by Candice Fox
‘I know you.’
‘Yes, good.’ I opened my arms. ‘That saves us time, doesn’t it? I’m Detective Frank Bennett, I’ll be your hostage negotiator for this evening.’
She didn’t answer.
‘And it’s Ms Harper, I presume.’
‘You found Ruben.’
‘I found everything you left out for me,’ I said. I was treading in dangerous territory, literally and metaphorically, so I kept my tone friendly. ‘I think you meant that.’
I took a couple of sideways steps, then stepped back the way I’d come. I wanted her to get comfortable with the idea of me moving my feet, perhaps as a nervous gesture, so that eventually I might try to close some of the gap between us without her noticing. I went sideways, and back again, and she didn’t shift back. I took half a step forward as I spoke. She didn’t seem to care. The gap was now six-and-a-half metres, I guessed. Negotiations were always slow.
‘Why don’t you tell me what you were trying to say, Tara?’
‘Why don’t you tell me what I was trying to say?’ she said. Her tone had changed suddenly, from amused to annoyed, and I felt my chest tighten at the sound of it. Such a seamless emotional change mid-conversation was not a good sign. Tara was not stable. She was not going to be an easy audience. She needed to talk more. There was too much going on in her mind and not enough going on here, now, with me.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve got me all worked out. You know me. Why don’t you tell me more about myself?’
‘I didn’t want –’
‘I think you meant for us to find what you left out, Tara. I’ll be your negotiator, Tara. Let’s not kill Caroline, Tara. Sweetie, honey, buddy, baby! Let’s be friends, Tara!’
Her words were snarled, spittle flying off her mismatched lips, but when she finished snarling them the snarls evolved into a wet laughter so high and full of rage it made my skin tingle. My mouth was bone dry. I tried to gather some saliva, looked at Caroline. She was really out of it. Her chest inflated and deflated in little shudders that produced soft snores through her open mouth. All she had to do was wake up and slide off the machine. But she wasn’t going to do it. Consistent with every interaction we’d had so far, Caroline was going to be completely unhelpful to me.
‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ Tara asked. She was back down to 25 per cent of the 100 per cent fury I’d seen in her only seconds before. Sliding up and down the rage scale the way the weights above Caroline’s head slid up and down as Tara adjusted her grip on the handle. I’d been put right back in my box, so I just nodded and agreed.
‘Isn’t it interesting, what’s beautiful?’ Tara said. The big dark hood, deep enough that it had probably got the disfigured girl all the way through the foyer and up to Caroline’s apartment without garnering attention, had slipped back a little, so I could see the lower half of her face. Two long scars lined her jaw on either side, perfectly, as though her face was a mask that could be lifted off and set in the palm of the hand. One cheek was bigger than the other. She was looking at Caroline. I could see the gap between Tara’s nose and mouth gave an unnatural slant, like her nose was stuck on. ‘Maybe that’s how we’re all supposed to be. Pure. Strong. We’re supposed to be born like that, show all those bones and edges. Built for swimming. Sprinting. Climbing. She’s mother nature’s finest work.’
Tara crouched down, letting the handle of the weight go with her, the line feeding back into the bottom pulley, the top pulley, lowering the block of pure death that hung above Caroline’s head. Tara stroked Caroline’s temple with a single finger, found the edge of the bone in the immaculate, caramel-brown flesh and pressed down hard. I snuck a couple more steps sideways, back, and then forward. Five metres.
‘If you’re not beautiful, you’re not natural. You weren’t born right.’
‘Is that what your mother used to tell you, Tara?’
‘No,’ Tara smirked. ‘She didn’t tell me anything. I had to have one of her old friends tell me, at a funeral, when I was a kid. Joanie just told me I was fat. But it wasn’t that at all. Not really. All the running and the pinching and the hiding away. It wasn’t about fat. It was because I wasn’t born right.’
She tugged back the hood. One side of her neck was lined with scars, skin bunched directly below the ear as though a seam had torn and torn again and she’d been run over back and forth with some grisly sewing machine. She was very much a torn doll. Her black hair was tied back haphazardly in a ponytail, knotted and matted where the ribbon cut into the wavy locks, and I felt the desire to untangle it. To try to fix her. I had a biological longing to try to make her pretty, standing there, looking at her. Perhaps I was beginning to understand.
‘She met him at a bucks night,’ Tara said quietly. ‘She and another girl were the entertainment. He wasn’t into the whole thing. The show they were putting on. She got talking to him out on the porch. He liked her. He didn’t know I was already growing inside her. I’m not sure she knew it herself.’
Tara wiped at her scarred lips. Curled a hand against her cheek, a doll in thought.
‘I wonder what she thought when I was born. All that black hair.’
‘Tara,’ I said.
‘I wonder if she knew which client it was.’
‘Tara, what happened to you in Bangkok?’ I asked.
‘Caroline Eckhart says there’s a beautiful person inside you. You’ve just got to reach in and pull her out,’ Tara said. She stood, still examining the sleeping beauty on the floor. Her voice rose to a high imitation, a child’s teasing. ‘Take what you’ve always wanted! You deserve it! You deserve it! You deserve it!’
I tried not to shake.
‘I thought maybe there was something beautiful inside me. So I tried to fix myself. I tried to cut away the badness. I was trying to do Joanie’s work, search for the beautiful thing in me, but I wanted to do it faster. I was going to be like a peach – when all that useless flesh was removed there was going to be a seed in there that would grow a new life. A new me.’
‘But that was never going to work,’ I said.
‘No. Because there’s no beautiful person inside me. I’m rotten. Joanie thought maybe there was a little version of her in here.’ She pointed to her chest. ‘Maybe if she beat hard enough I’d come out.’
Tara laughed. That crooked smile bunched the loose flesh at the corners of her eyes.
‘I’d planned to come out alright. I was going to come out and show her that she couldn’t hurt me anymore.’
‘But you didn’t get that chance.’
‘No. She slipped away from me.’ Tara squeezed the handle of the weight machine. ‘Isn’t that just … perfect?’
‘Tara.’
‘She was wearing the pink Chanel dress,’ Tara’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘They said she looked just like she was sleeping.’
I heard sirens in the distance, saw flashes of red and blue between the big ships lining the distant wharf as three squad cars raced down the hill from Potts Point.
Step Five: Hear the demands, and make a deal.
‘Killing Caroline isn’t going to give you what you missed out on with your mother, Tara,’ I said. ‘You can’t deface Joanie by defacing these women. The world is full of pretty women. Joan Harper is gone and she’ll never feel what you wanted her to feel.’
‘It might satisfy me for a while, though,’ Tara let the weight slide up and down. ‘I might feel full.’
I took a couple of steps forward. Tara took the zipper of her jacket with her spare hand and started unzipping. She slipped out of the jacket. Underneath, she was a mess of crooked seams and bubbled, puckered lines, the flesh mismatched and zigzagged. She had no breasts to speak of. No navel. She was a human patchwork doll. She jutted one hip and then the other. Slid out of the black pants and kicked off her shoes. Naked, I could follow all the seams, large and small, where skin grafts had patched flesh that had been cut away, had become infected, had been replaced with fresh skin
from here and there. Two great long lines down her thighs marked where a fat reduction procedure had gone wrong, taking half the leg, leaving two uneven stilts with bulbous knees. Some parts of her were the purple of an old man’s veins. I heard the telltale murmurs of the specialist raid team behind the apartment’s front door and glanced that way.
‘Look at me,’ Tara said.
‘I’m looking,’ I said.
‘This is me,’ she smiled. She dropped a hip, put her hands up as though modelling in a pageant. A grotesque marionette dancing on a gold-lit stage. ‘This is what ugly looks like.’
‘Tara, you’re not –’ I took a step forward. I wanted to tell her she wasn’t ugly, but that wasn’t true. I’d seen what she had done to those runners, and it was as ugly as humanity gets. I’d been in the dark stairwell where Tara had tried to end Fiona Ollevaris’ life, the lonely parkways where Ivana, Minerva and Jill had been dumped like trash. There was nothing but ugliness about Tara, and I realised that was what she was trying to tell me. She was an abomination. Finally, by showing herself, she was free. She nodded as she watched me realise this, accepting her message to me.
‘There are plenty of ugly souls in prison,’ I said. ‘You must have thought about how well you’d fit in there.’
‘I have thought about it,’ Tara said. The arm that held the weight was trembling. ‘I’ve dreamed about it. It would be just like high school, wouldn’t it? But there’d be no cool kids. We’d all be rejects.’
‘Let me take you then,’ I said. I reached out towards her, took a couple more steps. ‘It’s over. Put the handle on the hook.’
‘I’d be happy there in a safe little cage?’ Tara asked.
‘I’m sure you would.’
‘With all my ugly little friends.’
‘Tara, put the handle –’
‘But I’ve never been much good at making friends.’
Tara let the handle of the weight machine go.
I heard the zipping of the line in the pulleys over my head. I dived forward on my knees and grabbed the handle as it flew towards the floor. The weights clanked. I fell on my chest, my fingers tangled in the handle and the wire. The team outside must have heard the calamity and rushed the door. There were feet all around me, three sets of hands gripping the wire and taking it from me. I could see them sliding an unharmed Caroline from her place on the weight guillotine. I lay and looked across the floor, out the balcony doors, where Tara was standing with her naked back against the balcony rail.
She gave me a little wave and then curled backwards over the rail, her arms and head, and then her shoulders, and then her back arching until she was a perfect curve over the edge. A backward dive into the dark night. A couple of the squad cops grabbed at her, but she’d landed three flights below before they closed their fists on air. I heard a crash, and the screaming of some rich couple down there on the first-floor balcony as Tara’s body crashed through their outdoor dining table.
Outside the Finger Wharf apartments, the trauma team swooped on everyone except me. I stood in the crowd near Harry’s and watched the old man from the apartment next to Caroline’s being wheeled out of the building on a stretcher, an oxygen mask clamped to his face. Caroline was on another stretcher, somewhere in those lovely folds of mid-consciousness, looking lazily and silently at the crowd as she was brought to the ambulance, red and blue lights bouncing perfectly off her cheekbones for the cameras. The valet would have called the television channel that had him on their payroll, but everyone had heard somehow, and Cowper Wharf Road was blocked off, cars being redirected back past Frisco’s. There were even water police doing laps alongside the navy boats – their decks were busy with curious sailors brought up from their bowels by the lights.
I expected the group of four people who’d had their dinner party rudely interrupted by Tara to be lapping up the media attention, but they stood quietly huddled in the ring of commotion, watching the police activity. Two women and two men dressed to the nines, one of the women with a little fur-lined jacket wrapped about her shoulders.
A cursory glance over the balcony rail at Tara’s body had told me she’d gone headfirst through a glass table cluttered with dinner bowls and knives and glasses and plates, candles and napkins. She ended up twisted in an unnatural shape, her head tilted up towards the sky and eyes closed, her naked body covered in food and glass. I didn’t look for too long. I felt sad.
I imagined Imogen would see the news report when I didn’t get home as expected. I called her as I stood there in the night. The phone rang out. When I looked up Eden was standing beside me watching the fray, still wearing that black baseball cap. I didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. She hadn’t said a word.
‘You’re like one of those people who asks if they can help just when the last plate is being dried,’ I said.
‘I wasn’t asking to help.’
‘She’s dead,’ I said. I realised, now that I was talking, that shock was trying to nibble at me. When you’ve experienced it before, shock is as tangible and predictable as the onset of a cold. Usually, my teeth started chattering first. Waves of goosebumps ran up and down my arms. ‘Olympic-grade backflip off the balcony.’
Eden made a little half-interested noise. I rubbed my arms.
‘Come on,’ she sighed at last. ‘The ants have got it.’
We walked through the crowd towards the edge of the cordon. I didn’t ask where we were going or why. I was thinking about Eden’s propensity to call the police, fire and ambulance crews who would deconstruct the scene and drag away all the necessary samples, victims and photographs ‘ants’. It was very good. She was good like that, Eden, with the metaphors. I realised my mind was wandering.
It was a relief to get into the car. Warm in there. I drew out my phone and tried to call Imogen again. She didn’t answer so I sent a text.
I’d assumed Eden was going to take us to Parramatta headquarters, but she turned right at the end of Cowper Wharf Road and went into the tunnel. I thought she was driving to North Sydney station – maybe we’d been called there. But before I thought about it again we were on the Pacific Highway heading north. I wasn’t too concerned about it. Eden was like an autopilot. You didn’t have to watch her driving or question her route. She got you where you needed to go. The shock wore off and with all my adrenalin spent I slumped in the passenger seat with my phone in my lap, only concerned about when Imogen would call me back.
‘I killed Beck,’ I yawned at Eden. ‘You killed just about everything that moved on Rye Farm, and now the Sydney Parks Strangler is dead. We’re getting fired.’
‘Or promoted.’
‘Where are we going? Are you abducting me?’ I stretched and groaned. For once, she gave a little laugh.
‘Something like that.’
I fell asleep somewhere around Berowra, after making a crack about a romantic getaway. Eden drove in the dark in silence, the headlights blasting tiny white bugs and moths that flew into the windscreen. I don’t know how I rationalised it. Maybe I thought she was taking me to our next case. We were going to turn up at a car park in Gosford where a kid had been found stabbed or something grisly like that. But I didn’t even give it that much thought. I just trusted her, the way a little boy trusts his friend when he turns to the dense bush and beckons, ‘Come and look at this.’
I was on the come-down from a major case. All the weight and worry about Tara Harper and who her next victim would be had fallen off me. I’d shelved the case, the way I had all the others in my career, for it to be dragged out in flashbacks when I was sixty, when I finally let myself be vulnerable to delayed PTSD and went nuts before having to be crammed in a nursing home by whoever I was shacked up with at the time. Maybe Imogen. An old and glamorous Imogen.
When I opened my eyes we were pulling into the driveway of a large house by a lake. The moon was finally out, lighting water as still and flat as glass between the pine trees. Distant mountains rippled over the horizon. I guessed we were
somewhere around The Entrance. I’d spent my childhood holidays here, throwing blow-up pool mattresses off the shore into the tumbling, bumbling surf, being dragged with my holiday friends towards the ocean at what felt to us like breakneck speed. We used to go fishing on that very lake. When I got out of the car, the wind whistling through the pine trees was something I remembered from that time, a sound I heard nowhere else. A high-pitched whisper that rose and fell like a ghoulish song.
All the lights in the house were on. I followed Eden through the pretty garden, saw beads of dew on the blue flowers by the big oak door as she unlocked it. A stained-glass panel was set at eye-level in the wood, little blue birds hopping from branch to branch. She led me inside. On the wall by the door was a row of hooks. She put the keys on the only empty one. On others there were little backpacks and little hats, a girl’s pink umbrella. I looked at a family picture by the wall. Two pretty little black-haired kids and their handsome parents, he a broad-shouldered, dark-eyed man and she a whippet-thin waify type in a starched, collared white shirt. Hanging beside the photograph was a bare white canvas. I frowned at the empty canvas on the wall. Reached out and touched the unprimed material as I passed.
In the living room, more puzzles. The long dining-room table was full of glasses and plates and cutlery as if someone had just been eating there, but there was no food. A big wooden bowl was off-centre, empty. It might have held a salad. There was an empty lasagne tray on a wooden cutting board. Someone had brought a teddy bear to the make-believe dinner. It sat flopped on a chair. Two of the chairs were pushed in and two were pulled out.
Eden went to the kitchen and ran a hand over the empty bench. She looked at the couches. I followed her eyes. The long grey couches were arranged in an L-shape facing huge windows to the lake. Their cushions were awry. One was on the floor by an open colouring book and some pencils. From where I stood, I could see that half a page was coloured in, as though whoever had been working on it had only just left and was going to be back soon to finish the pink pig and the green turtle. There was a throw rug crumpled in one corner.
