The Fall

by Tristan Bancks

  Huh, I thought. Why would an elderly couple place a piece of sticky tape on the door? I had seen police use this in a Crime Smashers story called ‘Underworld Rats’. The officer stuck a small piece of tape on the door so that she could tell if someone had entered her apartment while she was out. But would the Hills, a nice, elderly couple travelling in their caravan, do that?

  Probably not.

  A police officer would, though. One with a secret.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  CODECRACKER

  I sat on the floor, my back against the wall of the dark room, my face lit up by the phone screen. It was 11.17 pm. Magic was lying on her side next to me, doggy-dreaming – growling and yipping, her paws twitching. The door of my hiding space in the wall was on the ground next to her. I had built it during the day, using two timber boards from the wall behind the wardrobe to connect the four boards that I’d removed from the lounge room wall. I’d re-used the rusty nails to run one length of timber across the top of the four boards and another along the bottom. There was no hammer in the flat, so I’d bashed the nails in with the handle of Harry’s hunting knife. The job was far from perfect but I felt ready. I sure hoped Harry didn’t mind me ripping his apartment to pieces.

  I had locked the front door deadlocks. I had practised getting myself and Magic into the wall. Magic hated it but I could get us inside, fully concealed, in thirty seconds if the man came back here.

  He won’t, I told myself.

  He will, I replied.

  I thought about the knife in the cupboard, but I left it there. I didn’t know how to handle it. He could use it against me. I thought of all those news stories about kids in America playing with their parents’ weapons and hurting themselves or a friend or a family member. I hated those stories.

  My phone pinged.

  Sorry Sam. Busy night.

  Still awake? What do you

  need to tell me?

  My skin tingled all over. She would come get me, could be here by 1.15 am.

  Can you come get me now?

  I’m in trouble

  I hit ‘send’ and the screen immediately went black. I pressed the home button but nothing happened.

  I hit the power button. Nothing. The battery was dead. How, in all that waiting, had I not plugged the phone in? I tried not to think the word ‘idiot’ again but it was difficult.

  Did the message go? Did she get it?

  I checked the wall for power points. There were none near my hiding spot, so I took Harry’s laptop and my phone charger cord out of my backpack. I flipped the laptop open and tried to plug the cord into the side of the computer but my hand was shaking. She’ll be waiting now, worrying. Or not. Did it go? I used both hands to guide the plug into the slot. I watched the black phone screen, urging it to life, my face bathed in blue laptop glow. The computer screen read:

  Please Enter Your Password

  I want to, I thought. I had already tried a bunch of passwords earlier. The cursor winked at me, daring me to try something else.

  I shook the phone but that didn’t seem to help.

  Please Enter Your Password

  Who is my father? I wondered. Born 23 September 1954. Crime reporter. Cranky. Not a big talker. A bit reluctant to have me stay with him these past thirteen years. Secretive. Not that tech savvy.

  I had read something online about the easy passwords people choose, especially older people who aren’t that good with technology. Even smart older people. While I waited for the phone screen to come alive I tried a few passwords that I could remember from the list and a few that seemed like Harry:

  123456

  password

  12345

  12345678

  123456789

  football

  boxing

  Magic1

  browndog

  letmein

  abc123

  111111

  crime

  Crime

  krime

  crimereporter

  123123

  Trustno1

  Nothing.

  Phone still dead. If Mum received my message she would be panicking now.

  I tried Harry’s birthdate again.

  230954

  Nothing.

  Out of desperation, I tried my own birthdate.

  060504

  A little blue circle started to spin in the centre of the screen. A fan whirred at the back of the machine.

  There is no way he used my birthdate.

  But a warm feeling rose in my chest. This morning my father said he loved me. Tonight I discovered he uses my birthdate as his password. I wouldn’t have thought that he even knew my birthday.

  ‘Father Loves Son and Uses Birthdate as Laptop Code.’ For most kids this would not be headline news. I tried to push the warm feeling away but I couldn’t.

  My mum had done pretty much everything for me my whole life. Harry had done pretty much nothing, apart from once sending me a pile of old comic books. Knowing my birthdate did not suddenly make him World’s Greatest Dad. And it was probably a stupid code, really, for someone so worried about cyber-security that he’d often leave his phone at home. But it felt good. I couldn’t help it. It meant that he thought about me sometimes, maybe even every time he punched in that code. It meant that I mattered to him. I sent out a prayer that he was okay, wherever he was. Even if he was out drinking again.

  The blue circle stopped spinning and the laptop screen came alive. The image filling the screen was divided evenly into four black-and-white rectangles. I stared at them, my eyes flicking between the four until I realised what they were and the hairs on my neck stood on end.

  The window in the top-left quarter of the screen looked like a wide security-camera shot of the inside of Harry’s apartment. The kind of image you see on the news or in a movie when a petrol station or convenience store is robbed. I looked carefully at the grainy picture and I thought I could see the side of my own head at the bottom-right. I waved my hand in the air and watched my hand rise on-screen. I pulled my hand down and it disappeared from view. My heartbeat quickened. I turned to look up into the corner of the room where the camera must have been, but I couldn’t see anything.

  Why would he have surveillance inside his own apartment?

  I turned back to the screen and waved my hand again, then struggled to my feet. I picked up my crutches and moved to the corner of the room, using the light of the laptop screen to make out where the camera must be.

  I thought of a horror movie I’d seen during one of my sleepless nights at home a few months back. In the movie, the phone kept ringing and the owner would pick up, only to hear heavy breathing. It happened again and again until police were brought in. They tapped the phone and the lady was asked to keep the caller on the line so that they could tell where the call was coming from. She did, and they got a reading on it. The call was coming from inside the house.

  I hadn’t slept for nights after that and for weeks afterwards I freaked every time the phone rang.

  Why would Harry have been watching his own apartment? All those nights I had seen him keeping an eye on the laptop screen, not pressing buttons, just watching. Was he watching me? Was he watching me now from another computer?

  I stared hard into the corner of the lounge room, the corner diagonally opposite the front door. He was watching the door, I thought. Did he think that someone would break in? Or was it just a precaution?

  A little way along, halfway between the corner of the room and Harry’s bedroom door, was a pine bookcase, the one the man had raked books off the night before. There wasn’t much on the bookcase but on the very top shelf was a brass elephant about the size of a guinea pig. I reached up. I wasn’t tall enough so I used my right crutch to push the ornament towards the edge of the shelf, just gently, not wanting to break it. I reached up again and could only just get my fingertips to scrape the elephant’s front foot. I pushed it another few centimetres with the crutch and the elephant reached out over the edge of
the shelf, tilted sharply and began to fall. I dropped my crutches and tried to catch it, but it was too heavy, too slippery. It fell through my fingers and onto my left foot. Hard.

  Pain shot up my leg like someone had poked the hot metal tip of a spear through my foot. I bit my hand to stop myself from screaming. I bent down to grab my toes. They felt angry and swollen from where Dumbo had landed. Magic arrived on the scene and licked my face, then my fingers and toes. I shrugged her off and stayed there for a moment till my pulse slowed.

  The elephant lay on its side. I picked it up and inspected it. I noticed, in the dim laptop glow, that one of its eyes looked shinier than the other. I twisted it right and left to see if there was light reflecting in that eye. It looked like a small camera lens, shiny and glassy. I glanced back at the laptop sitting on the floor. In the top left of the screen, I could see the side of my face in close-up. My dad had been watching me. Why was he watching me? Was he watching now? Could he hear me? I looked into the lens and pleaded, ‘Come home. Please.’ Just in case.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  SURVEILLANCE

  The other three cameras were filming a balcony, the inside of another apartment and a front door. The number on the front door said ‘6A’. The ‘A’ was slightly twisted to the right.

  Each of the four video images had timecode running beneath. In twenty-four hour time it was now 23:28:16. The 16 turned to 17, then 18 as the seconds ticked over. Next to the timecode was today’s date: 05.05.17. I wondered why security cameras always seemed to record such murky, grainy images when this was the one time you really needed to see clear detail.

  There were ‘play’, ‘fast-forward’ and ‘rewind’ buttons under each video feed. I clicked on the timecode and realised that I could change it. My eyes flicked to the camera view showing what had to be the inside of apartment 6A, looking out towards the balcony. The camera was filming from up high. I wondered if they had an identical elephant or if the surveillance company offered a variety of heavy brass animals. My toe throbbed.

  How did he get a camera inside 6A? Had he broken in? No, he wouldn’t have known how to set it up. Someone else must have done it for him. I took a sharp breath and typed in 02:10:00. That was 2.10 this morning.

  My skin seeped dread.

  The picture flickered for a second and the two men appeared on the balcony. I could see the big man from behind. He was blocking the view of the other man’s face.

  My concentration was broken by a sound on the stairs outside Harry’s front door. I hit pause on the video and looked up from the laptop screen, listening carefully. I was ready to climb inside the wall and close the hatch, but the noise seemed to pass. I waited and waited, to be sure.

  I pressed play again and watched. The big man moved to the left a little, pointing in the face of the smaller man. I hit pause. I clicked on a button with a magnifying glass and a ‘+’ symbol and zoomed in. I recognised the smaller man’s face right away. His skin was white and blurry from the zoom, and he was older than he looked in the photo I had taken on my phone from the news story. He had a shiny bald patch at the front of his hair. But, even so, I was 90 per cent sure it was John Merrin, the missing journalist. I wanted to take a shot of the screen but my stupid phone still hadn’t come back to life.

  I hit play again and watched the two men argue on the balcony. Merrin pointed his finger into the big man’s face and then Moon Face’s hand went over Merrin’s mouth, trying to silence him. They struggled for a moment, Merrin pushing Moon Face back before the big man shoved him very hard. Merrin went over the railing and I saw the back of the larger man as he looked over the balcony for a few seconds, then he turned and walked quickly across the apartment, directly towards the camera. I could hear his footsteps in my mind, the way I’d listened to them last night. I paused again and looked at him. Silver hair, double chin, wide, waxy face like the moon. His eyes were heavy, dark, wrinkled sockets. He looked like a banker or the head of a company. I did not need to zoom in. It was him, the cop.

  Harry Garner had known this would happen, had expected it. He had surveillance footage of the death of another crime reporter. But he had not been around to see it. Why had he not taken his laptop with him today? I scanned the interface of the video surveillance program. I went into Preferences and, under ‘General’, a box had been ticked: ‘Stream to Cloud’. I figured this meant that Harry could watch this footage from somewhere else. From everywhere else. ‘Stream to Cloud’ also meant that Harry had wi-fi here, which really annoyed me. I’d been going mental all this week without the web and he’d had it all along.

  Who had set the cameras up for him? This was a pretty sophisticated system for a guy as tech-phobic as my dad. Unless he was the world’s greatest actor and liar and secretly he was a tech-genius, which seemed pretty unlikely to me. He had tried to help me set up my Xbox when I first arrived and he was hopeless. Someone had installed this system for him. Someone from the Herald? The woman he met at the bakery? I wondered how they got the cameras into the other apartment. In comics and movies, surveillance experts broke into apartments all the time, but I had never thought about it happening in real life.

  I had everything I needed to identify the perpetrator of this crime. My phone screen finally came alive. There were three texts from Mum and seven missed calls. Another text buzzed in as I went to my messages. She said:

  What trouble? What’s

  happened?

  Sam?

  Why won’t you answer

  the phone? I’ll come

  right now.

  Getting in car. Please text

  me back so I know you’re

  okay.

  There was a knock on the front door of the apartment. Only quiet, but it felt like a shotgun blast to my heart. I pocketed the phone, clicked the laptop closed and slipped it into my backpack.

  ‘C’mon, girl,’ I whispered. I dragged Magic up by her collar. She snorted and grunted, then sneezed. I led her to the hole in the wall. She tried to refuse but I lifted her front paws and then her wide behind in and I pushed her into the narrow cavity, down to the right. She growled as I slid her along and I felt bad but it was for the best. I would give her snacks later to make up for this. If there was a later.

  I placed my backpack inside the wall to the left, pressing it into the darkness and breaking the silvery thread of a spider web that hadn’t been there earlier in the day. I put my left leg inside the wall, crouched, leaned heavily on my crutches, then eased my right leg in, keeping it as straight as I could. I rested my crutches against the wall, hoping they wouldn’t give me away. I picked up the hatch door and set it into the wall, entombing myself. Thirty-five seconds was my guess. Maybe forty. Not as fast as in practice. Should have been faster.

  The knock came again, still quiet but firmer this time. And a voice with just one word: ‘Sam!’

  TWENTY-NINE

  IN THE BUILDING

  I waited for the voice to come again. My legs and body felt jumpy. I needed to move, but I didn’t dare. Magnesium, I heard Mum say. Have you taken your magnesium?

  I hadn’t.

  I wanted to check my phone to make sure it was on silent but it was wedged tight into my shorts pocket, jabbing my hipbone. Something crawled across my neck and up into my hair but I didn’t move. Couldn’t. I thought of all the dead things I’d found in the wall earlier in the day and I prayed that I would not be like them soon. The city had been full of dead things for me – mice, rats, bugs, humans. The thing crawling across my scalp was not dead.

  ‘Sam!’

  It was definitely her. I practically burst from the wall, pushing the timber hatch away and rolling out, face-planting on the cold, hard floor. I swiped and scratched madly at my hair to try to remove the spider/cockroach/very small rat that had crawled up my neck. Magic backed up and leapt out, shaking off the cobwebs and spinning in a circle, trying to bite her own tail.

  ‘Coming!’ I whispered hard into the dark as I pushed up, grabbed my crutches and
hobbled to the door.

  ‘Scarlet?’ I whispered when I was close.

  ‘Open up!’

  My fingers trembled with relief as I twisted the locks. When I saw her face I wanted to kiss it. She was still in her pink onesie and she pushed past me to get inside, out of the hallway.

  ‘Lock it,’ she said.

  I did. Magic sniffed and licked her.

  ‘Sorry it’s so dark in here. I just don’t want to –’

  ‘Is your dad home yet?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m sorry about before. I –’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said.

  ‘I couldn’t stop thinking after you left. I wanted to be sure about that apartment. My mum’s the strata manager so she knows all the tenants. She’s got a file on everyone. I took a look at 6A and I have something for you.’

  She held up a small scrap of paper.

  ‘The Hills left the number of someone in their file, a contact for while they’re away. His name is Mick Kelly. You could ring the number.’

  I nodded in the darkness. ‘Can I show you something?’ I took the laptop out of my backpack and placed it on the kitchen bench. I flipped open the lid and punched in my birthdate, which gave me that warm feeling again. I showed Scarlet the video that proved the man who had pushed John Merrin over the balcony was the man I had seen standing over the body down below and the same man I had seen in the police station.

  ‘This is so bad,’ she said. ‘You should come up to my place. We’ll tell my mum. But maybe we should still call the number.’

  ‘Really?’ I had all the evidence I needed. It seemed like a good time for us to tell Scarlet’s mum and to wait for mine to get here. I needed to text her that I was okay. ‘I can’t make calls on my stupid phone anyway.’

  Scarlet pulled a phone out of a pouch in her onesie and grinned gently. She tapped the number in and handed me the phone. I held it up between us so that we could both listen. It was already ringing.