by Candice Fox
Amanda had been placed under arrest for trespassing on a crime scene. Chief Clark had arrived on the rooftop to find his officers snarling and swearing at each other, Joanna Fischer in tears and Amanda in cuffs kicking and screaming. The cops had wanted to take her to the Cairns police station in a car, and she’d been howling that if anyone put her in a car she would personally track that bastard down when she was released and bite all their fingers off one by one. Superfish, ever the calm and quiet voice cutting through the mayhem, had interjected at exactly the right time, volunteering to walk Amanda to the nearby Cairns police station. Clark had allowed Superfish to take her away from the fray in cuffs.
‘I insisted on my phone call,’ Amanda said. ‘I was going to call you. Tell you that I’d been arrested. How funny is that? While I’m trying to tell you I’ve been arrested, you’re trying to tell me you’ve been arrested. Or abducted! I think abducted would be more accurate.’ She turned, her tattooed skin purple and yellow and red in the flashing lights of the police cars. ‘Anyway, I made such a big deal about it that Superfish tried to call your phone as we walked to the police station. Some Japanese woman answered. She didn’t speak great English but she mentioned the crocodile farm. It seemed like you’d lost your phone in the parking lot at the crocodile farm.’
‘Why didn’t you just leave it at that?’ I asked.
‘It didn’t seem right.’ She shrugged. ‘Why would you go there? I mean, you’ve got one day left to spend with your sprog and you go to that crocodile farm. I thought you were probably a bit dissatisfied with Hogan taking the rap for Richie’s death, like I was. You went to the last place Richie and his mother were seen together, and then suddenly, puff! You’ve disappeared. Just like I always feared. Weird. No sign of you or your beard. It was like it was geared, engineered, you and the sprog had been commandeered.’
Amanda had charged into the Cairns police station ahead of Superfish, with her hands still cuffed behind her back, and started shouting demands for someone to open her instant messaging account on their phone or a computer and read her last text. Superfish obliged, and they read the SOS message together. Amanda knew I hadn’t been arrested. She thought about the crocodile farm. The last place Richie had been seen alive, in the company of his mother. Amanda had called for someone to track the GPS on Sara Farrow’s phone and tell her the location, but the station commander was already berating Superfish for his ward’s behaviour. No one had complied with Amanda’s GPS tracking request, so she kicked over a stand of brochures and knocked a laptop off a desk with her elbow, jumped up on a table and leapt from desk to desk as people tried to bring her down. Superfish had got her into a cell holding and quietly borrowed another officer’s computer to find the location of Sara Farrow’s phone, discovering that it was heading up the highway south from the crocodile farm.
‘How did you get out of custody?’ I asked.
‘Superfish let me out.’ Amanda glanced around at a huddle of officers taking a briefing from Chief Clark on a search of the mangroves. ‘He’ll probably be fired for it. He let me out of the holding cell and out a back door at the station, gave me his phone so I could follow the signal. I told him to tell them I kicked him in the balls but I don’t know. He doesn’t seem like the lying type.’
As though he’d heard his name called, Superfish approached us from the huddle of officers, looking grave. I checked on Lillian, letting her fall into the crook of my arm, and found she was asleep. In all the light and noise and chaos, she had simply blinked out of consciousness, all of it too much for her. I envied her, the dancing shadows of her eyelashes on her perfect cheeks.
‘They’re going to put some boats out, see if they can find Sara. Maybe some of Richie’s remains,’ Superfish said. ‘The coastguard has offered to help.’
‘Are you people nuts?’ Amanda threw her hands up. ‘That bitch will be half digested before you get the first engine started. You heard Ted. She’s croc food. And that kid’s corpse has been out there for five days. You’ll have to net every beast in the area and put his bones back together like a jigsaw puzzle. It’ll take months.’
Amanda was making such a scene that the officers nearby were watching. Even in the red and blue light of the patrol cars I could see Superfish was blushing.
‘Probably worth it, though,’ he mumbled. ‘I’d appreciate your help. You have a good eye, and you know exactly where Sara disappeared from.’
‘You want my help?’ Amanda snapped. ‘Look at me. I’m covered in child filth and swamp filth. If I don’t have the early stages of tuberculosis right now I’ve almost certainly got leeches. How am I going to search for anything like this? There are things crawling in my pants, Superfish. There are things crawling in my pants!’
My partner stared helplessly at the officer beside her, who seemed to have nothing to offer to counteract her complaints. I left them there in the chaos of the search, carrying my child to where more patrol cars were arriving in the hopes of catching a ride back home.
Amanda hadn’t signed up for this. She sat at the bow of a small aluminium boat while Superfish steered, picking bits of dirt from behind her ears, only half-looking at what the beam of the torch clasped under her arm showed of the riverbanks. Amanda had told herself after Pip Sweeney’s death that she and Ted, and Conkaffey & Pharrell Investigations as a business, would not be working with the police again. They were far too annoying, with their sneering and sniggering, their neurotic crime scene preservation and their kneejerk willingness to jump into boats and go zooming around searching for things that were clearly not there just so that they could say they looked and no one would throw sticks at them later because they didn’t. Too concerned with their own image, the police, Amanda thought. And their uniforms seemed uncomfortable and stuffy. The crotches were too high.
The decision had been made to send five search boats out into the river, to send teams to place dragnets up and down stream three kilometres each way from where Sara Farrow had disappeared, and to put up two search and rescue choppers – one police, one coast guard. In the morning, when they found nothing, Amanda knew they’d bring in dogs. Amanda didn’t envy the canines tasked with wading through the croc-infested waters looking for Sara or Richie’s remains, waiting to feel that inevitable brush of scaly skin against their furry hides. Crocs loved dogs. Their splashing and paddling was like music to their weird little waterproof ears.
They spied Joanna Fischer early in the search on the bow of another boat, Superfish and Amanda saying nothing, waiting patiently for some obscenity to be yelled across the water as the tinnies passed each other in the moonlit night. Nothing came, the woman watching emotionlessly as Amanda passed, the bruise under her eye like a dark smudge of mud. Superfish took them up the river and down a small, winding channel, the hull groaning as it sailed over rocks and roots. With his own torch he swept the banks, endless darkness populated by twisting, pale trees. There was the occasional panicked rustle overhead, something with luminescent eyes fleeing. The almost alien yipping of young crocs and frogs in the shadows. The channel narrowed so that on either side the banks were within arm’s reach.
‘Could I ask you to keep your torch on the ground?’ Superfish said, letting the engine idle as they sailed along.
‘I don’t know, could you?’ Amanda spat.
‘You’re pointing it at the tops of the trees. Perhaps you should actually hold it in your hand.’
‘What do you want to see?’ Amanda aimed the torch at the banks. ‘Look. Crabholes. Thousands of crabholes.’ She reached out, quick as lightning, and snatched up a white crab that had been sprinting sideways away from her torch. ‘Crabs, too. You want to see them? Here. Look real close.’
Superfish didn’t flinch as Amanda threw the crab at him. He caught it just in front of his face and placed it gently in the water.
‘I think I’ll take a look along the banks.’ Superfish cut the engine and let the boat shunt into a sandy bank. ‘It’s dry enough up there. You can stay in the boat
if you’re scared of the crocs.’
Amanda gave an exaggerated groan and slid out of the boat, barely resisting the urge to remind Superfish she had bested a fifteen-foot croc not a year earlier. Superfish took his own torch and stood on the firm sand, looking out into the dark.
‘Sara?’ he called.
‘She can’t hear you,’ Amanda said. ‘At present she’s the consistency of a beef casserole. Soon she’ll be steak tartar and then she’ll be liver pate.’
‘I’ll look this way,’ Superfish pointed. ‘You follow the bank up that way. Scream if you need help.’
They split, Amanda shining the torch before her, crowds of tiny panicked crabs rushing into their bubbling holes in the sand, pincers flailing. She had only walked a hundred metres or so when she heard the sound for the first time.
A soft moan.
She almost laughed at herself, her pessimism at finding Sara Farrow or her son out here in the dark falling off her shoulders like a cloak. Amanda was never wrong, and yet here she was, ears pricked, waiting for the sound to come again. If she found Sara Farrow right now, Amanda was going to laugh her arse off. What were the chances?
‘Help.’ A weak voice.
‘Oi!’ Amanda called. ‘Speak up. Where are you?’
‘Help. Help.’
Amanda followed the noise, sweeping the torch to look for crocs as she traversed a patch of deep sand, then a ridge of high, firm land covered in grass. The voice never seemed to get any closer. How was that possible? Was Sara walking away from her in the mangroves? Maybe she was disoriented. Trailing a munched-on leg hanging from her body by a thread. Amanda walked on, looking for a single footprint and a drag mark, maybe trails of blood. But there was nothing. Only the little crustacean citizens and their mass hysteria.
‘Help.’
‘Stay where you are, idiot!’ Amanda said.
The realisation of her mistake came in a violent rush, like a plunge into icy water, the knowledge that she had been lured into a trap. She saw footprints, not the small tennis shoes and thongs she’d seen Sara Farrow wearing over the past few days but the big, unmistakeable print of police-issue boots. Amanda had left her gun in the boat. She was so far from the banks now, on a wandering path she’d taken trying to follow a moving sound, that finding her way back would be a guessing game, and there was little chance Superfish would be able to find her even if she screamed.
Joanna Fischer stepped out from behind a tree and Amanda gave a full-body sigh that made the torchlight shift up and down.
‘You know, this swampland is two hundred and seventy square kilometres,’ Amanda moaned. ‘Couldn’t you have found another patch of it to be a creepy bitch in?’
‘Where’s my partner?’ Joanna asked.
‘He’s off hunting the legendary Australian bunyip.’ Amanda shone her torch in Joanna’s face. ‘He wants to bag one and sell it to Ripley’s.’
‘He put in a transfer,’ Joanna said, wandering out into the light. ‘He wants out of Holloways Beach and into Crimson Lake department. He wants to be away from me.’
‘I’ve never been less surprised by anything in my life,’ Amanda said. ‘Being away from you is one of my favourite pastimes.’
‘Superfish has really been good to me,’ Joanna said. She looked down at her boots on the sand. ‘He’s had a lot to try to understand with Pip’s loss. How what happened to my best friend still haunts me.’
Amanda slapped at a mosquito on her arm, sniffed.
‘Jesus Christ, you’re boring,’ Amanda said. ‘Pip didn’t even like you. She wasn’t your best friend, she was your partner, and she probably put in a request to get away from you just like Superfish did.’
‘She was promoted.’
‘Yeah.’ Amanda rolled her eyes. ‘I bet she was devastated, too.’
‘You’re wrong.’ Joanna inhaled unsteadily. ‘She was my friend, and you took her. You ruined me. You ruined everything I could have been. I had someone in my life to look up to. A guide. Look at what you did to me. I’ve killed a man because of you. An innocent man.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Amanda said. ‘You loved it. You loved it when Pip died, because that gave your already unhealthy fixation a tremendous bump into psychosis territory. You’re so interesting now, aren’t you, Joanna? The grieving, traumatised friend. People are falling all over each other trying to defend you. Suddenly you’re surrounded by friends!’
‘No one is grieving for Pip,’ Joanna said. ‘And no one recognises my grief. They’ve forgotten all about her. They’re all just so consumed by you.’
‘Well,’ Amanda said, ‘who could blame them?’
‘I need to do something,’ Joanna said. ‘I expected you to go. I pushed you and pushed you. You should have understood that you’re not welcome here anymore. You like the attention too much, I think. Well, let’s end the story for them, Amanda. Let’s give it a nice poetic finish, and then people can forget you altogether.’
She took a knife from her back pocket and threw it at Amanda’s feet. The tattooed woman didn’t flinch. The blade stuck in the sand, then flopped slowly onto its side. It was short and thin, like a folding knife.
‘This is what happens when you get too close to Amanda Pharrell,’ Joanna said.
‘What?’ Amanda laughed.
‘You’re a killer.’ Joanna took another knife from her back pocket, though it was bigger than the one lying on the sand. ‘You came at me, as you have before. I defended myself.’
‘I’m not doing this.’ Amanda turned away. ‘I’m not giving you –’
The knife was badly thrown, hitting Amanda in the back and only penetrating the skin a couple of centimetres before the weight of the handle dragged it out. Before she could turn and grab the weapon from the sand, Joanna was there, sweeping upwards with her shoulder, barging into Amanda hard so that she fell in the damp mangroves. Joanna’s body was hot, her breath coming in furious pants, the way a man’s had that fateful night when Amanda killed for the first time.
‘I’m not –’ Amanda tried to say. ‘I’m not –’
It was working, Joanna’s plan. She was taking her back. All the way back to when she was seventeen, the first time she had killed. She was hopelessly enslaved to it, the memories of Lauren Freeman in the rainforest that night impossibly accessible, even after all these years. Amanda remembered the girl’s desperate, wide eyes, the same as Joanna’s now, so shocked by the wounds in her back as she rolled over on the ground, gripped Amanda’s arms. She remembered the roar of the cicadas in the trees all around them, the way her own heartbeat seemed to trip, skip, hammer in turns.
She remembered the second time she’d killed. Pip appearing at the glass doors to the little house just as Amanda raised her gun too late, firing and hitting one of the men who had attacked her. Defending herself. Taking a life. Ruining everything Pip could have been. Taking Pip from the world simply by being, marking her with the touch of death as soon as she’d laid eyes on the other woman. She had to kill again now. Make Joanna part of it. She had no choice.
Joanna’s knife was coming down, teasing wounds in Amanda’s chest and forearms, tiny pricks and slashes, goading her. Amanda grabbed for the other knife in the sand, gathered it up, slashed wildly and caught Joanna across the chest, tearing fabric, the knife knocking over plastic buttons. There was blood. Joanna got off Amanda, stumbled back, examined the blood on her hand in the moonlight.
Amanda staggered to her feet, wiped the blade of the knife on her denim shorts. She hadn’t wanted to give in, to surrender to Joanna’s will. But her body was burning and bleeding and the rage that was usually so fleeting, so hard to access, was roaring out of her now.
‘Remember.’ Amanda waggled the blade at Joanna. ‘You asked for this.’
The two ran at each other. Amanda slipped sideways at the last second, palmed Joanna in the jaw, knocked her off balance and dug the knife into the soft flesh under her arm. The tip penetrated the back of her shirt, shallow, wounding. She didn’t see Joann
a’s move coming, tried to shove the woman down onto the sand but got the edge of a boot scraping down her shin bone. The scream caught in Amanda’s throat. Joanna came for her again, half-hearted slashes and jabs, baiting Amanda into another entanglement. She went willingly, trying to get enough swing to ram the handle of the blade into Joanna’s temple. They fell, Joanna giving Amanda three quick jabs with the knife in the ribs, wounds Amanda knew would bleed well but never threaten her life.
This is it, Amanda thought. You die by a thousand cuts or you give her what she wants. There was no winning. She could see Joanna telling one story, those dramatic tears, the twisted tale of Amanda Pharrell’s vicious attack on her in the dark night. Avenging her friend by taking Amanda’s life and refusing to give up her own, a bittersweet ending to a long and traumatic tale. The hero’s journey from victim to predator. Amanda’s frantic brain was also flashing visions of Joanna’s other purpose, the end she wanted even more. Joanna’s death by Amanda’s hand.
The only way to win was to give her neither. Survive somehow. Flip the game board and scatter the pieces.
Amanda rolled and tried to scramble away, but Joanna had her hair in her fist and the knife at her neck.
The breath left Amanda as another body slammed into them, Superfish wrapping his arms around Joanna, trying to haul her backwards, fumbling for the knife.
‘Don’t!’ His voice was high, desperate. ‘Don’t! Don’t!’
Joanna twisted, swung the knife, missed him as he fell away. This wasn’t in her plan. Her story included three people – herself, Amanda and her dead friend. Amanda could see the rage and excitement in Joanna’s face fall from her features like lead. Superfish had to be dealt with quickly. He was not part of her script. He lay watching, eyes wide, as she came for him.
