by Candice Fox
‘Mum,’ Tara gasped through the tears. ‘Mum.’
‘Is this your little one?’ The woman beside Joanie looked down at Tara with a mixture of concern and humour, her crooked smile faltering when she noted the orange juice dripping from the girl’s hair.
‘Mum,’ Tara pleaded, tugging at Joanie’s elbow. ‘Joanie.’
‘No, my one’s out there.’ Joanie shrugged Tara’s hand away, laughing uneasily, pointing towards the curve in the track and the bushland beyond. ‘My Tara’s out there somewhere.’
‘Joan–’
‘Go find your mother,’ Joanie said, pushing Tara’s face away. She turned her hip, blocking the child from the woman beside her. ‘Jeez. Weird kid. Anyway, so you were saying?’
Tara waited, but her mother didn’t turn back around. In time she walked through the crowds towards the school.
They try to tell you that if you’ve got a couple of observers at the autopsy, it’s because they need experience for their forensic medicine degrees, but … I don’t know. I’ve had so many young observers hanging over my shoulder through the years, I just can’t get next to the idea that studying to be a ghoul is so popular. When we arrived to view the autopsy on Ivana Lyon there were two young men already there, guiltily fumbling with their notebooks, surgical masks pulled tight like the shoelaces of kids on their first day of school. I gave them a fiery look as I waited for the tech to set up. I’m convinced a certain percentage of these kids are just too curious about murder corpses to stay away.
Beyond the glass, someone from Ivana’s family was watching. An older brother or something it looked like. I’ve only seen parents attend once. I don’t know why family would come at all. It’s not how I’d like to remember someone I loved. I guess in murder cases they like to see that nothing goes awry. The liver isn’t dropped on the floor or accidentally swapped with the patient on the next table. It’s pretty grim.
Eden was unusually fazed. It was by all accounts her bread and butter, but she was restless, sighing, looking at her watch. She’d ditched the crutch for the morning, but I expected her to be back to it by midday. Leaning against the table, her ponytail pulling up the corners of her eyes and her blouse pressed to within an inch of its life, she might have been the old Eden, the one I knew before her brush with death. Except that she was chewing a thumbnail. Her eyes were hard. I nudged her in the side and she jumped.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Too much coffee.’ She stretched her neck so that it cracked on either side. I knew that was a lie but I didn’t push it. Eden could have snorted coffee like cocaine and not got the jitters. She absorbed chemicals like a sponge. I’d never seen her so much as tipsy.
‘You’ve got to come to dinner with Imogen.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘What makes you think you can put her off forever? She gets what she wants. She’ll start turning up at your house, I’m telling you.’
‘I would strongly suggest she doesn’t do that.’ Eden looked into my eyes. I felt a cold splinter in my chest, sweat prickle at the back of my neck. I cleared my throat, tried to focus on the technician laying out the tools like some kind of slow, methodical sadist. The brother behind the glass was watching the ceiling, fighting tears.
‘What’s your beef with Imogen?’
‘I think you can do better.’
I scoffed. She was serious. I hadn’t expected the comment. It was kind of sweet. Strangely, bizarrely sweet, coming from a complete sociopath and ruthless serial killer who I’m sure got up every morning and looked at herself in the mirror and wondered whether today was the day she should kill me and dump my corpse in a mangrove somewhere, watch crabs pluck out my eyeballs.
‘Imogen is –’
‘Imogen’s an owner, Frank,’ Eden said. ‘She’s going to own you and train you like a newborn pup until you either bend to her command or snap her hand off one day, and it’s probably going to be the latter before the former.’
That hurt. She was referring to the time I’d hit my first wife in a drug-fuelled brawl at our cheap fibro bomb of a rental house in the Western suburbs. It was more than a decade ago, but Eden’s brother had brought it out into the light and Eden was never going to forget it. She didn’t forget things she knew about people. It was probably just a stab in the guts to cover for the compliment, to balance the universe, but in any case it seemed unfair.
‘And then when you do snap at her, boy,’ she said, ‘then she’s really going to own you.’
‘This conversation is getting far too deep,’ I said. ‘Come to dinner. Please. I’m asking you nicely. Stave off your jealousy of Imogen for an hour or so.’
‘My what?’ She squinted.
‘Your barely contained jealousy of Imogen.’
‘Jealousy over what? What could Imogen possibly ever have that I would want?’
I tapped my chest and nodded knowingly, gave her a happy wink.
‘One of these days you’re going to wake up to yourself.’
‘Hopefully not,’ I said.
I jostled her in the ribs again with my elbow and she jumped, swiped at me. Her flesh felt weird under my skin. I reached out and grabbed at her ribs, and heard a crackling sound under the fabric that was very familiar to me. Something I’d heard many times.
‘What is that?’
‘Get your fucking mitts off me.’
‘Is that a tattoo?’
I was certain I’d heard the crackling of sticky tape and the squish of damp plastic wrap, which is the kind of dressing only applied to a freshly inked tattoo. I’d stopped counting how many tatts I had myself. I was proudest of the gigantic traditional-style eagle, wings spread, that dominated my chest. My first. It was tough to go big on your first ink, and that’s basically all the image stood for. My young, stupid toughness. The design could have been anything.
‘Do not touch me, Frank. Ever.’
‘We’re about to get going here, people,’ the head technician said. He lifted the sheet from Ivana’s body and pulled it down over her naked figure, folded it at her feet. I looked up and saw that the brother was gone.
Ruben tried not to snoop but he couldn’t help himself. Something was very wrong in the house by the park, but he couldn’t fit the clues together, could not make any kind of sense out of what he saw. The path he took vacuuming from the ground-floor kitchen to the stairs outside the attic room was like a morbid tour of the moment things went wrong, the last days of joy before the hellish fall.
The previous summer he’d been in the States and stopped in Dallas to take the tour of the preserved Book Depository from where Lee Harvey Oswald had shot President Kennedy. He’d stood behind the glass and looked at the spot where the killer had perched, saw the scuff marks in the dust, the boxes still sitting unpacked as they had been that fatal day, forever to remain as they were, as though the moment could be returned to, changed somehow, if nothing was touched. He’d heard the haunting shots ring out over the little speaker in the corner, punctuating the commentary of the virtual tour guide. The house on the park was like the Texas School Book Depository. A frozen moment of terror and pain.
The wrongness of it all had struck him as he entered the bedroom the first day, puffed the pillows and shook the dust off the bed covers. The bedroom belonged to a man and a woman. History books on his side of the bed, business management books on hers. Ruben’s written English comprehension was terrible, but he flicked through the pages and found a shopping list bookmark in one. Then he spied the man’s heavy Omega watch sitting by the lamp. He glanced behind him at the door. Felt a tingle in his palms. Why had the master of the house left his watch there? It was obviously his daily watch. No case or box to speak of. Why wasn’t he wearing it when he left? Why hadn’t they tucked it away, knowing that a foreign student with no paperwork and barely enough cash to make rent would be walking around the house? Ruben thought it was odd. His own parents trusted no one, and they hardly had anything to call precious. When they’d had viewi
ngs to sell their house in Perugia the old man had taken everything and stashed it at his mother’s – even a set of crystal wine glasses from the back of the kitchen cupboard, as though people at the viewing could possibly manage to smuggle the set out in a bag or under a jacket, clinking and chiming as they ran towards their car.
There was more strangeness the more Ruben looked. The watch and the history books on the man’s side of the bed were far dustier than the items on the woman’s side. The pages were yellowed from the sun. So they had lain untouched longer. Wherever he’d gone, she’d left his things just as they were, gathering dust. There was something sad about it.
When Ruben entered the downstairs living room he found an empty wine bottle and a packet of sleeping pills on the little table beside the couch. There were three pills missing. On the floor was an empty sterile needle packet, the kind his brother carried in the pocket of his paramedic’s uniform. It was stamped Prince of Wales Hospital. The needle packaging, the wine bottle and the pill packet were all covered in dust. Whatever had happened, the evidence was right here where it had fallen.
Ruben stood in the doorway, feeling cold all over. According to the job advertisement, the family who owned the house had gone away to spend some months setting up a business abroad. He heard a creak in the floorboards above him and went back to vacuuming. On his way out, he ducked through the couple’s bedroom to look at the en suite. All the toiletries were still there. The toothbrushes leaning, waiting, in their ceramic stands.
I was the first to arrive at dinner, so I kept the obsessive Indian waitresses at bay by flipping through my notes on Ivana Lyon’s autopsy, my notepad on the empty plate in front of me. It was busy at Malabar South Indian Cuisine on Darlinghurst Road even though it was a Wednesday. I’d never seen the place quiet and I was there a lot. Malabar was helped enormously by how many bad Indian takeaway joints there were in the area, peppered all the way up Oxford and William streets, the hopeful guilty pleasure of city workers on their way home. These same workers, disappointed enough times in front of their televisions, found joy and bliss when they discovered Malabar. Groups stood outside the windows smoking and jostling in the growing cold, leaping forward when their numbers were called and darting away into the night, plastic bags trailing steam.
I tried to keep my mind on the job, but at the table next to me a strange kind of group had gathered. I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. It was the woman who attracted my attention first. I’m a red-blooded Australian male, so I notice women. I understand it’s good practice to try to train yourself out of this tendency – especially if you’re attached. You’re supposed to forget about women, each with her own distinct kind of magic, never the same as the one you saw before, a dimple in a perfect smile or a raspy laugh you can imagine cutting the dark of a warm bedroom. This one was very eye-catching and not in the traditional way.
She looked apocalypse-ready. She was muscled all over, the way survivors are muscled – a woman whose body was prepared both for running and fighting, for climbing and hiding and sliding down hills. She was more than ‘sporty’. She looked dangerous. Three huge guys sat at the table with her, talking in low voices, passing bits of paper around and signing things. The woman turned her head and showed me her sharp profile, and as she did I watched all the muscles in her neck move, some loosening, some tightening – the wires and chains of a great machine working. This is what women were becoming these days. Beautiful machines. Softness and curves and fat were things of the past. Everything was skin-tight and rock hard. It was exciting and kind of scary. I’m not sure it was really my thing.
Get your mind back on the job, Frank.
We knew plenty about Ivana Lyon from the autopsy. The body holds no secrets when you’re dead. The autopsy told us she’d been exercising for some time, lifting weights as well as cardio, and she liked upper body exercises. Her triceps were well defined, and she had strong hands and the nice little calluses you get on the upper pad of your palm from not bothering with gym gloves. She wasn’t pregnant, a smoker or a big drinker. She’d had braces once. She suffered mild psoriasis on her elbows.
I tried to take note of all these little bits and pieces and then forget them. I didn’t like knowing the victim too well. As I got older it was harder to keep the murders impersonal. You start relating to them and you’re in big trouble. Suddenly you think, oh yeah, I get the occasional spot of psoriasis on my elbows. I had braces too for a while. I’ve had that callus on my hands. Next thing you know, you and the dead girl are best friends in your mind and you’re willing to arrest the waitress for the murder just to cure your own broken heart. The justice system doesn’t work like that. You can’t cry over all of them.
Ivana Lyon had been dragged somewhere, knocked about a little on the journey. She’d had her wrists taped for a long time after death – probably right up until she was dumped back at the park at around 7 pm. She’d put up a little bit of a fight but not much of one – there’d been no scratching or biting, which indicated to me that she’d probably been drugged. How do you drug someone while she’s jogging around a public path in view of hundreds of witnesses?
Her water might have been spiked before or during the run. That wasn’t the likeliest option – but it was possible. The killer would have had to get hold of her water bottle before taking her, but if you knew her why bother letting her go out for the run in the first place? If it was someone she didn’t know, the killer would have had to access the bottle she took on the run somehow – which might have occurred, if Ivana had stopped and put it down at any point. A bit of a gamble, though, following a runner around waiting for her to put her water bottle down. What if she never stopped for a break during the run? What if she stopped but she didn’t let the bottle out of her sight? It was a bad plan.
Ivana Lyon’s autopsy revealed a strange injury to the back of her left thigh, right below her buttock. It was bruised like a track mark and still open when she died. I didn’t like the idea that there might be a killer out there with a tranquilliser gun putting down runners like jaguars on the plain, but I couldn’t think of another way around it. I had to wait until midnight for the toxicology report, but I was pretty sure it would back me up. Someone had hunted Ivana like an animal. Tracked her, caught her, barrelled her into a van like a lion on its way to the circus. I was sure of it.
My phone vibrated in my pocket, a text. Imogen saying she was late, probably. She was the only person who texted me. When I opened it up, however, there was a message from Hooky. I felt my nose wrinkle involuntarily. Imogen in my ear like she was sitting beside me.
What’s a seventeen-year-old girl doing texting a middle-aged man? Slut. Slut. Slut.
The text read: Tranquilliser gun, right?
I smiled and texted back: You’re in pedos, girl. Not homicide.
She replied before I had time to put the phone away: I want in!
When I looked up from my phone, Eden was settling into a chair beside me. She poured herself a glass of water, glancing ruefully towards the door without saying hello.
‘You didn’t change?’ I frowned.
‘Don’t start.’
‘You attended an autopsy in that outfit, Eden. You think you could have slapped on a different shirt to come to dinner?’
‘You’re murder police, Frank. Not fashion police.’
‘Imogen’s going to come through that door in a second, desperately overdressed now.’ I pointed towards the front of the restaurant. ‘It’s going to be awkward.’
‘Frank,’ Eden smiled at me, patted my hand, ‘Imogen’s always desperately overdressed.’
We engaged in a long, uncomfortable silence, looking at the tablecloth. Imogen walked through the door eventually, offering no relief at all in her foxy orange dress, little pearl earrings and the pride of her collection: the eight hundred dollar Jimmy Choos. She only wore orange when she really meant it – I understood it was a difficult colour to pull off – and as she approached the table I saw her face harden. When
had my life become this way? I wondered. When had I begun to sweat over what women were wearing? Imogen bent to kiss me and clouded me with Chanel.
‘Eden, thanks so much for coming.’ She grinned and kissed Eden on the cheek. Eden hadn’t seen the gesture coming and stiffened as though electrified. My phone flashed on the table – another text from Hooky – and Imogen’s eyes fell on it just as my hand did. I tucked it away and she gave me a look. The look a woman gives you when she’s cataloguing something in her mind, putting something away to burn you about later.
‘Shall we order?’ Eden asked.
‘Imogen just sat down.’
‘I know what I want,’ Eden shrugged, jutting her chin at the nearest waiter. He came to the table and Imogen scrambled for her menu.
‘We’ll order wine now.’ I kicked Eden under the table. ‘The Malbec, please.’
The waiter nodded and retreated and Eden looked satisfied with herself. She picked up her knife and turned it by its point on the table.
‘Well, what a crazy week,’ Imogen said brightly. ‘First that Byron Bay thing and now this.’
‘What Byron Bay thing?’ I asked.
‘A couple of young travellers and a couple of scumbags from some backwater hole behind Byron,’ Imogen said. ‘Police found them all stuffed in a burned-out van. Can’t seem to figure out the connection between the two parties. It’s all over the news.’
‘How weird,’ I said.
‘Do we have to talk shop at the table?’ Eden snapped.
‘Tough week, Eden?’ Imogen smiled.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Oh, I just mean –’
‘She’s not counselling you, Eden,’ I said. ‘She’s just asking how you are.’
