Candice is the middle child of a large, eccentric family from Sydney’s western suburbs. The daughter of a parole officer and an enthusiastic foster-carer, Candice spent her childhood listening around corners to tales of violence, madness and evil as her father relayed his work stories to her mother and older brothers.
Candice won back-to-back Ned Kelly awards for her first two novels Hades and Eden. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed Fall and co-writer of the latest James Patterson blockbuster Never Never, set in the Australian outback. She lives in Sydney.
Hades
Fall
Crimson Lake
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Epub ISBN: 9781473539969
Version 1.0
Published by Arrow Books 2018
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Copyright © Candice Fox 2014
Cover © Getty Images
Candice Fox has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain by Arrow Books in 2018
(First published in Australia by Bantam in 2014)
Arrow Books
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784758356
The night of the boy’s murder he was working, wandering along Darlinghurst Road in the crowds of workers, picking pockets, begging, doing tricks for coins. Later the boy would think of his life in the city streets as the Winter Days, because even in the summer they seemed cold and damp, the daylight short. The skin of his feet was hard and black, but the midnight hours penetrated this husky exterior, brought a chill through the asphalt into his skinny legs. The mornings rang with wet silence and the afternoons were heavy with foreboding, the promise of darkness bringing with it yelling, laughter, running footsteps, sirens.
It took years for the boy to forget how to remember, when one day ate into the next and nothing broke the monotony except the stabbing death of a whore or the chance find of a coin on the concrete. The sun shuttered above the buildings, on and off, counting the days. The boy wandered, head down, practised at sniffing bins outside restaurants to identify treasures hidden within, at slipping through the Minerva Theatre and the Metro Cinema fire exits to fossick for popcorn and sweets, at scaling tall buildings to raid clotheslines strung across cramped balconies.
Sometimes the boy felt he could have been ancient because all that came before the Night of Fire and Screaming was darkness, and it had been months since he had known what day it was. Now and then when he slept he returned to the fires, saw the faces of the woman and the man he supposed must have been his parents against the windows, heard their pounding on the glass behind the bars. Whenever he tried to remember how long ago the fires happened, who those people were and why they had died, how he had survived and how he had got to the city, he was confronted by blackness and silence – a door closed, locked, impassable. He didn’t know how old he was or the name those screaming people called him. When the police and the St Canice nuns who had spotted him came to take him, they said he looked eight and that he was mute and malnourished, whatever that meant. He’d fled the van they put him in and kept his eye out from then on. He didn’t like the police. He didn’t know why.
The boy was lost to himself. He wandered and tried to forget.
On the night he met the French Man, the boy was sitting on a set of steps down from Les Girls, which was alive with laughing and shoving, the toppling of glasses, the slapping of beer caps onto the pavement. The stage ladies with their exotic snakes were yet to perform down at Pink Pussy Cat’s, so men lingered in the street, easy targets. It was the boy’s favourite spot. To his left he could look down the curve of Darlinghurst Road towards the police station, watching for brawls and arrests when coins could be spilled or wallets lifted, and to his right he could trace the progress of long-legged sailors from Woolloomooloo, jostling and sniggering and trying to grope passing girls, a fine source of small change for a boy with a sweet face who could sing and dance and tell dirty jokes. Most of the jokes he’d read in the underground magazines he found in the streets, The Whisper, mostly. So he guessed he’d been to school once – he didn’t remember being taught to read but he could do it. He looked at the dirty pictures and the photographs from the war, all cut up and pasted and drawn over with lines. The men and women in the magazines wore their hair long and dirty, and so did he. The boy thought maybe one day he’d find himself.
He rested his heels and counted the trams passing on the line, cluttered with men and women on their way to Potts Point and the dockland suburbs, with their oiled hair, painted lips and leather bags full of papers. It was early enough for the whores who leaned on walls, filing their nails and hooting to each other across the street, late enough for the bums to have staggered in from the parks to curl up for the night on dirty street corners and shopfronts. All the dancers were inside under the bright lights of the upper floors, flashing bare chests and feathers in the windows, curling their hair and perfuming the breeze.
The French Man came walking up the hill under the Moreton Bay fig trees, the smoke from his cigarette winding around a row of sailors advancing behind him. The boy hardly noticed him. He moved off the steps and headed down to meet the sailors, stretching his dirty face into his brightest smile. The French Man caught him by the elbow and spun him in a half circle. The sailors parted to let him through.
‘What’s the hurry, petit monsieur?’
The boy wasn’t fussy who his marks were. The French Man didn’t look like a cop so he would make an easy meal. His accent was slurred and heavy. Perhaps he’d been drinking down at the waterfront. His clothes looked slept in. He smelled of cigarettes and wine, but his hair was neatly combed so that the ridges stood out across his curved scalp.
‘Hello, sir! Got a coin?’ the boy asked. ‘I can dance, I can sing, I can tell jokes. I can balance a penny on my nose.’
The boy did a handstand and walked in a circle on his palms on the dirty pavement. His black-soled feet waggled in the air. The French Man folded his arms and laughed, and a couple walking their dog stopped to watch.
‘That’s very good, monsieur.’ The French Man smiled. ‘What else can you do?’
‘I can make a coin disappear,’ the boy grinned.
The couple laughed. Two other men stopped to watch. The French Man fished a penny from his pocket and handed it to the boy.
‘Abracadabra, hocus-pocus!’ The boy swirled his arms in the air. Everyone smiled. He slipped the copper into his sleeve and dropped to one knee.
‘Ta daa!’
‘Magnifique!’ The French Man clapped his long thin hands. ‘Now give it back.’
‘I can’t.’ The boy grinned. ‘It’s disappeared.’
More laughter. The boy did another handstand as the crowd clapped and then dispersed. The French Man remained, watching, his thin upper lip curled slightly at the corner.
‘Another coin for the show?’ the boy asked.
‘I’m afraid I’m fresh out. Plucked me dry. Are you hungry, boy?’
‘Starving.’
‘Come on, then. This way. I’ve got a fresh batch of sausages waiting for me at home. Two streets back.’ The French Man flicked his head towards the crest of the hill. ‘You’re welcome to a bite, little friend. Most welcome.’
The French Man kept walking as though he didn’t mind leaving the boy in the windswept street. The boy looked down the hill and saw no more sailors coming. As it swung back and forth, the French Man’s wrist glittered with a silver wristwatch. The boy licked his lips, brushed aside his fear and followed.
The boy huddled close to the French Man as the wind rippled through the huge figs on Ithaca Road. He tried to get a feel for a wallet or a coin purse as he brushed and bumped against the man’s side. There was none. The watch fastening was a double-fold clip, built for surviving the slip. The boy circled the man, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, breaking twigs into pieces and strumming them against painted iron rails. The French Man laughed and ruffled his hair.
‘You’re a small boy. Got to bend to get a hold of you. Quick as a ferret.’
‘How many sausages will there be?’
‘Enough for a belly as small as yours. You’ve got an accent to you. Sauerkraut, is it?’
The boy shrugged. He knew he spoke funny but he didn’t know why.
Rain was dripping in silver streams from the corrugated iron roof of the terrace house. They stepped up onto the porch. The French Man jangled his keys. Inside, the house smelled damp, as though something in the walls was rotting and about to drip out of the wallpaper. The boy skittered down the hall to a table under a grimy kitchen window. There was equipment here – machine parts and bottles of oil, lenses and cloths. The table was covered with shining, glimmering things. The boy looked over the mess in awe and tried to pick something to lift before the man caught up. He pocketed a shiny lens. There was a paper bag stuffed with small square photographs. The boy glimpsed bare limbs, naked chests. When he put his hand on the bag the French Man brushed it away.
‘What is all this stuff?’
‘This, my small friend, is the Polaroid 110B, the Pathfinder. Newest thing on the market. It develops pictures instantly. Poof! Right in your hand. Like magic,’ the French Man said, and winked. He picked the camera out of the clutter and held it in the light. ‘You don’t have to go to a store. You can develop your own pictures, right here, at home.’
‘Are you a photographer?’
‘Sometimes, yes.’
The boy let his eyes wander to the French Man’s face. There were scars on his cheeks from burns or acne, marbling the surface of his high cheekbones. The boy thought of the moon. How long had it been since he’d looked up at the moon? ‘Here. You take a picture of me and I’ll take one of you.’
The boy giggled and took the heavy camera in his small hands, turned it, looked through the viewfinder. The French Man struck a pose. The device hummed and zinged in the boy’s hands, seemed to zap like an alien thing. Light exploded off the walls. The camera spewed out a blank picture, which gradually rippled with light. The boy watched it develop with barely contained rapture. Magic. In the picture, the French Man’s eyes were black. The boy let the camera go with reluctance.
‘Your turn.’
He smiled and struck a pose. The flash burned against the backs of his eyelids. He wondered if he’d ever had his picture taken in the days before the Night of Fire and Screaming, if there were pictures of him somewhere still, smiling and playing. The thought made the boy a little sad. The French Man snapped another picture of him standing and staring at the floor.
‘You ever seen Sugar Ray? The boxer?’
‘Course I have!’
The boy clenched his fists and hung them above his head, his puny biceps flexed as small lumps on his stringy arms. The French Man laughed and snapped a shot. The boy growled and brought his fists together at his belly. Another zap, hum, a spewed picture. The French Man flipped the photos onto the table without looking at them. The boy laughed nervously, shifting from foot to foot. The room seemed a little small, suddenly. The French Man snapped another picture, and the boy forgot to pose. He was simply standing there. Being him.
‘Take your shirt off.’
The boy frowned a little. He slipped the shirt over his head, smelling it as the cloth passed his nose, untold days of sweat and scum and rain. The boy cupped his hands and did a pose of his side as he had seen the boxers do. The French Man snapped him.
‘I’m hungry.’
‘Just a few more.’
The boy sighed. More pictures. The air in the room was heavy, hard to breathe. His cheeks felt hot. He didn’t know why.
‘It’s no fun anymore. Let’s eat.’
The French Man snapped him again, crouching by the table, eye-level with the boy. The light made the boy’s eyes water. He reached out and pulled the camera down. The man lifted it again.
‘A few more.’
‘No.’
‘You want to eat, you do as I say,’ the French Man grunted, showing teeth. The two front ones were grey as steel. The boy looked down the hall at the front door, so far away the darkness swallowed it, giving only a slice of silver at the bottom where the moonlit street blazed. ‘We’re friends, aren’t we, boy? Good friends. Friends don’t argue with each other.’
The camera flashed again. Now the pictures were falling on the floor. The boy picked his shirt up. His fingers were numb, aching, blood was raging in his ears. Embarrassed, somehow. The French Man’s hand flashed out, ripped the cloth from his fingers and flung the shirt by the pile of pictures. The boy’s face stared up from the photos. Afraid. In the street a siren wailed like a child. The boy in the cramped kitchen drew a breath, fighting a pressure on his lungs.
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘You’re not going anywhere.’
‘I said, I want to go!’
The slap came like a burst of heat, soundless, over before the boy knew what had happened. His ear pulsed, hammering against his head. The French Man shook his head slowly, sadly, then reached up and took the boy’s face in his cold hand. For a moment the room shimmered in the boy’s eyes. He had been drunk once before, on dregs from bottles he found behind The Goldfish Bowl. He felt drunk now. The French Man held him upright.
‘Don’t disappoint me, pretty one.’
The boy turned, twisted, tried to scramble away. The French Man’s arms were around him. They collapsed to the floor, the man a dead weight. The air was squeezed out of him. His stomach churned, clenched, he tried to suck oxygen into his lungs. His mouth was on the floor, lips collecting dust.
‘You do what I say, when I say.’
The French Man pinned the boy’s neck against the boards, righted the camera in his other hand. The camera flash caught remnants of polish on the floor, making them glimmer like pools of water on desert sand. The boy kicked out, struck the table leg, pain flooding through his bones. The man snapped another shot, then placed the camera beside the boy’s face.
The boy reached out, sweeping it into his arm. In the same movement he rolled beneath the weight of the man and used the momentum to swing the camera up and over, into the side of the man’s head.
Then the Silence came.
He had felt the Silence only once before – on the Night of Fire and Screaming, when he had stood in the street motionless and watched the people burning. It felt something like being under water, sounds pinging softly, all else an endless nothingness, slowed by numbness, decaying moments, the dripping of time.
The boy was on top of the French Man, the camera in his hands, beating it down on the man’s face over and over without sound, without sensation. The face was breaking, losing shape, becoming wet. The earth was turning beneath the boy’s knees, swaying like the deck of a ship. The man’s hands were fumbling at his face and neck, scratching, wringing, twisting, punching. Time passed. The camera fell away. The boy used his fists.
When the door of the terrace opened the boy was standing by the table, looking down at a picture of himself standing by the table, looking down. When the men’s voices finally broke the Silence the boy lifted his head.
‘Jean? Jean? You fucking frog prick. I know you’re here. Time’s up. I want my money, you hear me, cocksucker?’
There were shadows in the hall, one larger than the other, a great hulk of a man whose shoulders scraped the narrow walls and head ducked beneath the ornate frame of the kitchen door naturally, as though he’d been there before. A smaller man walked in front, cast completely in shadow by the beast. The boy wiped at a tickle on his upper lip. He looked at his hands. The blood was smeared to his elbows.
The first man was wearing a suit the colour of grey ocean, a collar stiff and peaked under his thick square jaw and white as a flash of lightning. Beneath the suit, old muscle languished to fat, making him look like an elderly retired war captain, his once-powerful frame ruined by peacetime. His hair was grey and a deep groove was cut into his chin from a clean knife wound that had split his bottom lip in two. The giant was not as well dressed but gave the same impression of darkened skies and old wars, a bearded bear with a nose that dominated his face, broken and twisted, a fighter’s nose.
The boy and the two men looked at each other for a long moment, before all eyes fell away. The men took in the smashed and broken thing that had been Jean the French Man, lying twisted at the boy’s feet. There was a gun in the old captain’s hand, hanging by his side, forgotten. No one spoke. The boy lifted his palms and examined the blood on them, the mangled knuckles already swollen twice their size, the wet and watery almost-orange blood sliding down his wrists. His stomach was pumping in and out, sucking air, the naked ribs protruding, sinking, protruding for the men to see. He searched for his shirt. It had disappeared.
‘Well, would you look at this, Bear,’ the Captain said.
The Bear said nothing as the Captain wandered forward and crouched beside the boy. He lifted a photo from the floor and flicked the blood from it. The boy standing. The boy with his biceps bared. He looked at them all carefully, considered each in turn, laid them in a neat pile. Jean wasn’t breathing. The Captain stood and looked down at the boy.
Slowly, a smile crept across the Captain’s face. Then he began to laugh. The Bear wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t even smiling. The boy wiped his nose again. There was more blood, running off his chin in inky streams.
The Captain laughed and laughed, and then cocked the hammer on the pistol and put two bullets into the French Man’s face. Jean’s body bucked twice as though electrified. The boy thought of the burning bodies on the Night of Fire and Screaming, the way they spasmed and shook. The Captain laughed again, a gentle snort, shook his head and walked into the short hall that led to the other rooms.
‘We’ll deal with him in a minute,’ he said to the Bear. ‘Put him in the car.’
HADES WOKE THINKING he’d been shot. The great weight that seemed to fall and then wrap around his chest, the noise, the pain. He’d taken a bullet before and this was how it felt. But the thump on his chest was only the cat. The pain was his old man’s bones snapping into action, the noise his perimeter alarm sounding, an old fire alarm screwed to the wall above the door. Someone had entered his property. Hades groaned and rolled onto his side, flopping out of the bed like a swollen fish. The cat weaved around his stubby ankles, suddenly full of affection after the terror of the alarm. It was usually a bitch of a thing. Hades kicked it away and slipped his thongs on.
It had been months since he had been visited this late. He’d put the word out that he had officially retired, that all the problems he had once been happy to fix were to be taken elsewhere. He wanted to spend his declining years free of harassment by cops, forensics specialists, journalists and true crime writers. During the day, the workers at his tip kept these scavengers away – Hades’ dark past was common knowledge among them and was at the heart of a brotherhood of loyalty and silence. At night he was vulnerable. Before, the first sign of company would be the howling of the tip’s wild dogs but he’d begun to sleep through this morbid night music. His daughter, Eden, had insisted on installing the alarm when she had managed to walk all the way up the dark drive, into the house and right to his bedside without waking him. Eden, always the predator, had made the alarm loud enough to induce a heart attack.
Headlights swept the kitchen. One of the few clocks in his extensive collection that actually kept time chimed an hour past midnight as he reached the screen door. He picked up a Ruger Super Redhawk that was sticking out of a flowerpot and tucked it into the back of his boxer shorts. The double-action magnum tugged at the waistband, felt cold against his arse crack. Hades was not a tall man. He walked with a wooden cane. The gun was far too big to be practical, but if he was going to go out one night in a revenge attack, a shootout with the police or a dance with burglars, all of which were equally likely, he was going to do it with a gun proportionate to his reputation.
The cat followed him out and bolted into the blackness. He hoped it wouldn’t be back, but knew it would. A red Barina with plastic eyelashes hanging over its headlights gripped its way uncertainly over the last rise before his shack and stopped with a jolt in the dust. Hades scratched his stubble and waited for the driver to emerge. If this was some kind of attack he was pleased by how undignified the approach had been. It didn’t speak of organisation. When the driver slid out of the seat and came into the murky lights, he let his head hang back and looked at the stars.
‘Oh god. Not you.’
‘Hades!’
She fell on him, rock-hard breasts against his chest, nails in his hair, an assault of smooth limbs and wet kisses, cigarette smoke, perfume. Hades pushed her off. He resisted the urge to smile. It would only encourage her.
‘Get off me, Kat.’
‘I’ve missed you. God, I’ve missed you. It’s been too long. It’s been ages.’
‘What are you doing here, for chrissake? I don’t have time for you. I’m retired. It’s the middle of the night.’
‘I love you, Hades.’
‘Go away.’
‘No, Hades, I love you. I need you.’
‘Oh, don’t tell me.’
‘Please, Hades.’ She stood back and clasped her hands like a child. ‘Please help me.’
He looked at her, let the silence hang the way he used to with Eden when she was a teenager, disappointment so deeply felt it could not be squeezed out into words. Just like with Eden. Standing there, Hades was struck with the sense that he was in the presence of a creature in disguise, a spider pretending to be a leaf, a snake coiled in the shape of a rock. Kat had come in her usual get-up – the six-inch heels and cheap nylon mini-dress, the half-dyed black hair falling out at the sides in wispy singed spikes. It was more than that though. The track marks on her ankles weren’t from smack, as she’d have you believe. Hades had seen these marks faked plenty of times by undercover cops – a little cayenne pepper and ink under the first layer of skin and irritated welts pop up like the angry sores of the addicted. Kat’s ‘grown-out’ hair extensions were clipped in for the night, a part of her run-down camouflage. The mascara was intentionally clumpy. The multiple piercings in her ears were magnets. Underneath the manufactured cheapness was a very beautiful woman, a clever woman. A seasoned killer.
Hades had caught Kat out once. She was sitting in a cafe in Glebe with a girlfriend, fresh-faced and vibrant, the make-up gone, her hair short and neatly bobbed, a gold watch she’d probably stolen hanging a little too loosely on her wrist. She hadn’t seen Hades watching from the traffic lights. There was a newspaper under her perfectly manicured nails and a briefcase by her side. The helpless Bambi act was a put-on too. Hades had heard somewhere that she was a financial advisor or something. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t care.
Whenever she turned up, he played along with her little game because Kat was just one of many actors, hustlers, con artists and tricksters who came to him in the night with bones to bury. Over the years Hades had been awakened by numb-headed drug mules who’d waited for their moment to cut down their bosses, lady-killers in expensive linen suits, hit men with cold eyes and false charm. Wasn’t he one of them too? Hades had spent decades carefully crafting his tired old man image. Sure, he was getting on. He ate too much and fell asleep in front of the TV more than he actually watched it. But Hades was deadly. So was Kat. Under the stars that night they played out the roles of a worn-out ex-warlord and a skinny prostitute. It was too early in the morning for the old man to think about it any more deeply than that.
‘What have you done now?’ he asked.
‘It was an accident.’
‘It’s always an accident with you.’
‘Oh, Hades!’
‘Come on.’ He waved at her impatiently. ‘Get on with it.’
She clopped back to the car, all guilty eyes and pouty lips. Hades watched her struggle with the boot. Nickel bracelets jingled on her wrists. She thrust the boot open and the overhead light flickered. Hades looked in and let a sigh ripple out of him.
‘How many times I got to tell you, Kat? How many times?’
‘What?’
‘You’re not wrapping them right. I’ve told you this.’
‘Hay-dees!’
‘Look.’ Hades leaned over and lifted one end of the tarp that contained the body. ‘You leave the ends open like this and you get DNA in your car. Hair. Eyelashes. Blood. Piss. Dirt and plant fibres from the tread in his shoes that will put him in your street, in your driveway. They can take a single hair, do a mitochondrial degradation test and tell you whether or not the guy was dead when the hair fell off him. They can put a body in your boot from a single flake of fucking dandruff, Kat. You know this.’
‘So what am I supposed to do about it?’
‘You tuck the ends in before you roll.’ Hades illustrated with his hands. ‘Lie the body out flat, arms down. Like a burrito. Tuck, tuck, roll. Tape. Tape, Kat, not fucking Occy straps. You shouldn’t be using tarp, either. You should be using plastic drop sheets. I can give you some. Tarps have a weave in them. They’re not airtight.’
‘Hades, I’m not as clever as you, okay?’ she whined.
‘You never rolled a fucking burrito?’
‘I don’t even know what a burrito is. What do I look like?’
Hades shook his head, felt exhausted.
‘The whole car will have to go. They’ll have your DNA in the front and his in the back. You need to start thinking about these things, Kat. Listening when I talk to you.’
‘You talk too much, Hades,’ Kat said, patting the side of his head, letting her fingers follow the rim of his ear to the nape of his thick neck. ‘You’re always talking. You’re always mean to me.’
Her breath felt warm on his face. Hades cleared his throat.
‘I do it because you’re going to get yourself caught one of these days. And I don’t want to be the one who has to come after you before you testify.’
‘Would you hurt me, Hades?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Sometimes I like being hurt.’
She was against him, kissing him, before he knew it. She’d got into his arms the way a fox will slip through a gap in a fence without slowing momentum, gliding, bones following a natural path one after the other until she was all around him, everything he saw and felt. Feral. Dangerous. He sighed again and surrendered. She always did this. He always fell for it. But in a way he kind of liked falling for it, knowing it was coming, wondering how she would make it seem spontaneous and wild and completely out of his hands each and every time. The concubine. Hades imagined that this was what it was like with the men she robbed and killed, leaving work and smoking on the corner, being approached by a cute, vulnerable, irresistible little whore in a painted-on dress. Cold, tired, gullible. Give me your jacket. Take me home. Play with me. She was like a child in his hands now, insistent and needy, surprised by her own passion. Hades withdrew from her and rolled his eyes. Such a snake.
‘Get in there.’ He cocked his head towards the house. ‘Make me a goddamn coffee while you’re at it.’
‘Don’t be long,’ she grinned, victorious. Hades grumbled and shut the boot. His hard-on was almost painful but he never put play before work, even when the play was just a ruse to get out of his body disposal fee. A twenty thousand dollar fuck. He would need a couple of coffees. It was cheap and nasty but he didn’t mind. It had been years since a woman had genuinely wanted to jump Hades’ bones. He wasn’t fussed. Women made things difficult, and the last thing he needed was more difficulty in his life.
First things first. He would drive the car back to the new fill grounds where the complex layers of rubber, vinyl, industrial biochemicals and trash were not yet finished. He’d slip Kat’s nameless victim in there, where the compressed layers, encouraging the development of leachate acid as a natural biodegrader of human waste, would eventually completely dissolve all trace of him as it had with hundreds of others over the years. He would grind the car’s identification off, leave the vehicle to be crushed into a cube and finished off in an industrial incinerator in the morning. Then he’d go to bed with Kat. Hades wondered gloomily if the reward would be worth the effort as he wrestled the keys from the lock. She’d take everything she wanted out of him in a matter of minutes and leave while he was asleep. He was making a mental note to put his wallet and keys away somewhere safe when he noticed the dark shape at the bottom of the hill.
At first he wondered if one of the workers had broken down, left the car and taken a ride with a mate, but it would have been more logical for them to park in the sheds where the car would be protected overnight. Hades took a short wander to the crest of the hill. Stood. Listened. The car was idling, its headlights off. He felt a twinge in his chest, a leftover spasm from the fear that the alarm had generated twisting in his heart. Hades began to walk again, a little faster this time. The car’s windows were down, blackness in the cabin, impenetrable. He got no further than ten metres before the car began to move, passed the gates in a blur of dark grey, or blue, or silver, he couldn’t tell, before disappearing between the trees.
Hades stopped, suddenly out of breath.
THE TELEVISION WAS on, but somehow the knocking broke through the chatter of morning programs, the laughter and music and cooking tutorials, to snap me awake. The first sensation was the wetness under my face. Cold drool. Camel mouth. The place smelled damp and reeked of kitty litter. But still bearable. I could leave it a couple more days. I sat up and felt a nudge in the small of my back. I fished around and retrieved an empty Jameson bottle. The pain – dull, heavy, everywhere.
The knocking came again. It was her. She came every day. I hung my head in my hands and groaned, long and loud, so she could hear me. She knocked again. The day before I hadn’t let her in, and she was waiting for me hours later when I went to get a pizza for lunch. Immaculate, in grey jeans and a knitted top that hugged the top of her perfect arse and fell to the backs of her cold pale killer’s hands. Sitting on a bench in the foyer, reading a magazine. Waiting. Watching.
Eden knocked again.
‘Go away!’
She knocked. I crossed the tiny apartment in two steps, kicked newspapers out of the way and flung open the door. Her hand was raised for more knocking. She took me in with those expressionless crow eyes, head to toe, let her hand fall and waited for me to go on my usual tirade. I did. She listened to my swearing quietly, thinking. I don’t know what I looked like but I know what I smelled like. I’d expected the performance to get rid of her. When I tried to slam the door, her boot was in it.
‘We’ve got an appointment.’
‘I’m not going. Are you listening? Are you fucking stupid? I wasn’t going yesterday. I’m not going today. Eden, I need you to leave me alone.’ I walked away from the door. She closed it behind her, wrinkled her nose just slightly at the smell.
‘Have a shower,’ she said. ‘We leave in twenty.’
I went into the kitchen and popped myself some Panadol, chewed them, angry. Her eyes wandered over the dirty plates balancing on the back of the couch, the dusty curtains blocking the mid-morning light, the grey cat pawing at the balcony door. Martina’s cat. Yes. Alright. I’d let things slip since Martina died. Since I’d been shot and Eden had saved my life. It had locked me to her, silencing me forever on the true nature of her being, the nights she spent stalking Sydney’s killers and rapists and molesters. Her playthings, the only way she could vent the uncontrollable and unstoppable evil that was as much a part of her biochemistry as the blood that circled her veins. I’d shot and killed a serial killer, deliberately, and Eden had stood with me through the investigation that followed with her untouchable self-assurance. We were bound, Eden and I, and I hated her for it.
She came into the kitchen and watched me swallow two more Panadol and an Endone. I liked the Endone, had got onto it after the bullet. My shoulder was mostly healed now, but I kept up the act to get the drug. I was supposed to go to physiotherapy to get rid of a twitch that sometimes developed in the last three fingers of my right hand, the only real leftover from the wound, but I wouldn’t go. Anything to get the Endone. Lovely, sleepy Endone. There were three sheets left in the packet. I pocketed them.
‘What are you staring at?’
‘A problem.’
‘Am I a problem for you, Eden?’ I raised my eyebrows, shook the twitching from my fingers. ‘You going to do with me what you do with all your other problems?’
She licked her teeth, looked almost bored. Not answering actually struck a chord with me. Deep down inside I knew she could do it, I suppose that was why. One of these nights I could wake up and find her standing over me. I liked to fool myself sometimes that Eden had a heart, that I’d wrung a laugh or two out of her over our months together, that she would at least have trouble killing me. Most of the time I wasn’t so sure.
‘You need to have a shower and come to this shrink’s appointment with me,’ she said quietly. ‘You need to do this two more times so you can get signed back on duty. You need to go back to work and get over this thing with Martina. Until you do all these things you’re a problem for me, Frank.’
‘Don’t talk about fucking Martina.’
‘Martina is dead. She’s dead, Frank.’
I shook my head at the floor.
‘I don’t like your unpredictability right now. I want you to get off the drugs and stop drinking.’
‘Honey, my mother died years ago and she was the last woman who got to tell me what to do.’
‘Have a shower.’
‘No.’
‘Have a shower.’
‘No.’
She stood waiting. I considered my options. The first was picking Eden right up off the floor and carrying her out of my apartment. In my mind that was fairly easy – even with all the weight I’d dropped after the shooting I still had a good thirty kilos on her. But she was slippery, I’d seen her put down men twice my size with minimal effort. I didn’t know if she had trained in any martial arts but I wouldn’t be surprised. She’d also been known to pull knives and guns from secret places on her body, which was always a shock because she dressed like she knew she had a kickarse body – athletic and spritely with curves only where they were absolutely necessary, and where they were, well, just divine. I scratched my neck and looked at her, summoning all my Jedi power, and willed her silently to budge. She didn’t. I also knew she could hold a Mexican stand-off for days. She had no emotions. No needs. I shook my head, spewed some more venom under my breath and left her.
I took half an hour in the bathroom just to piss her off, to get something back. I finished up and actually stood there in front of the mirror, counting off the minutes on my watch. Then I went out into the living room and grabbed a shirt from the back of the couch.
‘Not that one,’ Eden said, handing me a clean shirt she’d plucked from my wardrobe. ‘You didn’t shave. You need to shave.’
‘You need to stop beginning sentences with you need.’
‘You will shave.’
‘Leave me alone, Eden.’
She relented a little and held open the apartment door for me. In the car she flipped the radio on and turned up the air conditioning. I rolled down my window, let the warm autumn air come rolling in. There were people jogging in the park across the road from my apartment block. A couple in matching red-and-black lycra, the woman struggling, her boyfriend egging her on. Some people look like jerks, even from a passing car, even from a hundred metres away.
We turned onto Anzac Parade and headed into the city. At the lights outside UNSW we stopped and students flooded the asphalt in front of the car, some of them carrying iPads and nothing else, slouchily dressed, pierced. An old man with thick-rimmed glasses and a plaid shirt buttoned to his throat wheeled a suitcase across the road towards the gates. Mature-age student.
‘Look at this dork,’ I laughed. Eden ignored me. She was listening to the radio. Had that intensity about her – a cat about to strike, unnatural stillness, eyes fixed.
‘We’re going to get put on this, you and I,’ she said.
‘On what?’
She turned up the radio.
‘… the third woman to go missing from the area in as many months. Police won’t say at this stage whether the cases are related but are asking the public for any information about …’
I reached over and flipped the radio to a station blaring celebrity news.
‘I’m not on duty.’
‘You’re going to be put on duty if they link this missing prostitute to the others. We’re the serial killer team now, Frank. That’s us. Jason Beck gave us that title. They’re going to sign you on and put us on that case, whether you like it or not.’
‘Does that mean I don’t have to go to the shrink?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll refuse the case. My shoulder’s no good.’
‘What is your plan exactly?’ A little frazzle seemed to edge into Eden’s voice for the first time that day. I felt slightly uplifted. ‘You’re just going to languish away in that hellhole of an apartment eating shit and listening to Chris Isaak until you depress yourself to death?’
‘Sounds good to me. If no one bothers me for long enough the cat will probably dispose of my corpse. Ah, the circle of life.’
‘You’re not funny.’
‘Depressing myself to death would be very artistic of me. I always wanted to be artistic.’
‘Just stop.’
‘You stop.’
‘I asked Hades if he would give you some work,’ she said. She was driving one-handed, hanging her French-manicured nails over the edge of the centre console. Now and then she rubbed them together, the only outward sign of her irritation. ‘He said he had plenty you could do.’
‘Why do you call him Hades? He’s your dad. You should call him “Dad”. It’s very weird to do otherwise. You don’t want people to think you’re weird, Eden. They might catch on to you. To your little game. Is that why you ended up a serial killer, Eden? Was Hades a weird father? Did he train you in the dark arts?’
‘You better watch your tongue, boy-o.’
We looked at each other. My jaw felt locked.
‘You’re completely without friends or hobbies right now,’ she said after a time. ‘Binge drinking is making you totally ineffectual.’
‘Oh dear. I wouldn’t want to end up ineffectual. That would be ghastly.’
‘Hades needs help. He’s old. You need something to keep you busy.’
‘I’m not working for Hades, honey. That’s my final word on that.’
Eden swung the car out of the traffic. The car behind us honked. She pulled up behind a taxi and I jolted in my seat as she yanked the handbrake.
‘Listen, Frank, here’s how it is,’ she said, clasping her hands. ‘I’m going to keep coming to your apartment until you do as I say. I’m going to keep calling you on the phone. I’m going to follow you down to that disgusting pub where you spend your nights and I’m going to get in the way of those sluts you take home with you. If all that doesn’t work, I’m going to start hanging around inside your apartment, and you won’t be able to get me out. I’ve had a key for weeks. I’m not going away, so you make the decision now to get up and get moving or the consequences are going to get more and more inconvenient for you.’
A little colour, a light pink, had come into her cheeks while she was speaking and then it dissipated as quickly as it had come. That was the only indication that she meant what she was saying. I had to give her a little smile. For all the terror and heartache and frustration she brought to my life, for all her intrusions, her insults, her propensity for the word ‘dead’, I couldn’t deny that Eden cared about me. If she was forced to kill me, she was going to make it her last option. I felt a little loved by Eden at that moment. Maybe love was going too far. She wasn’t indifferent to me. That was nice.
‘You’ve got a key to my place?’
She sighed.
‘Seriously, how’d you get a key to my place?’
Eden pulled the car back into the traffic.
I’d made it clear early on that I wouldn’t be having private sessions with the shrink. Eden and I were required to have ten tandem sessions before we could be signed back on to work. The private ones were optional. The shrink had encouraged me to sit alone with her so she could address issues with me that she thought were ‘too private’ to discuss in front of Eden. I told her plainly that she had my permission to discuss anything she liked in front of Eden and that she’d have to shoot a tranquilliser dart into my arse and hogtie me to get me to do any more than was required. I’m a man of my word, so when I said I’d only do the minimum, that’s what I did. The paperwork Captain James handed to us stipulated that we needed to attend ten sessions. It said nothing about participation. For the first session I’d simply sat in the chair and hung my head back over the headrest, examining the water stains on the ceiling. Since then I’d been stonewalling Dr Stone, using all my years of training as a detective to keep a conversation going while revealing absolutely nothing about anything. It was kind of fun. I’m not sure Stone agreed.
Surprisingly, Eden was with me on this one. The last thing Eden wanted was anyone examining her past, or even her present, lest they should start scratching their heads about her, as I had begun to do when we met. Eden had a strange vibe that I’m sure she worked hard to keep under control. She was either very attractive to people or oddly repelling, like a pretty but deadly insect. I didn’t know much about Eden’s childhood, but her father, Heinrich ‘Hades’ Archer, had been one of Sydney’s most powerful criminal overlords back in the late sixties and early seventies. Eden and her brother, Eric, both joined the boys in blue for some reason, even though the two of them had made records in academia while completing their undergraduate degrees and been offered countless scholarships and fellowships to further their studies in science and forensics. Eden’s partner, Doyle, had taken a bullet in the face from an unknown drug dealer and she’d barely blinked an eye at his loss or made any effort to catch the guy who did it. To my knowledge she’d never entertained a boyfriend, though wherever we went men walked into lampposts at the sight of her. Her colleagues at the station were deeply afraid of her, and no one would say exactly why. No, any digging by our shrink into Eden’s character wouldn’t have been pleasant for the moonlighting serial killer. While I was usually fairly brazen about my refusal to participate in our psychologist’s appointments, Eden gave up just as little, albeit more politely.
Dr Imogen Stone’s offices were on Kent Street on the third floor of an old narrow office building squeezed between a monster architectural design firm and the glass-fronted palace of a mega import company. The stairs were steep and the carpet smelled as if it had been really wet once. She didn’t have a receptionist.
Eden and I sat in the waiting room. She pretended to read a magazine, flipping through the pictures, those predator eyes fixed and unseeing and her clockwork mind quickly ticking away. I watched her, bored. She really had quite a pointy look to her when I examined her carefully. She appeared in no way friendly, possessed none of the roundness and softness you would associate with approachability. Streamlined and fluid, like a shark.
When Dr Stone walked out she made me think of a big-eyed kitten. She was blonde and golden-skinned with a sprinkling of freckles on her small nose. Short and pretty, the girl next door. ‘Stone’ hardly fitted her as a name. She suited something soft and pretty like Lily or Pippi.
I shook my head when I realised she was speaking to me. Eden caught me checking out Dr Stone and looked embarrassed. It was the Endone slowing me down.
‘Frank?’
‘Yeah, yeah, I’m coming.’
‘Coffee, either of you? Tea?’
‘Frank will have a coffee,’ Eden said. Dr Stone made the coffee in a little kitchenette behind her desk by the huge windows. I could see a slice of the harbour between the buildings across the street. The place was bright. When she handed me the cup I got a whiff of some delicate perfume. I wondered if she could smell me. There was still scotch in my veins.
‘You’ve lost weight again, Frank,’ she said as she took her seat. There were folders in her lap beneath her usual notebook. I felt dread.
‘Keep your eyes off my body, Stone. I’m not a piece of meat.’
‘Are you experiencing a loss of appetite?’
I sipped the coffee. Dr Stone waited, her legs crossed and hands on her notebook. She really had coordinated her shoes well with her outfit. She was all cream today. Went well with her skin. The cashmere on her shoes was touchable, like the shimmery stockings.
‘You’re going to stare at my shoes all session again, are you?’
‘You really do have good taste in shoes.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. Stone was easier to frazzle than Eden. She shuffled the folders and the notebook. ‘I’ve just got the report back from the inquest into the shootings at the Avoca Street church. Looks like your colleagues are prepared to accept your account, that Eden’s brother, Eric, accidentally discharged his weapon at you, Frank, and that Eden, you mistook Eric for the killer and shot him dead. They’re still puzzled as to how six bullets from Frank’s weapon ended up in Mr Beck’s head at a trajectory that would suggest he was lying on the floor and you were standing over him. Is this something you think we can talk about today? Either of you? Eden?’
I looked at Eden. She was sitting perfectly upright in her chair, which I assumed must have been difficult, because they were excessively squishy, the kind of chairs that swallow coins, chips, sets of keys, remotes, dining-room sets.
‘I’m afraid I don’t recall anything further about the moments before the shooting that I haven’t already put in writing to the inquiry board,’ she said.
‘Listen to you,’ I looked at Eden. ‘You could read the news.’
‘Let’s get away from actions,’ Dr Stone said. ‘Let’s talk about feelings. How do you feel when you remember that time in the church? Can you remember entering the building?’
Eden said nothing.
‘Frank, what about you?’
‘I’m sorry, Doctor. You lost me at “Let’s talk about feelings”.’
Dr Stone licked her bottom lip. I sat sniggering at my own joke for a minute or so. I nudged Eden to see if she’d heard it. She was rigid as pine.
‘Tell me how you feel. Seriously. It will have no bearing on your masculinity, Frank, I promise you.’
‘You women and your lies,’ I sighed.
‘I want to know if either of you are returning to that day in your minds, either voluntarily or involuntarily, because I think it’s important that we put a name to how the event made you feel so that we can deal with it properly. Eden, you need to deal with your brother’s loss and any blame you might have assigned yourself for accidentally killing him. Frank, you need to deal with having been injured so traumatically and with whatever caused you to shoot Mr Beck. Until we deal with these emotions neither of you are going to be fit to move on with your lives.’
Eden pulled a thread out of her jeans and curled it around her finger. She rolled it into a ball and placed it on the arm of the chair. I watched carefully.
‘Frank, you’re obviously not coping with what’s happened,’ Dr Stone said.
‘What are you picking on me for? Pick on Eden. She loves it.’
‘I’m picking on you because whether Eden has dealt with the trauma of this event or not she is clearly still functioning. You’re not functioning, Frank.’
‘I’m deeply offended by that. I’m here. I’m not even that late.’
‘You reek