Fall

by Candice Fox

  ‘Who?’

  ‘George Hacker.’ Caroline widened her eyes, scoffed theatrically, as though working up a crowd that hadn’t arrived yet. ‘The one and only lead your people have had on the Strangler so far.’

  ‘Try to keep up. George Hacker is nothing but a creep. He’s not the … Strangler. God, it even hurts me to say the word. George can barely tie his own shoelaces. But speaking of being a creep, did you know that the legal definition of stalking in New South Wales includes one or more acts of unwanted following, or a similar intimidatory behaviour, such as the unwanted loitering near, watching or approaching a person? I looked that up last night, in case this happened again.’ I pointed to her, to myself. ‘Impressive, aren’t I?’

  I could see Caroline’s camera crew getting out of their cars on the corner. They’d struggled to find parking spaces, and she’d taken the opportunity to snag me before I drove away. I got into the car and started it up.

  ‘Why are you visiting the morgue today, Frank?’ She tapped on my window. ‘Are Ivana and Minerva here?’

  As I drove away, I felt my stomach sinking. Ivana and Minerva were still at the police morgue. If Caroline went and started hassling Carrie at the reception desk, her journalist buddies might be able to wrangle out of the woman which lab we’d visited and who was there. There was nothing I could legally do to stop them. News of a third victim would be on the television by the evening.

  ‘Who is that chick?’ Amy sneered.

  ‘Nobody,’ I said. ‘She’s a dead-set nobody.’

  Hades thought the dog would probably die. He wasn’t sure, with dogs. As a child, living in a brothel in the backstreets of Darlinghurst, he’d had plenty of birds die in his hands from running into windows, being buffeted by cars, being shoved out of nests too young. A bird got a funny look to it when its organs began to slowly shut down – seemed dazed, somehow, as though its quick little mind was elsewhere. When he lifted the tiny heads by the beak and they began to slowly sink down into their feathered chests, that’s when he knew it was over. The child Hades had always consoled himself that he at least gave them warm and pleasant deaths in small boxes in the greenhouse, tucked under the work bench, where the wild cats that roamed Darlinghurst couldn’t get them.

  But he hadn’t been close with dogs, not since he’d been pushed into a pit with two of them as a ten-or eleven-year-old and had his forearms stripped near to the bone by their ravenous teeth. He’d ended up killing the two huge beasts with his bare hands, a public feat that would strike almost super natural fear into the city during his reign as criminal king of Sydney. Lord of the Underworld. Hades wasn’t afraid of dogs, far from it. But now and then when he saw one in the tip’s wilder parts, he remembered that night in the pit. Dingo-dog hybrids had provided a natural alarm system at Utulla for many years and kept the stray cat and fox numbers down. But Hades didn’t tempt them towards the house, as he sometimes did with the possums that clambered around his sculptures. It was better that the hounds stayed out there, in the dark.

  Those night creatures were a far cry from the dog in Hades’ kitchen. It was a cross also, but had some more prestigious breeds in it. It had the burned gold colour of a Weimaraner, with the sad, delicate look of a whippet. The pink nose was a mystery. It was an expensive dog, probably had a stupid ‘innovation’ breed name. Whipparaner. Weimarippet. The expense, the youth of the thing. There were the bills and notes in the trash – the garbage had come from an expensive area. The callousness had stunned the vengeful tip workers who discovered the thing in the bag.

  Hades could understand rich people starving a dog. Rich or poor, he’d seen people do all kinds of things in his time. Cruelty had nothing to do with money, and lots to do with selfishness, carelessness, irresponsibility. The dog had probably been forgotten a series of times, accidentally at first, and then half-deliberately out of sheer laziness, spite, punishment for the chewed-up shoes or the pissed-on couch. The thing was probably very cute as a newborn but in time failed to naturally assume the behaviour of dogs that were professionally trained. Refused to sit. Didn’t answer to its name. It was punished, left behind while its owners worked, took drugs, travelled, stayed over with friends. Three days turned into four. Bored and looking for sustenance, the thing had probably trashed the house a few too many times, had its living areas reduced to a small laundry room where the sound system drowned out its wailing. And then suddenly, one day, without any real warning, the dog went from skinny to dying. Visibly, undeniably, shockingly dying – beyond what a vet could fix without having to report the animal’s condition. The dog was binned. A broken toy.

  Hades sat looking at the thing in the basket at the foot of the couch – or what he could see of it, the snout jutting from the wicker rim in case any more slices of soft red roast beef came floating by as they sometimes did. He also fed it with syringes full of water or milk with honey. The dog was still eating, but that meant nothing. Birds ate right up until the moment the light faded from their eyes. Hades was certain that activity was a good predictor of the animal’s chances, and the dog hadn’t moved in two days, not so much as shifted its position in the basket. Hades hadn’t seen its full body, in fact, since the moment he first picked it up. That wasn’t good. If the thing had been a horse, he’d have shot it by now. When horses lie down, they stay down.

  Hades knew his tip workers had the address of the people who owned the dog. He knew there was nothing he could do to stop them enacting their vengeance. Whoever they were, they would probably venture out to a nightclub or a restaurant over the weekend, and a couple of big dirty men smelling faintly of garbage would bash them up. There would be no reason given. No words said.

  Hades could warn his workers against it. Tell them vengeance was hardly ever worth the trouble taken to apply it. It was a lesson he’d learned with difficulty as a young man.

  But they wouldn’t listen, so he wouldn’t bother. Young, angry men listened to no one.

  The old man turned at the sound of the fire alarm bell above the front door. A car had entered the tip grounds. He glanced at the collection of clocks at the entrance to the hall. There were fifteen clocks of differing sizes and styles, cuckoo clocks and stainless-steel postmodern clocks, plastic clocks and an old bedside alarm clock hung by a string. Averaging their times, Hades guessed it was about seven. He hoped his evening visitor wasn’t Eden. She only came unannounced these days when something was wrong.

  It was a woman approaching. Hades could hear that much from the difficulty of her heels on the gravel. He didn’t get up. Beside him on the tabletop, as always, lay a pistol, concealed in the glossy fold of some magazine or another. Hades shifted the magazine a little closer and turned his coffee cup handle towards himself, sloshing the cooling brown liquid in its base.

  A short silhouette appeared against the diamond wire of the screen door. Hades took his glasses from beside his cup. The visitor rapped.

  ‘It’s open,’ he called.

  The woman approached with a smile. This puzzled Hades. Unexpected clients were usually shaking and blood-spattered, still wired from the drug pick-up gone wrong or long-awaited gang hit or botched robbery that had brought them there. Unexpected clients came to him in every variety of panic, some crying and begging for advice, some with a mere clenched jaw to indicate the turmoil within. The woman came down the hall and stood behind the chair opposite Hades, not offering her hand, which was also odd, her eyes half-hidden in the shadow of thick chocolate brown bangs, concealed further by black-rimmed glasses. Hades smiled. Was this Eden’s hunter?

  ‘Heinrich Archer.’ The woman finally offered her hand. ‘I’m Bridget Faulkner.’

  The name was fake. She was too heavy on the ‘d’ in Bridget and the ‘l’ in Faulkner to have said it a hundred thousand times over the span of a life. Fake names were best kept phonetically simple. She wasn’t a practised liar, or if she was, she was nervous – had overthought her moves. Hades felt the first tingles of apprehension, and not a little excitement
, on the nape of his leathery old neck, the hackles rising on an ageing wolf.

  ‘I’m so sorry about the hour.’

  ‘Please, Ms Faulkner,’ Hades smiled, ‘it’s been years since I’ve been able to boast of lady visitors in the night hours. How can I help you?’

  She laughed, wiggled uncomfortably a little at not having been offered a chair. Hades gestured to the seat across from him, and she took it with a sigh of relief.

  ‘I’m a journalist with the Herald,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to round up a few sources for a feature on Kings Cross in the late 1970s. I was wondering if you could help? I understand you sometimes speak to journalists … about your time there.’

  This woman was a very poor impersonator, Hades thought. He’d met enough journalists to know their tics, their little insecurities. Where was the notebook? Where was the recorder? Every journalist Hades had met had an elaborate title that set them apart from the other guppies in the crowded tank. Head Crime Correspondent. Assistant Lifestyle Features Editor. Government Policies Analyst. Where was all the pomp and ceremony? Hades reminded himself not to be too disarmed. It was possible Ms Faulkner, whoever she was, was a fool, or took Hades himself for a fool. Her glance towards the folded magazine beside him suggested the latter. How long would it be before this half-baked imposter got to her real purpose? Hades thought that now she’d spied the gun under the magazine, the pretty little woman would want to work fast.

  ‘Oh dear, ancient history,’ Hades smiled. ‘Aren’t you Herald people done with that yet? I thought there was a Cross piece just last year around this time.’

  ‘Well, you know. It never loses its interest. We’re trying to bolster intrigue for a couple of upcoming TV series.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen snippets of some of those shows. Very dramatic. I only wish the times themselves had been so exciting. So effortlessly profitable.’

  She laughed, put her hands on the table, seemed in need of something. Hades took his coffee cup.

  ‘Can I offer you a drink, Ms Faulkner? Coffee? Tea?’

  ‘Oh no, thank you.’

  ‘Mind if I get myself one?’

  ‘Go ahead.’ She had a pleasant, if crooked, smile. Her mouth was dry, the painted lips sticking to her teeth, making noises as they came unstuck. Lying either took a lot of practice, or it was natural – came with the biology of sociopaths and psychopaths and babies born with enough violence-induced chemicals in their systems to have that ability ingrained in their survival mechanisms. Hades went to the counter, turned his back to the woman, almost felt her eyeing the gun before her. He took another weapon from inside a ceramic pot marked ‘Tea’. Flicked the switch on the kettle.

  ‘It must have been a long road from what we know about your time as a crime lord to suburban family man,’ Ms Faulkner said gently. Hades poured the water into his cup, watched the black grinds shrink and dissolve.

  ‘People grow. They change,’ Hades said.

  ‘You’re in your twilight years, if you don’t mind me saying,’ the woman continued. ‘When you were the age your daughter is now, you had a stranglehold on Sydney. You had bikies and drug dealers and hitmen in terror of you. Eden, on the other hand, is a police officer. Her brother was too. What an interesting turn of events.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Hades said.

  ‘She must have been a very different child to the one you were.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘What was Eden like as a child?’ Ms Faulkner asked.

  Hades turned. Put a hand on the counter near the gun. In the other, he held his coffee. The woman calling herself Bridget Faulkner had turned in her chair, one foot out as though ready to spring to her feet. One hand was on the table. Did she know that Hades knew who she was, what she was – a threat to his child, to himself, to everything he had built? Could she see in his eyes now that, if it came down to it, he would never let anything destroy that, that he was prepared to make his front door the last door this woman would ever step through alive? Did she see the fierce paternal fury of a lion in him? Or did she just figure him for a tired old man, someone whose befuddlement at questions about Eden’s first false years would tick boxes on her stupid little quest for the truth. Hades looked at his coffee.

  ‘It was very stupid of you to come here alone, Ms Faulkner,’ he said. Out of the corner of his eye, he registered the slightest twitch in her body, a sort of electric pulse as his words coursed through her. The veils were dropped.

  ‘What if I’m not alone?’

  ‘Oh, you are,’ Hades said gently. ‘We both know you are.’

  ‘I just want answers.’

  ‘You want money.’

  ‘Why did you kill the Tanners?’ Bridget said. Her jaw twitched repetitively as her back teeth ground with terror. ‘Why did you take their children?’

  Hades licked his lower lip. Gripping the edge of the counter, he put his coffee down.

  ‘Does Eden know who she is?’ Bridget asked.

  The man and the woman paused, looked at each other across the yawning silence. The howl of one of the tip dogs seemed to mark the abandoning of civilities. Hades reached for his gun. As he did, Bridget’s hand slipped beneath the magazine and clumsily brought the pistol’s aim around to him.

  Hades fired with his eyes open. The woman fired with her eyes closed, an accidental gesture, her terror at the sound of Hades’ blast making her entire body clench. Her gun blasted out the window behind him. Her sharp, squinting cower at the sound turned her head away from his aim, caused his bullet to shunt into the wall by her ear. She gathered her resolve and tried to fire again without drawing the hammer back, clicked helplessly, then dropped the gun. She tried to run and he lunged, his weapon slipping from his fingers. He heard his own yelp of agony as old wounds awakened, his ancient body unused to panicked action. They struggled for the pistol on the counter, sent it clattering into the sink. She grabbed the coffee cup, broke it over him, splashed boiling water on his arms, hands, chest, her own hands. She growled. Frightened. Angry with herself.

  Hades swiped at her with one arm as he went down and knocked her away from the sink. On his hands and knees, a figure shifted past him, bright and fast like a flicker of light.

  The old man had never heard such a noise. The high, squealing bark of an animal giving itself over to the violence in its heart. The dog flew at the woman in the kitchen, frenzied, jaws snapping with rage. Hades turned and watched it back the woman into the wall, watched it chase her into the darkness before the door.

  He barely heard the door open and close, the car beyond. The woman gone, the dog gave her a few warning barks from behind the screen, then erupted into terrified squealing, skittering back to Hades, cowering with its head tucked completely between its front legs and tail almost invisible between its hind quarters, wagging against its belly. The dog’s eyes were remorseful slits, its ears flat against its skull, bracing for a blow. Have I done the right thing? The dog squealed its strange apologies, fell dramatically on its front paws beside him, surrendered.

  ‘Good dog,’ Hades panted, trying to unlock his clenched fists. The animal licked his arm, shoulder, ear, whimpering with delight at his words. ‘Good dog.’

  Eden didn’t spend a lot of time imagining herself as a victim. It wasn’t really in her nature. She assumed that when her parents had been murdered was the time to form her childish conception of victimhood. The moment to discover the benefits so many lifelong victims became addicted to – the attention, the comfort, the slow, heroic climb of recovery, little encouragements treasured along the way. But something had gone wrong that night as she sat on the table in Hades’ kitchen and let him wash the blood from her face. Something had failed to connect. Psychiatrists would say that her neurological pathways leading that way, towards victimhood, were damaged or non-existent. A priest would say she had half a soul. But whatever the case, Eden had picked up her life again the next day, mildly afraid of the man who had become her new guardian, concerned whether her brothe
r would survive, whether she would have to face this strange new life alone. She was nothing of the victim. She wondered if, even then, there’d been too much of the natural predator in her to really know how victimhood worked.

  Had the night her parents died made Eden what she was? Or had the malevolent thing that made her kill always curled inside her, sleeping, until the sound of the guns shook it awake? Had it been Hades who made her what she was? Or if, by some twist of fate, she and Eric had survived the night of their parents’ murders but ended up in the care of a regular person, might they have ever killed? Did her parents’ murders open the door on who Eden was, or close it?

  Over the birthmark that connected her to the child she had been, Eden asked for an ornate door to be tattooed, a big oak thing with a stained-glass panel in its top depicting birds fluttering between tree branches. It was a door she knew well.

  Her lack of victimhood made her job as a detective interesting. Empathy was something she tried hard at. Often she had to distinguish exactly what victims in their many varieties were feeling, what their dying faces expressed, what the escapees of dungeons and bedrooms and long rides into dark bushland were experiencing when they made it back to safety. She deeply admired Frank when he connected so instantly and completely with his now-dead girlfriend Martina after her initial escape from Jason Beck. Frank had been able to feel what she felt. He felt moved to protect her. He loved her, and then he grieved for her. He was probably still grieving now, Eden imagined, but she couldn’t be sure. Why else did he bury his head so firmly in the sand in terms of his current squeeze? Imogen was so completely wrong for him. He needed someone pretty and simple and gentle, like Martina. Was he afraid of being alone? Eden had heard it was difficult to sleep when a partner you’d got used to was suddenly gone from the bed, that even washing the sheets didn’t stem the desire for their presence, their warmth, the roll and tumble of them on the mattress as they twisted in the night. Their snores. Was Imogen a bed-filler to Frank?