by Candice Fox
‘Mmm,’ the other agreed. Neither moved.
A tight group of orange-clad runners passed, determined faces and downturned mouths. A pod of teenagers and a father with a young son huffing away at his sides. Chills rippled up Tara’s spine as the cheers suddenly rose from the people passing.
Run, run, boys and girls,
Try to get away,
We won’t stop, can’t stop,
Gonna make you pay.
Two women ran down the outside of the barrier. Tara leaned back and caught the flashing blue and red of the police car at the side of the tunnel. As they passed, she slipped back into the safety of the dark, a slick sea snail snapping shut the door of its shell. One of the officers let out a dramatic sigh.
‘Idiots,’ he grumbled, walking past the alcove. Tara watched him bumbling against the stream of runners who ducked and weaved out of his path. One last woman slipped through the gap between the barrier and the tunnel wall, glancing cheekily at the officer as she passed.
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ she giggled. The officer waved a tired hand, heading towards the end of the barrier. He went to the opening and dragged the last barricade diagonally against the wall, cutting off the gap. When he looked back down the aisle, it was empty. He assumed the last runner must have jumped over the barrier and rejoined the crowd. His offsider was looking at the tunnel wall above the runners, the shadows of hundreds of people lit up red, then white, then blue, a strobe of pumping limbs against the flat grey curve.
It was a little cruel, Eden thought, to send the runners up Arden Street. She trotted along past the bus stations at Coogee Beach, listening to the rise and crash of waves on the pale sand and watching the runners ahead of her grinding slowly up the massive slope towards Bronte. She’d caught a ride to the cemetery on Malabar Road and clopped down the long, steep hill, looking along side streets at the ornate beach houses nestled between the trees. The black horizon of the ocean cut into the grey sky beyond them, million-dollar views ruined by the occasional hulk of a brick apartment block stuffed with backpackers leaning out windows. Out on the ocean, sheet lightning flashed pale pink. As she ran, she listened to the buzz of police activity. Her long abdominal scar was as numb now as the rest of her, her legs working like machinery, pulling tendons in her feet and ankles, making her dance over the asphalt. The McDonald’s on the beachfront was lit a painful white and crowded with runners waiting to use the toilets. They swirled in both directions around the roundabout at the bottom of the slope, a couple of jokers doing the full circle before powering at the hill, heads up, eyes on the clouds shifting across the skyline.
Halfway up the slope she saw the runner a few metres ahead of her waver slightly, the side of her right foot scraping the gutter. She dug in, head down and calves straining. The head down part wasn’t a good idea, Eden thought. She watched the runner waver again and then stumble sideways into the bushes out the front of one of the houses on the slope, wet orange rose petals raining on the grass.
‘You alright?’
Eden bent forward over the woman, grabbed her bicep. The woman rolled, looked up and squealed, her whole body tensing rock hard beneath Eden’s fingers.
‘Jesus!’
‘Hey, what are you doing?’ someone yelled. Eden straightened as two men ran towards her. When they spied the ‘Police’ lettering on her back they slowed.
‘I’m alright, I’m alright.’ The woman laughed nervously, still panting from the run. She let Eden drag her to her feet. She was a chubby little thing with the face of a young bulldog pup. All cheeks. ‘The rooftop. The shadow of the rooftop made a … made a hood over your head.’
Eden looked across the road at the curved triangular roof of the postmodern monstrosity of a house. From the ground, the roof’s silhouette must have made a perfect hood shape around her face as she bent over the woman. It was almost laughable. The spectre of the Sydney Parks Strangler was so close to the surface of the woman’s mind, she was ready to pick Eden as the ghoul on the loose. More runners gathered around them to see what drama was unfolding, the squeal having drawn their focus from the hill. Their chattering was an excited mumble bubbling and sputtering in the dark.
‘What is it? What happened?’ someone asked.
‘She thought she was the Parks Strangler,’ someone else asked.
More runners arrived.
‘Did you say Parks Strangler? Where’s the Parks Strangler?’
‘No, she thought she was the killer. But she’s the police.’
‘What’s wrong with her? Did the killer come after her?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on.’
‘Where is he now? Was he here? Was he around here?’
‘Is she alright? Did anyone see him?’
Runners carried on past the group towards the top of the hill, catching snippets of the frightened words as they floated in the darkness. Little boats stealing cargo and carrying it on up the stream. Eden watched, stunned at how fast it was happening, the mouths jabbering all around her. She didn’t like talking to groups unless it was behind the safety of a desk or near the protective proximity of a planning board. Still in hunting mode, she felt exposed, the faces all around her turned inwards, the hounds suddenly aware of the fox in their midst.
‘No, he wasn’t here.’ She put her hands up. ‘Just calm down a second, will you all?’
Someone at the top of the hill screamed. The message had been received up there. The killer was nearby, had made an attempt on a runner and fled. Eden watched the groups of runners gather in the centre of the road. The panic was thick smoke in the air.
We were heading to an alert in the Cross City Tunnel when the radio broadcast came through. Only seconds old, the alert popped up on Hooky’s screen as we were stopped outside the hardware store on William Street, deciding where to go next. A few runners trotted here and there, but the street was mostly empty, except for a couple of junkies who had wandered down from the Cross, staggering and twisting like the undead as they made their way against the flow down the middle of the street. Hooky put her iPad away and I hummed the bike up towards the mouth of the tunnel. The entire thing was manned by two porky male beat cops who leaned, side by side, against a squad car flashing the red and blue up over the tunnel walls. I stopped the bike beside them and lifted my visor.
‘Any dropouts?’
‘Not that we’ve seen.’ One of the cops got off the car, picking me as a detective. He was suddenly straight-backed, looking up and down the tunnel lined with red plastic barricades to keep people off the gutters. The other cop was picking his nails.
‘No one’s approached us.’
‘We might have a runner down in this area,’ I said. I turned as I heard a dull thumping start somewhere close by, probably a car going over the top. ‘I’ll get one of you to run up over the top, see if you can spot anything.’
The alert cop dashed into the tunnel. The thumping continued. I felt a strange tension in my chest at the sound, like a hand was on my heart, gently squeezing, urging me. Urging me towards what, I didn’t know. It was probably just the bike rattling my guts around for the first time in decades.
‘Heron One to Command. We’re getting multiple reports of a target sighting up here on Arden Street near Queens Park.’
‘Archer to Command. Reject that call please. I started a game of Chinese whispers.’
Eden sounded tired. I sat listening, one hand on the bike, looking at Hooky. She was listening to the muffled voices through my helmet, squinting as she tried to pick out the words.
‘Heron Two to Command. I’ve got runners panicking up here. Arden and Bronte.’
‘Command to Heron One and Two. I’ve got backup on its way to you. Bronte and Tamarama units respond.’
There was no response from Eden. It was possible she couldn’t get through the chatter with the Eastern suburbs unit radios alive on every frequency as cars rushed to the top of Arden Street. I lifted one foot off the ground, straightened the bike
and felt Hooky wrap her arms around my waist.
I stopped. The thumping had stopped. Hooky jostled me around the ribs with her arms, made my stomach flip.
‘Let’s go, dickhead.’
‘Hang on,’ I said. I let her take the weight of the bike. A weird, queasy sensation had come over me, half the light-headedness that comes after too many skipped meals and half the guilty terror of a bad hangover – the sensation that something is wrong. I’d had the feeling before, running into the church to capture Jason Beck. At the time I couldn’t have known that he’d just murdered my girlfriend. I’d passed it off as the usual fears a cop experienced rushing into an unfamiliar environment to confront a criminal.
I was looking at the entrance to the tunnel when the thumping started again. It was so faint I hardly heard it above the rush of cars overhead.
I ripped off my helmet and ran into the dark alcove beneath the glowing green exit sign and hit the iron crossbar with both hands. The fire door swung open ten centimetres and thumped into a figure on the ground. All my muscles tensed at once. There was pure darkness before me. All the emergency lights were out.
‘Amy! Amy! Amy!’ I howled over my shoulder. I saw her drop the bike like it was made of cardboard. She leaped over it. The cop with the nail obsession stood dumbly at the bonnet of the patrol car. I shoved open the door, pushing the soft, limp thing behind it sideways and slipped into the dark. I drew my gun and peered into the murky red and blue of the stairwell. Amy slid into the stairwell with me. She fell on the body on the ground, gathering her arms and pulling the woman backwards, into the light cast by the doorway. I rushed blindly up the stairs, gun drawn, ears pricked. There was no one there. I could feel the emptiness of the space around me. No light came through from the above exit door. I sprinted back down the stairs.
‘She’s alive.’ Hooky’s voice in the dark was high, thin. ‘Help me. Help me! She’s alive!’
I could hear the two beat cops calling for backup. I kneeled in the dim light and looked at the crushed figure before me. A tiny plastic tube crunched under my knee. I groped in the dark and felt the spike, the wetness. A dart – still full, it seemed. I looked at the victim’s swollen lips moving in a bloodied face. I wiped dampness from the woman’s eyes with both hands. There was no telling how old she was. One eye was already swollen shut.
‘Face,’ she said. Her hands were on my hands, trying to touch her face. ‘Hard face.’
‘It’s alright,’ I said. I was stammering, almost crying with terror and anger. ‘You’re alright, love. Your face is alright.’
She passed out in my arms.
Eden didn’t follow the victim to St Vincent’s with Frank. It wasn’t her scene. He was the one to do the coddling and worrying – she would direct the wind-down of the police operation. The cordons and checkpoints she set up after the victim was found in the Cross City Tunnel proved useless, of course. By the time the sound of Frank’s bike had spooked the killer, he or she had run – and that kind of running was the most important of the killer’s life. No amount of gall that the Strangler had struck right under their noses was going to help the police catch up. Eden knew that kind of terror, the electric flight of a hunter being pursued. Bodily limitations meant nothing. It was instinctive. Escape or perish.
At 3 am she returned home, shut her apartment door and breathed for the first time without feeling the strange tightening of her throat muscles that happened whenever she was in charge. She went straight to the bath, slipped beneath the steaming water and dragged the rack at the end of the tub towards her. For an hour or so, she clacked away at the keys of her laptop in the candlelight, sipping absent-mindedly at a single glass of cold moscato, now and then licking the beads of condensation from the side of the bulbous glass. When her officer report was finished, she got into bed and filled in her operations overview report and an advisory report to the media, and updated the case log on the police intranet. When the sun began to peek beneath the heavy red curtains across the balcony door, she shut the little silver device and fell asleep.
It was dark beneath the curtains when she woke. Having a very expensive bed, with very expensive sheets and covers, Eden always slept like the dead. The trouble with that was that waking was always difficult and she was often forced to throw off the sheets completely and let the coolness of the dark room prick at her naked skin to bring her fully to consciousness. She took the phone from the side of the bed and read through Frank’s text messages one at a time.
2.22 am Victim is Fiona Ollevaris, 28. Some bad facial fracturing/broken ribs/minor strangling but no brain damage. Coma natural at this stage. Will update. FYI last thing she said to me was ‘hard face’. Any ideas on that one?
6.47 am No movement yet. Family blubbering everywhere. Media.
12.12 pm Family says victim is MMA fighter. What??? Picked the wrong runner! Checking hospitals for injuries in case perp comes in.
2.00 pm Induced coma for facial surgery.
4.14 pm Hard face hard face hard face hard face I’m going nuts here. Any thoughts? U there?
Eden stretched, yawned, and rolled out of the bed. She pulled on her clothes and threw open the curtains, looked at the orange-lit night. Lovers walked along the sandstone wall across the street, arm in arm. A bus roaring past almost drowned out the sound of knocking at the front door. Eden padded to the door on the cold tiles and looked at the small monitor next to the intercom, a pinhole she’d installed beside the outer handle for those rare cases, like now, when someone slipped in the front door without buzzing. The visitor waiting there made a small wave of heat sweep over her body, the instinctive sizzle of nerves rushing to their edge. She opened the door a crack.
‘Hi,’ Amy said.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Yeah,’ Amy smirked. Eden remembered all the times Frank had bugged her lately about how she greeted people, the straight-to-the-business style that had infected her since her accident out on Rye Farm. Eden came close to death that night. Lately, pleasantries seemed a waste of borrowed time.
She supposed she should let the girl in, so after a moment or two of silent contemplating, thoughts slowed by the girl’s incredibly bad outfit, she let the teen wearing the dusty purple boots into the apartment and shut the door. The girl’s attire had struck Eden since she first laid eyes on her as a confusing mix of ‘look at me’ and ‘stay away’. Yet another side-effect of her near-death experience had been an aversion to confused motives. She headed to the kitchen, putting the marble island between the girl and herself. She recognised this as her first survival-mode strategy. Why had she suddenly flipped into survival mode? She found herself opening the fridge without knowing why, taking out a bottle of milk.
‘Coffee? Tea?’
Eden wasn’t even sure she had any tea. She heard the girl ease onto one of the stools on the other side of the island, drop her shoulder bag on the floor. There were knives in a block to the girl’s right. Eden added this to the calculations hurrying through her mind.
‘No, neither. Thanks.’
‘Did you go to the hospital with Frank?’
Keep the conversation on your terms, until you know the motive for the visit, then decide whether you’ll allow the original reason for the visit to be addressed. Everything was about control now. The conversation. The environment. The available tools. Eden opened a cupboard beneath the sink and took out a spray bottle, ran a cloth under the water as though preparing to mop up a recently noticed spill. She gave a couple of sprays, mopped at the invisible spot.
Why was she so paranoid? She paused by the sink and closed her eyes. This was all a symptom of being alone with a teenage girl again. The last teenage girl she’d trusted had tried to kill her. Amy might just be trying to hold onto the Parks Strangler case while Frank was tied up, and had got the message, however wrong, however moronic, that Eden welcomed her as a companion. Eden couldn’t recall even the most subtle indication she might have given the girl over the last few days that would inspire the
idea. She’d mostly ignored Frank’s weird little fangirl completely. Or so she thought.
‘No. No, I hung around after the ambos got there for a little while and then I went home.’ The girl coughed. Eden put the kettle on. ‘We need to talk though.’
Eden turned, the spray bottle and cloth in hand, and looked at the girl’s short blonde prickles. It was an odd look. Amy’s pale cream skin led naturally to expecting striking black Asian hair framing the high cheekbones and chocolate eyes. The style was new-recruit military but she’d bleached it hard so that it was almost snow white.
Short blonde hair.
The girl held Eden’s eyes. Defiant.
‘Out with it then,’ Eden said.
The girl drew a breath and nibbled her bottom lip, just once, refusing to back away from the cliff edge she had crept onto. When she began to speak the words tumbled out, one after the other, a series of gunshots.
‘I know that you’re Morgan Tanner.’
Eden’s mouth was immediately dry, denying any verbal response. She found herself smiling, licking her lips. She hadn’t thought it would be this easy, the solution to the problem of the woman who attacked Hades. It was terrifyingly easy. The mouse had wandered right into the cat’s basket.
‘Oh,’ Eden said. She looked at the floor. ‘That’s interesting.’
Amy opened her mouth to reply, as Eden anticipated she would, and it was in those precious microseconds that she was inhaling air to make her response that Eden lifted the spray bottle and pulled the trigger, saturating the girl in trichloromethane. Eden didn’t use chloroform in any of her night-time games – she found the practice a little unfair. But a homemade cocktail of the stuff in an easy dispenser was a must for her household. She wandered around the kitchen island as the girl coughed and spluttered, wiping at her nose and eyes, the wooden stool tumbling and splitting the air as it hit the ground. A couple more puffs and the girl was on her knees.
