirt and sweat, and not even slowing to catch his breath he rummaged through thick, prickly bushes that scraped his bare flesh, searching eagerly for the next important item the Prison Lady had left for him.

  There it is!

  The backpack was waiting for him, just as planned, hidden amongst dense shrubbery.

  He looked around cautiously, staying low to the ground. He half expected to see police officers running along the sand waving guns, helicopters flying overhead, search boats gathering just offshore. He half expected to hear his name on a megaphone: ‘Ed Brown, stop where you are and put your hands in the air!’ But he was alone. No other human being was in sight.

  Ed opened the bag, unable to contain a broad smile, and pulled on the plaid pants and the white polo top he found inside. He patted his ginger hair down and fitted a cap onto his head. He pocketed the car keys and the note with the street address. He was set.

  There was just one last detail to attend to before he could be on his way. He found the golf clubs lying hidden in another flattened section of thick shrubs only a few metres away. He hauled them upright, dusted them off and looked himself over. Everything was in place. He had not forgotten a thing.

  Ed started towards the golf course.

  His gait was casual, the corners of his mouth turned up in a nonchalant smile. He was still sweating, but no one would notice. He could slow down now. There was no longer any need to rush. In fact, rushing now would draw attention to himself. No, he was just another golfer enjoying a scenic walk, just another golfer taking his time and enjoying a beautiful day by the water. Ed rounded the corner of the point and stepped onto the edge of the golf course. Slowly, he began to saunter towards the parking lot on the other side of the hill. It was at least a five-minute walk across the open fairway and he would take his time. He blended in so beautifully with the handful of golfers already on the greens that no one even looked up. No one seemed to notice that he had appear
ed out of thin air at the edge of the cliffs. He was back to being the invisible, unremarkable Ed Brown. He was back to living under the radar and making his own rules. He was free. He had won.

  Ed did not look back in the direction of the entrance to the tunnel until he was safely on the crest of the hill close to the clubhouse. When he finally turned, he was so far away that the mouth of the entrance, with its iron gate, was a mere speck on the horizon, the figures huddled around it as small and insignificant as ants. It was hard to discern what was going on from such a distance, but it hardly mattered now. They would not think to check the golfers. Not at this point. They would be scanning the tunnels, checking the shoreline for an escape boat. They would be tending to the injured. They would still be panicking, if they even knew enough to panic yet. Had the men on the surface even heard the blast? Perhaps they had not. And what kind of carnage had he left behind? It would take some time for them to sort through the mess, and by then he would be miles away.

  Less than ten minutes later, as he was driving down Anzac Parade in the Prison Lady’s beat-up Volkswagen, Ed heard the sirens. He calmly pulled over and let the speeding ambulance pass. And a few minutes after that, two blue and white police cars zipped by as well, all on the way to Botany Bay National Park.

  Ed watched them disappear in the rear-view mirror.

  He smiled.

  CHAPTER 25

  Andy sped toward the Prince of Wales Hospital, still barely able to register the news. He felt numb, like a distant observer separated from his own body. With a tense grip he drove his car on automatic pilot, fighting to block out the emotion and fear, and the dark conclusions running through his mind. Ed Brown is out. Jimmy is injured. The news was inconceivable, the consequences grave. One of Australia’s most notorious serial killers was at large, having escaped directly from the custody of the New South Wales police—out of their very own hands, a damning reality. The escape would trigger a public outcry, and quite possibly another Royal Commission. Someone would have to pay, and if they did not act fast to bring him in, more lives would be at risk, Makedde’s in particular.