Already Dead

by Jaye Ford

  ‘I don’t mean now,’ she told him. ‘Or here. I could meet you somewhere. Without Kate. Buy you a coffee. Or a beer. Maybe we can both understand what went wrong for Brendan.’

  It was at least ten degrees hotter outside when they left Kate’s house and, not wanting to look like she was lingering, Jax called a cab as she and Zoe walked the block and a half to the main road. Hugh had agreed to think about meeting her later in the afternoon. She’d written a time and the name of a cafe – the only one she knew in Newcastle – on the back of a business card and told him she’d be waiting there if he didn’t call.

  It was Zoe’s first time in a taxi and she asked questions without pause: how long would it take, how many cabs had Jax been in, where do cabs go at night, how much does it cost to buy one. ‘Can you get purple ones?’ They were dropped off at the top of the driveway and Zoe ran ahead, ready to draw a picture of the taxi for Aunty Tilda.

  ‘Can I go upstairs and get my colouring things?’ Zoe asked, skipping in and waiting at the turn in the stairs for permission.

  Jax had told her she wasn’t to go upstairs whenever she felt like it, that downstairs and upstairs were two separate houses, even though they didn’t have front doors. She was reluctant to let her six-year-old wander around without Tilda, but Zoe had been patient and ‘nice’ all morning. ‘Where are they?’ Jax asked.

  ‘On the kitchen bench.’

  ‘Okay. But come straight back down, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ she sang, starting on another complicated hop-skip up the steps. If she did it again on the way down, it could take her half an hour.

  The heat and the cab and an hour and a half with Kate Walsh’s grief had dulled the memory of last night’s chase, and Jax was halfway down the stairs, juggling a handbag, two hats and a wad of mail, before the hairs on the back of her neck came to life.

  She froze, not sure why. All she could see was the white tube of the stairwell and one of Tilda’s pastels on canvas on the wall at the bottom, lit from the right by light spilling in from the sitting room. So she listened. The ocean. A dull clomp from Zoe upstairs. A shush of sound from …

  Thump. Something hard against soft. Footfall on carpet or body into wall. It shuddered through her bones; adrenaline fired like an electrical current. Then her hands were empty and her back was pressed to the plaster, head twisting right and left. The noise had come from deep in the house. Up or down?

  Then shoes were moving fast across tiles. Downstairs. A chair clattering. And Jax was bounding – two steps and a leap to the bottom, her shoulder slamming the wall, swinging into the living room as the sliding door rocked in its track and a figure moved fast through the courtyard.

  ‘Hey!’ The word tore from her mouth of its own accord. The same force carried her outside and into the heat and glare and the empty square of yard before fear and logic pulled up her fight instinct. She whirled around, the dull clomp from upstairs replaying in her mind. ‘Oh, fuck. Zoe.’

  She yelled as she hit the stairs. ‘Zoe!’ Tried to listen for sounds of her daughter as she thundered upwards, hearing only her own feet and high-pitched panic ringing in her ears. She didn’t register the turn in the stairs or reaching the top, just the frenzied swinging of her head as she stood in the centre of the room trying to find her. Colouring pencils spilled from a case on the counter, a pair of sandals were discarded on the floor. Jax was vaguely aware of a need for caution, of trying to sound calm for Zoe’s sake. But it was too late to hold her fear in check. ‘Zoe!’

  ‘I’m here, Mummy.’

  Zoe was on the floor. Beside the TV. Pointing the remote at it.

  ‘What the hell are you doing? I told you to come straight back downstairs.’ The words tumbled out fast and cross as she lurched across the room, fell to her knees and locked her arms around her daughter’s small body.

  ‘Sorry, Mummy.’ Zoe’s voice was muffled against Jax’s chest.

  ‘No, baby. You’re a good girl. The best girl.’ Her voice was firm with conviction, choked with tenderness.

  ‘My movie won’t come out of the player.’

  Still holding her daughter tight, Jax lifted her eyes, saw why Zoe couldn’t get the disc out. She was pointing the remote at the equipment on the stand under the flat-screen TV – an old CD stacker and video recorder. The DVD player was gone.

  Jax glanced around the room. It was barely disturbed, just a few books scattered on the floor by the old walnut desk, a painting knocked askew. And Tilda’s laptop was missing. She wanted to run downstairs, see what was left, but thirty seconds ago she’d thought someone was still in the house with Zoe. No reason to dismiss that assumption.

  Jax slipped her arms from around Zoe’s back, pulled her close to her side.

  ‘Mummy?’

  Pressing a finger to her lips, Jax made the shhhh shape without the noise. Zoe got it, and more. Her eyes widened, mouth closed, and she burrowed into her mother’s side – and Jax felt something grow large and hard inside her, something she hadn’t felt on the motorway with Brendan. Anger, a protective instinct, a mother’s ferocity.

  She stood, lifted Zoe off the ground and to her hip. It had been a few years since she’d carried her daughter that way. Zoe had grown, filled out; Jax thought her strained muscles might not manage it. But her daughter was no weight at all. Jax could have carried her across the country.

  Eyeing the hallway to Tilda’s bedrooms, Jax saw three doors open, one closed – and she wasn’t heading down there to check out the damage. Moving quickly, quietly to the steps, she held tight to Zoe as she started down, checked the lower stairwell, crept across the foyer, opened the door just enough to ease them both through, and ran to the top of the driveway.

  30

  Jax’s fingers were trembling as she tapped the screen of her mobile, thankful she’d shoved it in her back pocket when she’d rung the cab.

  ‘I’m glad you decided to call.’ It was Aiden, with a hint of it’s-about-time in his tone.

  ‘It’s not what you think. Someone broke into the house. I’m not sure they’ve gone.’

  A pause. ‘Is everyone okay?’

  ‘Yes. I grabbed Zoe and left. Tilda isn’t home.’

  Zoe had either run out of questions or was tired of her mother’s I-don’t-know’s and was now huddled against Jax as they sat on the kerb under the shade of a tree.

  ‘Where are you?’ Aiden asked.

  She’d run to a neighbour’s house with Zoe in her arms, got no answer to her knock, then stomped about in indecision for about thirty seconds. ‘In the street, outside the house.’

  ‘Have you called Triple-0?’

  That idea had caused the indecision. ‘No. I thought it might take them forever to get here for just a break-in, and it might be too difficult to explain the rest. I thought you’d get here faster.’

  Another pause. She hoped Aiden was on the move, not rolling his eyes. ‘I’m forty-five minutes away,’ he said. ‘I’ll send some uniforms to you and get there when I can.’

  She squinted at the house, at the road, at the midday sun, and hoped they got there soon. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Stay where you are, Jax.’

  Where did he think she’d go? ‘I left with a mobile phone and my daughter and your guys have my car. I’m not going anywhere.’

  It was hot. Zoe was thirsty and hungry. Brendan hovered in Jax’s thoughts as she watched the house from the top of the driveway. The figure she’d seen running through the courtyard wasn’t a kid. He was male and adult, wearing jeans and something dark on top. Not a shirt and tie, but that didn’t stop her thinking about the two men she’d seen at her car last night. The man in her house hadn’t been carrying anything, at least nothing big enough that it needed to be hefted under an arm, and yet Tilda’s DVD player was gone. Two men or one taking several trips?

  After ten minutes, Jax phoned Tilda and left a message. Another five minutes and she was itching with tension, pacing the grass, irritated and impatient. Zoe whined about the h
eat and hunger. Jax wanted to kick in the front door and see what was left of her possessions – the ones she’d brought from the home she’d shared with Nick. She needed something to do to stop her fingers twisting themselves into knots. There were dandelions growing in a patch of grass by the driveway, little yellow flowers blooming in the summer heat.

  ‘Hey, Zoe, why don’t you make a daisy chain? You can show Aunty Tilda when she gets home.’

  While Zoe hummed and laced flowers, Jax pulled the notebook from her bag and updated the lists, adding what she’d learned from Kate Walsh, thinking about Kate’s version of the man who’d sat in Jax’s car. Nothing like the bad guy Jax had assumed was waving a gun in her face. More like the sad, sorry, distraught man she’d tried to hold on to at the edge of the motorway. Brendan had loved his family, it wasn’t something his mind had invented. And his family loved him back. He was injured by war and he’d tried to get well; he’d wanted to make amends for the disruption to Kate and Scotty’s lives. He hadn’t been violent and aggressive by nature. Whatever had happened inside his head last weekend had made him think carjacking was his only resort. A good man who believed he’d been driven to desperate measures.

  Which left the question: had Brendan imagined people were after him, or had they just been inside Jax’s house?

  Two uniformed officers arrived twenty-one minutes after Jax spoke to Aiden – longer than it took him to find her in the building site. Her adrenaline peak had sunk by then and her array of minor injuries and sore muscles felt like one throbbing mass.

  ‘I don’t have my keys but the sliding door downstairs is wide open,’ she told a tall, thin young woman with pupils that darted everywhere. It wasn’t clear if the eye action was trepidation or surveillance but it made Jax wonder what Aiden had told them.

  The woman disappeared around the side of the house ahead of a beefy, chummy thirty-something cop, who opened the front door a few minutes later and beckoned Jax and Zoe inside. He told them the intruder was gone, that entry and exit appeared to be through the downstairs slider, and directed Jax to the alarm pad in the foyer.

  ‘Was it armed when you left this morning?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t the last to leave.’ She filled him in on the living arrangements, said she’d have to check with her aunt, told him her daughter needed a drink of water.

  ‘A detective is organising for fingerprinting, so try to touch as little as possible. Then I need you to take a look around and start a list of what’s gone. It’s usually sellable items: electrical equipment, cameras, jewellery, cash if there was any around.’

  Was that it? A simple robbery? Not two men searching her house after they’d failed to find her the night before?

  She stood at the bottom of the stairs, her eyes scanning the sitting room. It wasn’t vandalised or plundered. It looked like it had been picked up and dropped. Sofa cushions were on the floor, the table was at an odd angle, one chair was toppled, the rest higgledy-piggledy. Removalists’ boxes were open, a couple were on their sides; kitchen appliances had been shunted along the bench; Zoe’s box of toys lay on its side, dolls scattered like they’d been thrown from a horse and cart. It was the kind of disarray that happened when you tipped a table or lifted cushions to see what was underneath.

  Did house thieves do that? Or had the man – or burglar and accomplice – been searching for something?

  Zoe sat quietly in a corner with a glass of water and a handful of crackers while Jax walked the room eyeing the furniture, her arms folded, touching nothing – not to protect evidence, but because the room seemed dirty, contaminated, covered by something ugly and ominous that had swept through her home.

  Her DVD player was gone, too. So was her iPod but its dock was still there, and the TV had been left like the one upstairs – even though both were relatively new, Tilda’s a large and expensive model.

  Zoe’s room was the first door off the hallway. The only sign of disturbance was the mattress sitting skewed on its base, the sheets hanging loose as though someone had lifted the whole thing up to take a look under.

  Jax paused in the doorway of her own bedroom, took in the mess with a single sweep of her eyes, and her gut tightened. He – they – had been through everything. The mattress was upturned, the bedside table toppled, packing cartons ripped open, clothes scattered. The big laptop from her desk was gone, along with its charger and carry bag. But it wasn’t the mess or the theft or the mounting alarm that pushed the cry from her throat. It was the files. Nick’s files. Dumped on the floor, crumpled and trampled by shoes that had left dirty, disrespectful marks.

  She wanted to rush in, scoop them up, protect them like she hadn’t been able to protect Nick.

  ‘Jax?’ Aiden, at the other end of the hallway.

  She swung her head towards him, felt the cool damp of tears on her cheeks.

  There was caution and concern in his face as he took long strides to her side. He didn’t touch her, just propped in the doorway as though he’d expected a body, blood. ‘What is it?’

  She didn’t know how to explain. It was just paper. She had copies saved to both of her laptops, and the mini one was still safe in her shoulder bag; there were back-ups on USB sticks and in web storage files – she was fanatical about it. But these were the copies she took to bed at night. She’d made notes on them, spilt coffee, dropped crumbs, slept with them when she couldn’t sleep with her husband. They were her hope for an answer. Her connection to Nick.

  God, Nick. Gasping, lunging forward, she got only a step before Aiden caught her around the waist, his arm a lasso, hauling her back until his body was against her spine.

  ‘There are good, clear footprints on the pages,’ he told her urgently, apologetically. ‘We need to keep them intact.’ It was a directive but whispered into her hair like a secret, his breath warm on her cheek.

  She wanted to take comfort from the gentleness of him, let his muscles hold her up, absorb the heat and smell of him, and for half a second she did, clutching at his arm, dropping her head to his chest. But her husband was in the room with them, what was left of him was battered and abused on the floor at her feet. She lifted Aiden’s hand away, sank to her knees at the edge of the spread of files, pressed fingers to her lips and sobbed.

  ‘Where’s my mummy?’ Zoe’s voice came from the hallway.

  Jax sucked in a breath, wiped at her face.

  Maybe Aiden sensed her need to keep the tears from Zoe, maybe he would have done it anyway, but he stepped into the doorway. ‘Hey, Zoe. Do you remember me from yesterday? Detective Hawke.’

  There was a beat of silence.

  ‘Your mum’s in here.’ Aiden used his body to block Zoe’s view. ‘There’s a bit of a mess so you can’t walk all the way in, okay?’

  ‘Why?’ Zoe said.

  ‘Because the police have to take photos.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So they can work out what happened.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because –’

  ‘I’ll explain it later, Zoe,’ Jax said, glancing up at him, smiling her thanks. ‘You can come in just a little bit.’ She shuffled back against the wall, cradled her daughter between her knees as Aiden squatted beside the files, his eyes moving over them. ‘What are they?’ he asked.

  Jax tipped her head, trying to find a way to explain.

  Zoe did it for her. ‘They’re Daddy’s files.’

  Jax nodded agreement. Aiden used the tip of a pen to slide a page around. Jax couldn’t read it from where she was, but knew the shape of the words on the page. It was a statement from a resident of the suburb where Nick died.

  ‘What was he working on?’ Aiden asked.

  ‘They’re Mummy’s files about Daddy,’ Zoe said. ‘I’m not allowed to look at them until I’m a grown-up.’ She whispered to Jax, ‘I can see them but I’m not looking at the words.’

  ‘Good girl,’ Jax said – it wouldn’t have mattered, Zoe couldn’t read well enough yet. ‘It’s just stuff I’
ve been collecting,’ Jax told Aiden. ‘It’s only important to me.’

  Aiden lifted his eyes from the page he’d been reading. ‘Did Anita Lyneham give you these?’

  ‘Anita Lyneham wouldn’t give me anything.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘I wrote it.’

  ‘I mean the information.’

  ‘I knocked on doors and asked.’

  His focus drifted sideways to the mound of paper, came back to Jax. A small crease had tightened between his brows. ‘It’s not just statements here.’

  ‘No.’

  Another pause as he chewed on it. ‘Where were you this morning?’

  She wondered where his thoughts had taken him, not sure where they’d lead if she told him. But there was no point dodging it, not after someone had broken into the house. ‘With Kate Walsh.’

  For half a second, his gaze stayed on her, then his face swung away, a hand pushed through his dark hair. When he looked back, there was something new in his eyes. Something less restrained, more direct, a little forceful.

  ‘We need to talk. Outside. Now, Jax.’

  31

  ‘I’m going to make a sandwich for Zoe first,’ Jax said, waving a hand at the fridge door. ‘What can I touch?’

  ‘Here.’ Aiden pulled a latex glove from his trouser pocket. He produced another one, slipped it over his right hand, reached for the kettle. ‘I’ll make coffee.’

  ‘God, no. I’m already on caffeine overload.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of you.’

  ‘You need a caffeine hit to talk to me?’

  He flicked the switch, folded his arms. ‘I’ve driven to Sydney and back since my last coffee.’

  ‘So you’re not about to interrogate me?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

  She wasn’t sure if it was an act.

  He waited until she’d cut two slices of bread into Vegemite fingers. ‘Does Lyneham know what you’ve got in your files?’