Already Dead

by Jaye Ford

  Jax stayed huddled behind the brick, scared of moving in case she made a sound. The scratching came and went and started up again while the collection depot in her brain threw up unnecessary facts: Cathy Freeman won the four-hundred at the 2000 Olympics in 49.11 seconds; there was a breed of rat that could grow to six kilos. Eyes now adjusted to the darkness, Jax glanced around, saw dried chunks of concrete, twisted strips of discarded wire, hamburger boxes, used takeaway bags, crushed drink cans – a builders’ dumping ground. No monster rats, but something busy and tireless was scratching again. She pulled her legs in tighter, hoped whatever it was didn’t reach her. Her left calf balled in a cramp, pain shot through her glutes from a rock under her butt. She winced as something dug into a rib – then gave a small, silent gasp. Her handbag.

  The flap at the top had ridden up as she crawled and the inside was full of dirt and underfloor crap. She felt her way past a crusted lipstick, gritty keys and mini laptop, before finding her phone embedded with sand. Please, please work. Glancing at the daylight, shielding the screen, she switched it on and sent thanks to the gods of technology as a photo of Zoe showed through a smear of scratches.

  She hit ‘Contacts’ and hesitated. Who? Russell was hours away, Tilda was singing somewhere with Zoe – and she didn’t want either of them picking around a building site that may or may not have bad guys lurking. It had to be Aiden Hawke. And she’d just bawled him out on Kate Walsh’s doorstep. Shit.

  He answered on the first ring.

  Jax cupped a hand around her mouth. ‘It’s Miranda Jack,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes.’ Not committing himself until he heard where she was going with this.

  ‘Two men …’ She started, stopped, swallowed at the fear stuck in her throat like a gag. ‘Two men,’ she hissed again. ‘I was at the beach. They came after me and … and Brendan said … Did you send someone? Are there cops looking for me? Are they yours?’

  A brief pause, then his neutral voice turned calm and measured. ‘Slow down. Tell me what happened.’

  She clenched her teeth, glanced at the daylight. ‘Two men were at my car. They said they wanted to talk to me. I ran, one followed. I’m in a building site. They were here. I don’t know if they’ve left.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘No. I lost my shoes.’

  A pause. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Under the floor.’

  Another pause. ‘Jax, where did you run to?’

  Of course that’s what he fucking meant. ‘Merewether Beach, heading towards the harbour. I took a left into one of those streets going left.’ She shook her head. Think. ‘There’s a house being built, a skip out front.’

  ‘Are you out of sight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then stay where you are. I’ll find you.’ He sounded like he was already moving. ‘Turn your phone to silent and keep it on.’ Another switch in his voice – from information-gathering to efficient instruction.

  ‘How long will you be?’

  There was murmuring on his end of the phone, more directives but to someone else. Good. Send out troops. ‘Jax,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to hang up now. Don’t go wandering around.’

  ‘Do you know who they were?’

  ‘Tell you what. You sit tight, make a list of questions, and I’ll try to answer them when I find you.’

  24

  The scratching stopped and started twice more. The rumble of car engines and the thump of the surf continued unabated. No footsteps, no voices. Not for thirteen minutes, then a shush of sound made her body go rigid. It was followed by the soft clomp of shoes on the timber floor above her head. More than one pair. Then the phone in her hand vibrated. Aiden.

  ‘I took a left off Merewether Beach, found a skip. I’m in a building site and there’s no-one here.’

  Jax ran her eyes across the strip of light again. ‘So they’re gone?’

  ‘I told you to stay put.’

  ‘I haven’t moved.’

  His pause was filled with a step and scrape on the timber. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Under the floor you’re standing on. Who else’s feet are up there?’

  ‘Detective Constable Suzanne May.’

  The one from the motorway. ‘Can I come out now?’

  There was hesitant shoe shuffling. ‘How did you get there?’

  ‘Through the backyard.’

  ‘I’ll meet you there.’ Footfalls moved in two directions, the heavy ones towards the rear of the house. Jax was still on her hands and knees, picking a wary path through the builders’ rubbish, when she saw Aiden’s feet land side-by-side in the narrowing strip of daylight. She was so relieved she wanted to laugh.

  ‘In here,’ she called.

  He squatted and peered into the darkness. ‘Need a hand?’

  She needed a good cry but when she opened her mouth, it was some kind of been-there, survived-worse attitude that answered. ‘Got a rat trap?’

  He reached to his waistband as though he might actually have one. ‘Sorry, no. How about this?’ He flicked on a torch, lighting a path to her.

  ‘Nice.’ Very nice. She’d had serious doubts about him this afternoon, but she was revising her judgement as he moved across the strip of daylight to her closest exit point, watching her as though he was ready to dive in if she was grabbed by a rat. Man of action. Absolutely the kind of solid, capable presence she wanted around after being chased under a house. Or almost killed on a motorway. It didn’t excuse his attitude at Kate Walsh’s house but it gave him a few more ticks on the good-guy side of that particular ledger.

  He straightened as she stepped into the fading light of the early evening, his eyes moving over her as though he was checking she had all her limbs. On some plane she was still pissed off with him, but right now all she could think was that he’d dropped everything to find her. And, wow, he looked great. As tall and steely eyed as he had been two days ago, except this time he wasn’t pointing a gun at her. Christ, she could hug him. Then she was. Her arms wrapped around him, hands clutching fistfuls of shirt, face crushed into his shoulder. And for a second, maybe two, the aftershave-laced smell of him filled her up, his body warmed her bones, the fit firmness of him made her feel safe and … and the part of her that still felt married made her pull away.

  She slapped pointlessly at the dirt caked on her arms and trousers, avoiding his eyes as she examined the crust of grit on her palms, lifting them to show him with a wry grin. A mixture of concern and exasperation washed across his face. It made her feel like a recalcitrant child. She didn’t care – the adrenaline that had banked up while she was under the house just wanted an outlet. Three spirited paces across the rubble was all she managed before sore feet stopped her. Hobbling to the edge of the flooring, she sat gingerly. ‘Everything hurts.’

  ‘Do you need an ambulance?’

  ‘A shower should be enough.’ She lifted a foot to examine the tender sole. ‘And slippers.’

  Perched beside her, Aiden cupped her ankle in one hand and shone his torch on the damage. The skin was red, inflamed, streaked with blood in a couple of places. His fingers were firm, steady, warm. ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘When I saw the two guys at the car park, I tossed my shoes and bolted.’

  It took him a second. ‘You ran barefoot?’

  ‘And you thought I was worried about my shoes.’

  He tipped his head to one side. ‘I thought you were upset.’

  Something caught in her throat and her vision blurred as the gentle empathy in his voice made her bravado catch and swing like a pendulum. She turned her face away. His hand on her ankle softened, thumb sliding across the dirt with a scratchy rub. It was comfort – she was more than grateful – but he was probably deciding she’d had enough, that any more questions would be best handled with avoidance.

  Only there were more questions now, starting with: Who the hell had chased her? She lifted her chin, faced him again. ‘I want to know what that was about.’

&
nbsp; He held her gaze. Not with the standard, neutral cop look or the forerunner to a refusal. Not even detached assessment. It seemed personal. Intimate and searching. Concern and reluctance in it. Something warm, too, as though the heat of his thumb as it passed over the notch of her ankle was being communicated through his eyes.

  She should look away, she told herself. He might see something she didn’t want him to. She might find something she wasn’t ready for.

  ‘Sarge?’ It was the detective from the motorway, Suzanne May, her black hair tied back now and her voice low, maybe not wanting to disturb the neighbours. Or her boss.

  Aiden’s fingers slipped from Jax’s ankle before he turned. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We’ve got the car. It’s parked opposite Merewether Beach.’ She jerked a finger over her shoulder. ‘Just round the corner.’

  When he looked at Jax again, his eyes were back to business. ‘Were you in your car when you were approached?’

  ‘No, I was walking to it. They were standing either side of it.’

  He turned back to the detective. ‘Have it taped off and get fingerprinting to put in an appearance.’ He stood, directing another question at Jax. ‘Can you walk that far?’

  ‘Yes.’ If hobbling was considered walking.

  ‘Good. You can tell me what happened on the way.’

  He spoke quietly to the detective before she left, then led Jax to the corner of the house she’d thrown herself around half an hour earlier. The sky wasn’t dark yet but close, so he lit up his torch again. The earth was harder than she remembered, more painful to negotiate the second time around, and she held on to the fence with one hand as she limped ahead of him.

  ‘I could carry you to the road,’ Aiden offered.

  ‘A piggy back?’

  ‘I was thinking more of a fireman’s hold.’

  And have her sandy arse in his face? ‘Thanks but I’ll pass.’

  The thump of the waves was louder out on the road and eerie in the twilight. The temperature had dropped to a more comfortable level and the breeze that met them straight off the ocean was cool and salty and slightly damp.

  ‘When I called,’ she said, falling into step beside him, ‘I thought you’d assume I was ringing to apologise.’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  He’d accused her of using Kate Walsh to find a job. She’d told him she didn’t give a shit what he thought. ‘No. Do you?’ She heard a quiet huff, somewhere between a chuckle and a scoff. Guess not.

  He switched off the torch, leaving the streetlights to cast soft circles on the bitumen at their feet. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  There wasn’t much to tell but she went through the details trying to keep to the facts, the way he’d directed when she’d given her statement. They rounded the curve in the road as she spoke, the beachfront path at the end of the street coming into view. A jogger ran left to right, passing a walker being dragged by three dogs.

  They’d reached the intersection when Jax finished and she stopped and turned to Aiden. ‘Were there cops looking for me?’

  He faced the orange glow coming off the sodium lights along the path, looking down to the police car now parked where it had all started. ‘Why do you think they were cops?’

  ‘That’s what I first assumed. And they looked like you.’

  He frowned.

  ‘Business shirt, tie, dark trousers, neat, fit,’ she said. It sounded like Brendan, too, minus the tie. It sounded like anyone who worked in an office and went to a gym. ‘So were there detectives looking for me?’

  ‘Not any of mine.’ He put hands on his hips, glanced around. ‘Are you sure the guy was chasing you?’

  ‘What do you mean? He wasn’t chasing anyone else.’

  ‘He wasn’t just running and you mistook it for chasing?’

  ‘Mistook it?’ Did he think she was an idiot?

  ‘Brendan Walsh convinced you there were people after him. It’s understandable you might feel uneasy. I’m wondering if you might have misinterpreted what happened.’

  ‘I’m a little paranoid, yeah, but I’m not delusional. And that guy followed me all the way to the house.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘He was behind me in the side street and then I heard him on the rubble in the driveway.’

  ‘Did you see him after you got to the house?’

  She hesitated. ‘I heard him. And a car.’

  ‘It’s a street. People use it.’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head – firm, adamant. ‘I didn’t get it wrong. Those two men were standing by my car, one asked if I was Miranda Jack, then he was powering down the road after me. Arms and legs working it. He didn’t decide to go for a jog.’

  He nodded again. Took another glance around. ‘What about media?’

  She wanted to say not anyone she knew, wanted to tell him there was nothing in the story worth chasing now, but she hesitated again. Jax wouldn’t pursue the subject of a story if they ran – it didn’t mean it didn’t happen. The media was a cutthroat industry and it wasn’t limited to trained journalists working for publishers and broadcasters these days. Anyone could write what they liked on the net and if you had a mobile phone and a social media account, you could upload pictures as soon as you shot them. Jax and her car had already been splashed all over the news and internet. Had someone tried to make a buck off her? An editor somewhere would pay for pictures of a fleeing Miranda Jack. It didn’t have to be about money, though – shots of the gun-toting woman from the motorway might score a lot of hits on YouTube. It might even spark debate about whether she had something to hide. ‘Maybe,’ she admitted, ‘but it didn’t feel like that.’

  ‘It’s a fair distance from your car to the house,’ Aiden said.

  She nodded. ‘My guess is four hundred metres on the button to the skip.’

  ‘You had bare feet.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Two fit-looking men, presumably with shoes –’

  ‘Only one ran. I didn’t see where the other went. But yeah, he had shoes.’

  ‘And you stayed ahead of him. In bare feet.’

  She heard the doubt in his voice. It was fair enough. ‘A car held him up.’

  ‘You sure you weren’t further away when you started running?’

  Did he think she’d got the facts out of order? ‘No. I used to run. The four-hundred was my event. I’ve covered that distance so many times I could do it in my sleep. Any further and I wouldn’t have made it.’ She held an arm out, tracing the curving course she’d taken, remembering her alarm but feeling a hyped-up sense of elation that was better than any first place she’d ever won. ‘The corner is tighter than a track and I had to take it wide and cut in fast but the guy had slowed. I think he figured I’d die about here. I almost did but muscle memory and a shitload of adrenaline count for a lot, thank God.’

  He said nothing for a good ten seconds, something amused working its way onto his lips.

  She put her hands on her hips. ‘Don’t you believe me?’

  ‘Yeah, actually, I do.’

  There was something else. ‘And?’

  ‘And …’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘The four-hundred. That’s relatively cool.’ He turned, started walking, spoke over his shoulder. ‘Come on, Cathy Freeman. Let’s look for your shoes.’

  She hobbled after him, wanting to raise her arms in a silent cheer. She hadn’t got closer than tickets in the stalls to an Olympics, but thirty-five years old, covered in dirt, widowed, worn-out and shaken up – and she could still be relatively cool. It earned him another tick on the right side of her ledger.

  ‘Over there.’ She pointed across the road to the hand-railing that kept pedestrians from the two-metre drop to the sand.

  ‘You were on that side of the street when you lost your shoes?’

  ‘I didn’t lose them. I threw them. There’s one.’ A sandal had landed upright beside a lamppost as though she’d simply stepped out of it.

  Aiden walked ahead, picked it up and
stood for a moment looking down the street to the parking area, as though measuring the distance. About fifty metres, she wanted to tell him. A slow, uncontrolled fifty that was only salvaged because of the people mover that had held up Guy Number One. Then she spotted her other sandal. ‘The left one is down there.’ She aimed a finger over the railing to the dark beach below.

  He turned but looked at her, not the sand. ‘Why did you run?’

  ‘I don’t know. It, they seemed … off.’

  ‘That’s it? They were off?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She shrugged. ‘They didn’t say who they were and there was something about the way they were looking into the car.’ And maybe it was the anxious, unnerved thing living inside her.

  He watched her for a beat or two. ‘There’s nothing else you want to tell me?’

  She took a breath, about to say, Paranoid, remember? Saw his flat cop eyes and changed her mind. ‘No, that’s it.’

  Another pause. Then he handed her the sandal. ‘I’ll get the uniform to fetch the other one up.’

  She grabbed at his sleeve as he made to walk on. ‘It has to be about Brendan, don’t you think?’

  He glanced at her hand, took a second to answer. ‘It’s one of the options.’

  In the car park, her Mazda was cordoned off in a rectangle of blue-and-white police tape. Aiden had another quiet conference with another cop, heads together, then pointing at the railing above her sandal. As the uniformed officer trotted across the road, Aiden tapped a message on his phone before joining her again.

  ‘Your car will have to be towed for fingerprinting.’

  ‘Again? I only picked it up a few hours ago.’

  ‘I’ll make sure you get it back tomorrow.’

  She glanced around the now empty beachfront road, feeling the energy high start to drop, taking her mood with it. ‘Right. Well. I’ll call a cab.’

  ‘No. Suzanne is bringing the car around. I’ll drive you home.’ It wasn’t an offer: the decision was made.

  Ten minutes later, Jax had both sandals and was sitting in the front seat of an unmarked detective’s car giving directions to Tilda’s house, almost hearing the last drops of her adrenaline draining away as though they were being sucked from the bottom of a glass through a straw. She felt cold, exceptionally dirty and bone-achingly exhausted. She wanted a hot shower and a soft bed but told herself she’d have to hold it together a while longer – the sight of her would be enough to make her aunt and daughter gasp, and she didn’t want to make it worse by asking for help to get down the stairs.