by Candice Fox
It was enough for Amanda. She’d taken the clue and run.
What she’d brought with her today were three pieces of paper. First, there was a photocopy of a page of a Mount Annan local newspaper, the issue dated four days before Claire Bingley was abducted. In the ‘Freebies’ section, an ad had listed a mediumsized cross-breed white dog, free to good home, ‘moving to England and cannot take her with us’. On the back of the page, Amanda had made notes from her conversation with the posters of the ad. She’d called the couple who’d owned the dog from her hospital bed and talked to them in the quiet of the night, listening to the sounds of a London morning in the background of the call. Though they didn’t remember much about the man who’d taken their dog, they did remember his dark blue ute.
Amanda had started looking for a dark blue ute in all the evidence she could find about the moment Claire was abducted, and her search had led her to the second piece of paper in the envelope. It was a screenshot she had obtained from the CCTV camera of a homewares store in Camden Park, eight kilo metres from the spot where Claire Bingley was abducted. She’d started with cameras near Mount Annan, where the child had been abducted, and spiralled out. The only reason the owners of the store had kept the tape for the day Claire Bingley was abducted was because they’d been robbed the day after, and their cash register had been stolen, so the tape for the entire week had been entered into the police records. The image Amanda found was of a blue ute waiting at the traffic lights outside the store, the shadowed figure of a man sitting in the driver’s seat. At the edge of the passenger-side window, two tiny triangles were visible. With the quality of the video, and the distance of the shot, it was possible that the two white triangles in the window of the ute were flashes of light, reflections of the shopfront or the sun pouring between the buildings.
But Amanda didn’t think so. She thought they were the pointy ears of a medium-sized, white dog.
The final piece of paper in the envelope was another screenshot, this one taken from the security camera outside the Yagoona RSPCA shelter. As a matter of course, the RSPCA keep screenshots of all members of the public they catch dumping animals at their shelter gates. In the picture, a man was tying the leash of a medium-sized white dog to the gates of the centre. The man in the picture was bent at the waist, his face hidden. It was the best picture the camera had yielded. When the animal rescue staff had arrived the following morning, they’d found the dog there, his front left paw fractured.
Amanda could see Claire Bingley standing at the bus stop when she closed her eyes. The little girl turning from watching Ted’s car drive away at the sound of a yelp in the bush behind the bus stop. A white dog in the dark, shadowy brush, limping on its paw, whimpering in pain. What child wouldn’t go to an animal in distress?
Amanda stood at the corner of Ted’s house now and wondered. She knew that the few months she had been tracking down the man with the white dog were a good indication of how likely it was that she would eventually catch him. She was a good investigator, and her prison time had taught her the kind of quiet patience it took to find a monster as skilful, and as slippery, as the man with the blue ute seemed to be. But Amanda also knew that if she kept going, if she gave the information to Ted, and together they hunted down Claire Bingley’s attacker, she would lose him.
If Ted cleared his name completely, she’d be alone again. There’d be no reason for him to stay in the prison he’d built himself beside the dark waters of Crimson Lake. And Amanda kind of enjoyed having Ted around, even though he wasn’t often up for her games, and he couldn’t rhyme to save his life.
He made her happy. And she hadn’t been this happy since they threw her in prison for the first time all those years ago, the remand centre where she’d waited to go on trial. She’d stood in the doorway to the dorm with her toothbrush and soap and toilet paper ration and watched as the occupants of this strange new concrete wonderland awakened to her presence. She’d watched them emerging from their blankets, leaning around the corners of their bunks, examining her. Suddenly, her shaking had stopped.
She’d recognised them.
These were the broken dolls. The weirdoes. The freaks. These were the people she’d belonged with all her life. She’d finally found them. She’d finally found her place.
She’d felt that same sense of homecoming when the big man appeared in the Shark Bar doorway, trying to contain his worry, trying to hide his face. Here was another outsider. Here was one of her people.
Amanda took a deep breath and squeezed the envelope tight. As she stepped forward into the sunlight, the man on the grass noticed her. Ted turned and smiled as she made her way over.
She’d just have to trust him, she guessed.
If you enjoyed Crimson Lake, read on for an exclusive extract from Candice Fox’s prize-winning novel.
HADES
A dark, compelling and original thriller that will have you spellbound from its atmospheric opening pages to its shocking climax.
PROLOGUE
As soon as the stranger set the bundle on the floor, Hades could tell it was the body of a child. It was curled on its side and wrapped in a worn blue sheet secured with duct tape around the neck, waist and knees. One tiny pearl-coloured foot poked out from the hem, limp on his sticky linoleum. Hades leaned against the counter of his cramped, cluttered kitchen and stared at that little foot. The stranger shifted uneasily in the doorway, drew a cigarette from a packet and pulled out some matches. The man they called Hades lifted his eyes briefly to the stranger’s thin angled face.
‘Don’t smoke in my house.’
The stranger had been told how to get to Hades’ place but not about its bewildering, frightening character. Beyond the iron gates of the Utulla tip, on the ragged edge of the Western suburbs, lay a gravel road leading through mountains of trash to a hill that blocked out the sky, black and imposing, guarded by stars. A crown of trees and scrub on top of the hill obscured all view of the small wooden shack. The stranger had driven with painful care past piles of rubbish as high as apartment buildings crawling with every manner of night creature – owls, cats and rodents picking and shifting through old milk cartons and bags of rotting meat. Luminescent eyes peered from the cabins of burned-out car shells and from beneath sheets of twisted corrugated iron.
Farther along the gravel path, the stranger began to encounter a new breed of watchful beast. Creatures made from warped scraps of metal and pieces of discarded machinery lined the road – a broken washing machine beaten and buckled into the figure of a snarling lion, a series of bicycles woven together and curled and stretched into the body of a grazing flamingo. In the light of the moon, the animals with their kitchen-utensil feathers and Coke-bottle eyes seemed tense and ready. When the stranger entered the house he was a little relieved to be away from them and their attention. The relief evaporated when he laid eyes on the man they called the Lord of the Underworld.
Hades was standing in the corner of the kitchen when the stranger entered, as though he’d known he was coming. He had not moved from there, his furry arms folded over his barrel chest. Cold heavy-lidded eyes fixed on the bundle in the stranger’s arms. There was a Walther PP handgun with a silencer on the disordered bench beside him by a half-empty glass of scotch. Hades’ grey hair looked neat atop his thick skull. He was squat and bulky like an ox, power and rage barely contained in the painful closeness of the kitchen.
The air inside the little house seemed pressed tight by the trees, a dark dome licking and stroking the hot air through the windows. Hades’ kitchen was adorned with things he had salvaged from the dump. Ornate bottles and jars of every conceivable colour hung by fishing line from the ceiling, strange cutting and slicing implements were nailed like weapons to the walls. There were china fish and pieces of plastic fruit and a stuffed yellow ferret coiled, sleeping, in a basket by the foot of the door, jars of things there seemed no sense in keeping – coloured marbles and lens-less spectacles and bottle caps in their thousands – and lines o
f dolls’ heads along the window-sill, some with eyes and some without, gaping mouths smiling, howling, crying. Through the door to the tiny living room, a wall crammed with tattered paperbacks was visible, the books lying and standing in every position from the unpolished floor-boards to the mould-spotted ceiling.
The stranger writhed in the silence. Wanted to look at everything but afraid of what he might see. Night birds moaned in the trees outside the mismatched stained-glass windows.
‘Do you, uh …’ The stranger worked the back of his neck with his fingernails. ‘Do you want me to go and get the other one?’
Hades said nothing for a long time. His eyes were locked on the body of the child in the worn blue sheet.
‘Tell me how this happened.’
The stranger felt new sweat tickle at his temples.
‘Look,’ he sighed, ‘I was told there’d be no questions. I was told I could just come and drop them off and …’
‘You were told wrong.’
One of Hades’ chubby fingers tapped his left bicep slowly, as though counting off time. The stranger fingered the cigarette he had failed to light, drawing it to his lips, remembered the warning. He slipped it into his pocket and stared at the bundle on the floor, at the shape of the girl’s small head tucked against her chest.
‘It was supposed to be the most perfect, perfect thing,’ the stranger said, shaking his head at the body. ‘It was all Benny’s idea. He saw a newspaper story about this guy, Tenor I think his name was, this crazy scientist dude. He’d just copped a fat wad of cash for some thing he was working on with skin cancer or sunburn or some shit like that. Benny got obsessed with the guy, kept bringing us newspaper clippings. He showed us a picture of the guy and his little wife and his two kiddies and said the family was mega-rich already and he was just adding his new dosh to a big stinking pile.’
The stranger drew a long breath that inflated his narrow chest. Hades watched, unmoving.
‘We’d got word that the family was going to be alone at their holiday house in Long Jetty. So we drove up there, the six of us, to rattle their cage and take the babies – just for a bit, you know, not for long. It was going to be the easiest job, man. Bust in, bust out, keep them for a couple of days and then organise an exchange. We weren’t gonna do nothing with them. I’d even borrowed some games they could play while they stayed with us.’
Hades opened one of the drawers beside him and extracted a notepad and pen. From where he stood, he slapped them onto the small table by the side wall.
‘These others,’ he said, ‘write down their names. And your own.’
The stranger began to protest, but Hades was silent. The stranger sat on the plastic chair by the table, his fingers trembling, and began to write names on the paper. His handwriting was childlike and crooked, smeared.
‘Everything just went wrong so fast,’ he murmured as he wrote, holding the paper steady with his long white fingers. ‘Benny got the idea that the dude was giving him the eye like he was gonna do something stupid. I wasn’t paying attention. The woman was screaming and crying and carrying on and someone clocked her and the kids were struggling. Benny blew the parents away. He just … he pumped them and pumped them till his gun was flat. He was always so fucking trigger happy. He was always so fucking ready for a fight.’
The stranger seemed stirred by some emotion, letting air out of his chest slowly through his teeth. He stared at the names he had written on the paper. Hades watched.
‘One minute everything was fine. The next thing I know we’re on the road with the kids in the boot and no one to sell them to. We started talking about getting rid of them and someone said they knew you and …’ The stranger shrugged and wiped his nose on his hand.
For the first time since the stranger had arrived, Hades left the corner of the kitchen. He seemed larger and more menacing somehow, his oversized, calloused hands godly as they cradled the tiny notepad, tearing off the page with the names. The stranger sat, defeated, in the plastic chair. He didn’t raise his eyes as Hades folded the small square of paper, slipping it into his pocket. He didn’t notice as the older man took up the pistol, actioned it and flicked the safety off.
‘It was an accident,’ the stranger murmured, his bloodshot eyes brimming with tears as he stared, lips parted, at the body in the bundle. ‘Everything was going so well.’
The man named Hades put two bullets into the stranger. The stranger’s confused eyes fixed on Hades, his hands grabbing at the holes in his body. Hades put the gun back on the counter and lifted the scotch to his lips. The night birds had stopped their moaning and only the sound of the stranger dying filled the air.
Hades set the glass down with a sigh and began to trace the dump yards around the hill with his mind, searching for the best place for the body of the stranger and, somewhere separate, somewhere fitting, to bury the bodies of the little ones. There was a place he knew behind the sorting centre where a tree had sprung up between the piles of garbage – the twisted and gnarled thing sometimes produced little pink flowers. He would bury the children there together and dig the stranger in somewhere, anywhere, with the dozens of rapists, killers and thieves who littered the grounds of the dump. Hades closed his eyes. Too many strangers were coming to his dump these nights with their bundles of lost lives. He would have to put the word out that no new clients were welcome. The ones he knew, his regular clients, brought him the bodies of evil ones. But these strangers. He shook his head. These strangers kept bringing innocents.
Hades set his empty glass on the counter by his gun. His eyes wandered across the cracked floor to the small pearl foot of the dead girl.
It was then that he noticed the toes were clenched.
1
I FIGURED I’D struck it lucky when I first laid eyes on Eden Archer. She was sitting by the window with her back to me. I could just see a slice of her angular face when she surveyed the circle of men around her. It seemed to be some kind of counselling session, probably about the man I was replacing, Eden’s late partner. Some of the men in the circle were grey-faced and sullen, like they were only just keeping their emotions in check. The psychologist himself looked as if someone had just stolen his last zack.
Eden, on the other hand, was quietly contemplative. She had a flick-blade in her right hand, visible only to me, and she was sliding it open and shut with her thumb. I ran my eyes over her long black braid and licked my teeth. I knew her type, had encountered plenty in the academy. No friends, no interest in having a mess around in the male dorms on quiet weekends when the officers were away. She could run in those three-inch heels, no doubt about that. The forty-dollar manicure was her third this month but she would break a rat’s neck if she found it in her pantry. I liked the look of her. I liked the way she breathed, slow and calm, while the officers around her tried not to fall to pieces.
I stood there at the mirrored glass, half-listening to Captain James blab on about the loss of Doyle to the Sydney Metro Homicide Squad and what it had done to morale. The counselling session broke up and Eden slipped her knife into her belt. The white cotton top clung to her carefully sculpted figure. Her eyes were big and dark, downcast to the carpet as she walked through the door towards me.
‘Eden.’ The captain motioned at me. ‘Frank Bennett, your new partner.’
I grinned and shook her hand. It was warm and hard in mine.
‘Condolences,’ I said. ‘I heard Doyle was a great guy.’ I’d also heard Eden had come back with his blood mist all over her face, bits of his brain on her shirt.
‘You’ve got big shoes to fill.’ She nodded. Her voice was as flat as a tack.
She half-smiled in a tired kind of way, as if my turning up to be her partner was just another annoyance in what had been a long and shitty morning. Her eyes met mine for the briefest of seconds before she walked away.
Captain James showed me to my spot in the bull-pit. The desk had been stripped of Doyle’s personal belongings. It was chipped and bare, save for a black
plastic telephone and a laptop port. A number of people looked up from their desks as I entered. I figured they’d introduce themselves in time. A group of men and women by the coffee station gave me the once-over and then turned inward to compare their assessments. They held mugs with slogans like ‘Beware of the Twilight Fan’ and ‘World’s Biggest Asshole’ printed on the side.
My mother had been a wildlife warrior, the kind who would stop and fish around in the pouches of kangaroo corpses for joeys and scrape half-squashed birds off the road to give them pleasant deaths or fix them. One morning she brought me home a box of baby owls to care for, three in all, abandoned by their mother. The men and women in the office made me think of those owls, the way they clustered into a corner of the shoebox when I’d opened it, the way their eyes howled black and empty with terror.
I was keen to get talking to people here. There were some exciting cases happening and this assignment was very much a step up for me. My last department at North Sydney had been mainly Asian gangland crime. It was all very straightforward and repetitive – territorial drive-bys and executions and restaurant hold-ups, fathers beaten and young girls terrorised into silence. I knew from the media hype and word around my old office that Sydney Metro were looking for an eleven-year-old girl who’d gone missing and was probably dead somewhere. And I’d heard another rumour that someone here had worked on the Ivan Milat backpacker murders in the 1990s. I wanted to unpack my stuff quickly and go looking for some war tales.
