Fall

by Candice Fox

  ‘Alright, quick as a flash.’ Hooky made a show of prancing into the apartment, knees high, a happy elf. ‘You’re the absolute best for this. Thank you so much.’

  Hooky went straight into the bedroom. This was Imogen and Frank’s bed. She stood wondering at its hospital corners, the expensive cream coverlet, waffle-textured, the kind she’d forbid him dragging to the sofa on movie nights. There were books on her side of the bed – true crime novels – and nothing on his. Not committed enough to bring his books over yet, the permanency of them sitting there in a lopsided stack like promises, a list growing higher and higher towards a ceiling he couldn’t bear reaching, couldn’t believe he’d ever reach, before the inevitable fall. The room wasn’t him at all. It was too clean, too bare, too orchestrated. The en suite was free of shards of his stubble, his scraggy hair on the shower walls. There wasn’t so much as a toothbrush to symbolise that he even existed. The cat had been a resident for a short while, she knew, but now it was gone too, the strange imbalance of the token he had taken from his dead girlfriend living and lounging in his current girlfriend’s place too much, too weird.

  Hooky snapped a couple of photographs. Wandered around appreciating the ceilings.

  ‘This is perfect. Thank you again so much. You’re an absolute lifesaver. Nice apartments, aren’t they? My Beijing investors are going to just snap these up, I’m telling you.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad I could help.’ Ella was hovering by the front door, checking at the time on her phone now, as though it was slower than the watch and could somehow give her more seconds before the bus pulled up outside. She itched to go. Hooky stalled.

  ‘I’m just going to be a second.’ Hooky snapped some photos of the balcony, came inside and stood by the desk in the corner. Looked at the manila folders all in a stack, their spines labelled neatly with printed surnames and dates. ‘Just one sec here.’

  Evans. Cherry. Bithway. Heildale. Smith.

  She’d have the Tanner file tucked away somewhere. Tanner, the names Imogen kept Googling on her laptop over and over again, right after the texts and emails about the Archers started flying. Hooky didn’t know what the connection between the Tanners and the Archers was yet, but she was going to find out. There had to be a reason Imogen was so hot on Eden’s tail.

  Hooky swiped away the camera on her phone and switched to the contacts list, pushed the dial button. Ella cocked her ear in the hallway as she heard her phone ringing inside her apartment.

  ‘Shit. Shit! That’s my landline. I’m just going to leave you for a sec –’

  ‘I’m almost done,’ Hooky shouted as the door clicked closed. She threw open the drawers one at a time, found the Tanner file in the very last one, under a stack of old newspapers. She shoved the file open on the desk and spread the papers out, went back to the camera and began to click. She was just pushing the bottom drawer closed, the file replaced, when Ella threw open the door again.

  ‘All good?’

  ‘Yeah, hang-up call.’ Ella shuffled her backpack higher on her shoulder, annoyance edging into her tone. ‘You done here?’

  ‘All done.’ Hooky smiled. She strode to the door, slipping the phone into the pocket of her blazer. ‘You’ve been instrumental.’

  If you count dreaming about work as work itself, which I do, I was on the planning for the running festival for about thirty-seven hours straight. When Imogen found me the night before Take Back the Parks I was sitting at her kitchen table with a glass of milk staring at the balcony doors, no idea that she’d even arrived home, my fingernails bitten down to stubs. I’d actually turned my phone off for an hour and was playing a sort of mental game with myself, battling back the desire to turn it on again, when she walked into the room. I knew when I turned it on, it would explode with messages from Eden, Hooky, Captain James, some journalists I’d known over the years. There were maps spread all over the floor of the kitchen, all over the bench tops, some stuck to the fridge, all representing the structure of security for the event in different colours and patterns.

  Together, Eden and I had tracked down as many CCTV cameras on each of the run routes as possible. We’d directed a team to work through the registered runners, looking for participants with violent pasts, and we’d composed watch lists of their likenesses for the foot patrol teams. Four different security companies were covering the events – we’d briefed them all on what we were looking for, what codes to use for what kind of backup should they spot anything unusual on the night.

  While all that was happening, I’d tried about seventeen times to get through to Caroline Eckhart to persuade her to cancel the event, despite being told to leave all the schmoozing to Eden. Caroline erected a wall of people to field any communication I tried to throw at her, whether it was email, call or message. I was fairly sure if I’d attempted to send a carrier pigeon to her massive apartment on the Finger Wharf, it would have been shot down. Probably with lasers. If she didn’t hear from me, she couldn’t refuse my direct appeal. As far as I knew, she was doing the same to Captain James.

  The tension surrounding the festival was feverish. Journalists and the public wanted to be there when someone was killed. Everyone else wanted to prevent a killing taking place. The whole thing was like some horrific hunting expedition, the bear trap snapped open and set, teeth gaping, the trigger ready for the slightest breath of wind to whisper over it before it snapped shut. I was more afraid of what might happen if we lured and cornered the bear. I still had no idea who the Parks Strangler was. What sort of creature we were dealing with. I’d stood by Jill Noble’s badly decomposed body in Glebe morgue and tried to get a feel for the killer – and all I got was malice. Pure, inhuman malice, the kind that takes over soldiers pushed too far by the intensity of war, the kind that makes them do sick things like burning villages, forgetting their humanity, forgetting their lives before that moment. Someone out there was letting go completely with these women, and what that person was surrendering to was nothing but a monster. It takes a long time to cultivate that sort of evil power in a human being. No one is born that angry – you have to be made that way.

  Eden had said the victims were being punished by proxy, that the killer was living out revenge on them that she couldn’t enact on the real target of her fury. The real target, it seemed, was unavailable somehow – she was dead or out of reach. The killer couldn’t strangle and beat the real target the way she wanted to, so it was these runners who copped the violence. The original target was a runner then? A fitness junkie? Was her athleticism, her propensity to run, what was being punished? I spent three or four hours wasting time on the internet looking into the backgrounds of famous Australian athletes, trying to find female runners who’d been issued threats, who had violent boyfriends, sons, daughters, husbands. I looked at Caroline Eckhart’s ex-boyfriend for a long time, half-heartedly inspired by Mr Esposito’s weird tip. But Caroline and her bulky former beau were good friends. She was hardly unavailable to him for punishment.

  I kind of knew I was wasting my time, fishing without bait, but I couldn’t stop myself. I fell into an exhausted helpless pattern, trudging through one web page after another. Night fell. Takeaway containers lay everywhere, though I didn’t remember ordering or eating anything.

  And then suddenly Imogen was there, with her fingers working my neck on either side beneath my ears, nails reaching up over my scalp, dragging through my hair. She bent over my chair and kissed me on the cheek, put her arms around me. I sat back and let her squeeze me. The smell of her, the warmth of her lips against my neck, was a relief as potent as a drug. I was snapped awake, electrified.

  ‘How’s the dazed detective?’

  ‘I’m wide awake now you’re home.’

  ‘I’ve been home for half an hour,’ she laughed, pressing her nose against mine. ‘I’ve had a shower and everything. You’ve just been sitting there staring at the windows.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. I’m just … I’m just tired. And starving, for some reason, although I t
hink I’ve eaten.’ I looked around.

  ‘I’ve ordered pizza.’ She sat down beside me. ‘It’ll be here soon.’

  ‘Oh, you’re a doll face.’ I reached out, squeezed her taut cheeks so that her lips poked out. ‘You’re an absolute doll face. What happened to your arm?’

  She had a massive bruise on her bicep. I gave it a squeeze and she slapped me.

  ‘I ran into something. I don’t know.’

  ‘You tell those other men not to be so rough with you.’

  ‘You’re hilarious.’ She rolled her eyes.

  Imogen was a strange creature, an odd choice for me. I knew that much without Eden having to tell me. She could be very mild and gentle, as she was now, quiet in the way that suggested she’d ticked off all her goals for the day, whatever they had been, and she was satisfied to pass the soft decline of the evening light curiously poring over my maps, holding my hand, now and then looking at messages on her phone and tapping away replies. She wanted nothing from me, not that I’d have minded if she had. I might not have been there at all.

  There were times, however, when I couldn’t talk to her, when her mind was so tangled with clients and their problems that when she walked through the door she was ten people. She was the needy little girl with daddy issues, the OCD sufferer exhausted with worry about her health, the angry old man trying to push down the abuse suffered as a child, which rose and rose over again through the decades like bile. She could be manic with her own hidden desires and concerns – I knew the armchair detective thing was a flag of something, some ancient point she had to prove or dream she couldn’t ignore, a childhood fascination with cops that needed some outlet other than me. She needed to unravel things. Part of the hobby was the money, which she greedily fantasised about, but some part of it was the thrill of the investigation – which also poked its head up in her ordinary work. She dug down into people, uncovered buried traumas, brought secrets out into the light and examined them. There was power in that. Control. Perhaps the unhealthy kind.

  A part of me also recognised that what I liked about Imogen was what I liked about Eden. There was no wearing of the heart on the sleeve with these two. Their weaknesses, insecurities, embarrassing little joys were nowhere to be seen. Once or twice I’d seen the masks slip on both of them – once I caught Eden lose herself to some tune on her headphones in the station’s locker room. When I say ‘lose herself’, I mean she did a smooth little wiggle of her hips, frowned and mouthed a nasty lyric or two, then went back to packing her things away in her locker, robotic. That was Eden ‘losing herself’.

  Imogen did it too, albeit more obviously. She tried too hard to get people to like her. Me, sometimes, when she ordered pizzas after spending all week trying to cram carrots and hummus down my throat. When she asked hidden or sidelong questions about our future together, trying to work out how I felt about it. Whether I loved her.

  Her obvious, inescapable jealousy over girls she caught me looking at, over Hooky. I knew it must be a powerful kind of jealousy for it to emerge in the accusations over Amy. Imogen had never had a specific target for her jealousy before, but now I knew its intensity for the first time. Imogen was the kind of woman who wouldn’t let an embarrassing emotional failing like jealousy show in anything more than the tips of waves, no matter what massive undercurrents swept the ocean floor. I could see hate in her eyes at the mere mention of the girl. For some reason, she didn’t feel the same way about Eden, which was strange. I spent every working minute with Eden. It was natural, given what we faced together, that we might develop feelings for each other – plenty of cops did. Why was Imogen so sure Eden was no romantic threat to her? Did she know something that I didn’t?

  I watched her scrolling through the day’s news on her phone, stopping now and then to examine commentary on some high-profile sex scandal or another, an old actor and his obscenely young wife. There was a story about some guys in council-worker uniforms who had beaten up a couple in Lavender Bay, five of them on two, with no apparent reason for the attack. Imogen looked soft in the dim light from above us, gold light falling on her arms, on the curves of her collarbones, on the backs of her hands. She had one word, ‘payment’, written on her hand. I don’t know what she’d been doing that day, as I’d commandeered the apartment and she’d simply gone off to entertain herself and keep out of my way, but I hoped she hadn’t spent her time paying bills. I reached out and took her hand, and without looking at me, she squeezed my palm.

  ‘You’re funny,’ I said.

  ‘You’re funny.’ She smiled to herself.

  Of Bangkok, Tara remembered snippets. Heat. A heavy, numbing heat that made the body beg for relief outside the wall of air conditioning that halted like held breath at the automatic doors of the airport. A throbbing in her calves as she made her way through the crowds of freelance taxi drivers, all of them oldish, angry-looking men muttering prices as she passed, brown lips thin and dry as words rippled through them too fast. She remembered wild dogs by the side of the highway, slipping in and out between the long grass like snakes, tussling by the side of a brown canal. Huge wooden temples on impossibly high stands outside carpet shops, antique shops, supermarkets and coconut stands, heaped with pink and yellow flowers and bowls of rotting meat and coloured rice. The city beyond, grey sludge in the heat haze, the gaping mouths of half-finished and abandoned apartment buildings, tattered advertising fluttering in the breeze.

  Tara remembered narrow halls and darkness, the smell of incense burning. Bright red carpet everywhere, flecked with pieces of white cotton, as though someone had washed clothes that still had a tissue in the pocket and then trailed the thing throughout the building. Thinking that there shouldn’t have been carpet in the doctor’s halls, that somehow the presence of carpet in an apparently sterile, surgical environment seemed odd, out of place, the way it might in a kitchen. A bathroom.

  Smiles everywhere. Excited smiles. Smiles fading into the dark. She was signing documents in a dark room. People were whispering. The towels. Towels everywhere, stacked, different colours. Why were they different colours? Shouldn’t they all be new and white? There were lapses in her memory and they were happening fast, snipping the edges of moments away. She was shivering in the cold. The lights were flickering. A machine was screaming beeps and the people around her were talking fast.

  Darkness for a long time, a liquidy depth of dream Tara wasn’t sure she would ever wake from, wasn’t sure she wanted to wake from. She was free of her body for an instant. Weightless. Oh, for a moment those ancient aches in her hips and knees gave way and she had no hips or knees, and her chest collapsed inwards, dissolved, so that she was nothing but a floating consciousness, a bee buzzing from light to light as colours flashed before her. And then her eyelids were being pulled back and someone was shoving a tube into her newly formed throat.

  Tara? Tara? Come back to us, Tara. Come back, honey. Squeeze my hand if you can hear me. Come on, girl. Come on, girl.

  Australian voices. Why were they Australian voices? Tara squinted, tried to wriggle away from the words. Come on. Come on. She was running again in the dark. Joanie was behind her. She had to run. Had to get away. She felt a rhythmic pumping on her newly returned chest, and again the squeal of machines. Darkness fell again. And then there was stillness, the crisp firmness of starched hospital sheets beneath her fingertips. Everything aching. People laughing in the busy halls. A woman was there, one of those wrinkled, pleasant-faced people used to frowning with concern. Her navy blue scrubs were pinned with cheerful things – a fleshy pink watch and a ribbon, a pair of stickers printed with animals grinning maniacally, rows and rows of teeth. Tara had the impression that she had seen this woman before, that in her half-drugged state the woman had been talking to her, perhaps had talked to her for days, her bony hand playing with Tara’s wrist, a skin-covered manacle impossible to break. Tara had bucked in the bed, tried to shift from a position she felt she might have been in for hours. The pain fluttered through her like
a big red bird, razor-sharp feathers brushing the insides of her arms and legs, pulling on stitches. Hundreds and hundreds of stitches. She felt them tugging all at once like so many tiny spiders latched onto hunks of skin, curved teeth inserted.

  People came and went, people in suits, people in police uniforms. All of them white. Tara hadn’t known there were so many white people in all of Bangkok. Might have said so, but she couldn’t hear her own voice above the rising and falling hum of the drugs.

  ‘You’re back in Sydney,’ the nurse said gently. ‘You’ve been back in Sydney for six weeks, honey.’

  In time, she was sitting, and the nurse was talking gently to her, talking, talking, talking, and as the sun began to fall, Tara began to make sense of the words.

  ‘But then,’ the nurse was saying, ‘people make bad choices. I know I have. It happens.’

  ‘What happened … to me?’ Tara asked.

  The nurse looked at her.

  ‘You fell victim to a terrible scam, Tara,’ the nurse said. She reached for Tara’s wrist again. ‘And no matter what anyone tells you, girl, you’re the victim in this. You thought you were being sold a service, and … god, I suppose the doctor you hired thought he might have been able to provide it. Christ, I don’t know. He certainly made an attempt.’ She seemed to want to give a laugh but swallowed it back. ‘Tara, your surgery in Bangkok, your weight reduction surgery, went very, very badly.’

  Tara looked at her hands. They seemed the same. Scarred, yes, by the savage pokes and prods of several IV tubes. She pulled back the sleeves of her gown. Bandages, from wrist to forearm. From forearm to shoulder. Her arms were half the size they were, but beneath the bandages she felt strange ripples and bulges of flesh, a seam of wide stitches that ran from the inside of her elbow to her armpit, the entire bottom half of her arm savagely cut away. Another seam ran from her armpit into her collarbone, disappearing in a mesh of grooves and dips. Tara watched the unfamiliar limbs trembling as she explored herself. She felt her ribs. Were those her ribs? Fluid moved beneath the surface of the skin, igniting with pain as she touched.