Candice Fox 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, and her third novel, Fall was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly and Davitt awards. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed Crimson Lake and co-writer with James Patterson of the Sunday Times No.1 bestseller Never Never set in the Australian outback.
Crimson Lake series
Crimson Lake
Archer & Bennett series
Hades
Eden
Fall
With James Patterson
Never Never
Fifty Fifty
Black & Blue (BookShot novella)
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473539778
Version 1.0
Published by Arrow Books 2018
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Copyright © Candice Fox 2018
Cover images © Arcangel/Shutterstock
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 2018)
Arrow Books
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Arrow Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784758080
For Nikki, Malpass and Kathryn
There were predators beyond the wire. I knew they were there, although in the months since my incarceration I hadn’t yet seen one. My evening ritual was to come down to the shore and look for the ominous rise of two dead eyes above the surface of the water, the flick of a spiky tail. Feeding time. Half a tonne of prehistoric reptile lolling and sliding beneath the sunset-lit water, separated from me by nothing but an old, rusty fence. I looked for crocodiles every day, drawn to the bottom of my isolated property on Crimson Lake by the recollection of being one of them. Ted Conkaffey; the beast. The hunter. The monster in hiding from whom the world needed to be protected.
I couldn’t stop myself coming down here, though holding the wire and watching for crocs brought up the comparisons, the dark thoughts, all those scary old memories of my arrest, my trial, my victim.
She was never far from my mind. Claire would come to me at the strangest times, more vivid than she possibly could have been when she first etched herself into my memory, standing there at the bus stop by the side of the road. Every time I thought about her, I saw something new. Gentle wind from the approaching rain tossing her almost-white hair over her thin shoulder. The glaring outline of her small, frail body against the blue-black clouds gathering on the horizon.
Claire Bingley was thirteen years old when I stopped my car beside her on the ragged edge of the highway. She’d stayed at a friend’s house the night before. Her backpack was stuffed with pyjamas, half-eaten bags of lollies, a brightly coloured magazine; little-girl things that would in a few short hours be spread over an evidence table and dusted with fingerprint powder.
We had looked at each other. We’d hardly spoken. But on that fateful day, the backpack would stay by the side of the highway while the girl came with me. I snatched her right out of her beautiful little life and pulled her, kicking and screaming, into my depraved fantasy. In a single act, I ruined everything that she ever hoped she could be. If all my plans had come to fruition, thirteen would have been her last birthday. But she survived the fiend that I was. Somehow, she crawled back out of the woods where I left her, a fractured remnant of who she’d been when she stood before me at the bus stop.
At least, that’s what everyone says happened.
Only half of that story is true. I did stand before the child at the bus stop that day, impossibly taller and broader and stronger than her, opening the back door of my car, watching her nervous eyes. But in reality, I’d only pulled over to shift my fishing rod off the back seat where it sat leaning against a window, tapping irritatingly on the glass as I drove. I’d spoken to Claire Bingley briefly, but what I’d said wasn’t an invitation to come with me, a plea or a threat. I’d made some stupid comment about the weather. Cars full of witnesses had whizzed past us on the road, looking out, photographing us with their suspicious minds, knowing that we weren’t father and daughter, that something was wrong here. Premonition. I’d got back in my car and driven away from Claire, forgetting her instantly, having no idea what was about to happen to her. Or me.
Someone did abduct that little girl, just seconds after I’d been there. Whoever he was, he did take her into the woods and violate her, and he did make that awful decision, the worst a person can make – he decided to kill her. But she survived, too traumatised to know who the hell had done this to her, too broken to put anything much about the crime into words. It didn’t matter what Claire said anyway, in the end. The public knew who’d done this. Twelve people had seen the child, seen me standing not far from her, talking to her, the back door of my car yawning open.
I’d heard the story of Claire’s attack described so many times across my trial and incarceration that it was easy to see myself doing it. There are only so many times you can hear a lie before you start living and breathing it, actually remembering it like it was real.
But it was not real.
I’m not a killer or a rapist. I’m just a man. There are things I am, and things I used to be. I used to be a cop, a new father, a devoted husband. I’d been someone who could never imagine myself wearing handcuffs, sitting in the back of a prison van, standing in the queue for chow in a correctional facility food hall, a wife-killer in front of me and a bank-robber behind. There had been only one little girl in my life, my daughter Lillian, whose existence on the earth I was still measuring in weeks when I was arrested.
I used to read voraciously. I drank red wine, and I danced in the kitchen with my wife. I regularly wore odd socks and I often left beard stubble in the bathroom sink. I was an ordinary guy.
Now I was a runaway living on the edge of nowhere, looking for crocs, watching the sun disappear beyond the mountains across the lake. Wandering back up the hill, my hands in my pockets and bad thoughts swirling. When an accusation like that comes into your life, it never leaves. The story of what I had done to Claire Bingley played on and on, in the minds of my ex-colleagues, my friends, my wife, Claire Bingley’s parents and the barrister who prosecuted me before my trial collapsed; they saw it just as vividly as I saw it. An unreal reality. A false truth.
People passed the story on to each other in whispers as I walked into the court in cuffs. The media printed it. The television stations ran it. The story was so real that it came to me in flashes of light in the strangest moments – while I was showering, while I was sitting alone on the porch drinking Wild Turkey and watching the water. I dreamed about it often, woke sweating and twisted in my sheets.
I am not, and never have been, a paedophile. I don’t find children sexually attractive. I never laid a hand on Claire Bingley. But that doesn’t matter. To the world, I was a monster. Nothing was ever going to change that.
Working on my goose house seemed to drive out the darkness, so I went to the newly erected structure and stood before it, making plans. Around me on the sprawling, empty lawn, seven geese wandered, plucking at the grass, muttering and clucking contentedly to each other. When one settled by my feet, her hunger apparently sated, I reached down and stroked the back of her soft grey neck, the feathers collapsing, weightless, until I felt the soft, warm flesh of her neck underneath. My geese don’t think I’m a monster, and that’s something, at least.
I never planned on being a goose daddy. I spent eight months in prison with no idea if I was ever going to see the outside world again, let alone what I might do if I was ever released. I didn’t have a home to go to. Three weeks after my arrest, my wife Kelly had started to turn her back on me, the weight of the evidence against me and the pressure of the public opinion simply too much for her to withstand. I didn’t make any plans for life after the accusation. I was taken to prison and I tried to survive each day there without going completely insane or getting myself killed. Then, without warning, three months into the trial proceedings, with my lawyer looking more strained and exhausted with every passing day, the Department of Public Prosecutions dropped the charges against me. The legal procedure, a motion of ‘no billing’, meant that I was not technically acquitted. I was not guilty – but I was not innocent either. There simply wasn’t enough evidence to ensure I would be convicted, so they decided to let me go until new evidence could be acquired, if any ever surfaced. With the knowledge that I could be re-charged at any time, I was sent out into a city full of hate. I went home, packed my things and fled north on nothing more than the instinct to hide and terror of the public’s revenge. Kelly wasn’t at home when I left. She refused to see me. I had to borrow a car from my lawyer.
Not long after I’d arrived in Crimson Lake and rented this small, beat-up house, a mother goose with a broken wing had showed up and interrupted my sunset drinking, squawking and flapping on the other side of the wire – the croc side. It was the first time in more than a year that I’d laid eyes on a creature more helpless than myself. The three-foot-tall, snow-white anser domesticus, which I named Woman, had six fluffy chicks trailing behind her, just begging something slippery and primordial to emerge from the dark waters of the lake and snap them up. Since then, Woman the goose and her babies and I had lived together on the edge of the water and tried to heal.
Her babies had grown up quickly, and these were the creatures that surrounded me now as I assembled their new living quarters, approaching at times, examining my bare feet in the lush grass or pecking at my pockets where I sometimes kept grain pellets. Watching, their beady eyes following my hands as I pushed the screws into the corrugated iron roof of the cubbyhouse.
Yes, instead of a proper goose coop, I’d acquired a children’s cubbyhouse. Not the most sensible idea for a notorious accused child rapist living in hiding with no children at home. I’d found the cubbyhouse online, free to whomever was willing to come and pick it up from the nearby town of Holloways Beach. I’d scrolled past it at first. It was a dangerous idea. Vigilantes and gawkers had learned of my presence not long after I arrived in town, and they still drove by my house every now and then, curious about the man who’d somehow escaped justice. And one in three times when I opened the front door to a knock, it was a journalist who greeted me, notebook and pen thrust out like guns. All it would take was for one of these people to spy the cubbyhouse in the backyard to bring the press and the public mob to my front door, pitchforks in hand, once more.
But money hadn’t exactly been in abundance, and the cubbyhouse was free. A genuine goose coop cost anything from $1200 upwards, and all I really needed to do to the cubbyhouse was remove the floor and replace it with wire, and build a ramp to the entrance for Woman and her young. Since I’d found them, the family of geese had settled on the porch of my small, barren house, and I liked to sleep out there on the couch sometimes when the night was hot and loud with the barking of crocodiles and the cry of night birds. More than once I’d been awakened at dawn by the sensation of a goose beak foraging for bugs in my hair. Sometimes the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes in the morning was a curious bird-face inches from mine, waiting for me to hand out the breakfast pellets. Something had to give.
I squatted in the grass and swept away some of the cobwebs from under the cubbyhouse, tested the base with my fingers. I would cut it out with a jigsaw, staple a sheet of wire across the bottom, then fit a steel tray I could unhinge and spray out to keep the house clean. The construction of the cubby was solid and would protect the birds from the foxes and snakes that sometimes made guest appearances around the property, preying on waterhens down by the shore. I went to the front of the cubbyhouse and opened the shuttered windows, tore down the mouldy curtains that some kid had probably spent many years enjoying drawing against the outside world, closing their little house off in privacy for their games. Playing house. My daughter might have enjoyed a cubbyhouse like this. She was going to be two years old in a week. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her in person, held her, warm and wriggling, against my chest.
‘I’ll tie these up for now,’ I said, pushing the shutters closed on the windows, showing the geese as the chipped wooden frames clicked into place. ‘But eventually I’ll probably put locks on. You can have them open during the day. You lot are sleeping in here tonight.’ I pointed, stern. ‘You’re not sleeping with me. It’s getting weird.’
Woman, the only white goose, wandered close at the sound of my voice and tilted her small head, eyeballing me. I reached out to pat her but she swung her head away as she usually did, muttering. She’d never been very affectionate, but I’d never stopped trying to win her over.
‘Two shelves for roosting.’ I showed her, levelling my hands halfway up the house, mapping out my vision. ‘And I’ll put in some of that straw you like. Snug and safe, the lot of you. It’ll be grand – probably grander than you need, but I’m a nice guy. What can I say?’
I shrugged, looked for an answer. The goose looked away.
I talked to my geese all the time. Particularly Woman. I recognised that I had started doing it at the same time as I realised it was too late to stop. I talked to her like I would a wife. Updated her about things I’d seen while out and about in the town, chatted to her absent-mindedly, let her in on my thought processes. I would talk to the bird through the screen door to the kitchen while I cooked dinner, throwing things into the pot on the stove, the bird settled on the porch just outside the door, preening. I’d heard that lonely people talk to themselves. I’m not sure I was lonely, exactly, but I sorely missed having a wife. Kelly used to sit at the kitchen table when I was cooking, drinking wine, flipping through magazines, as uninterested in my ramblings as the regal mother bird. You can talk to people in prison, of course; there are no rules against it. But the guards will invariably answer you in single words until you give up and go away, and I was housed in protective segregation because of the nature of my charges. The inmates in my pod were mostly paedophiles, and paedophiles rarely come into the company of others of their kind in the outside world. So they like to talk about what they have in common. A lot. The only feedback I ever got from the geese was questioning looks and indecipherable bird babble – but I never had nightmares about that.
I left the geese and went up the stairs to the porch and into the kitchen. There were cable ties in the bottom drawer beside the sink, left over from some running repairs I had done when I moved into the old house. Deciding I’d use them to secure the windows of the cubby, I crouched and rummaged around in the clutter for them.
I was just slower than my attacker had anticipated as I rose up. If he’d been on point, he’d probably have killed me. But the wooden baseball bat whizzed over the top of my head and smashed into the wine bottles lining the windowsill, spraying wine and glass everywhere.
Emotion whipped up through me, an enormous swell of terror and anger and shock that seemed to balloon out from under my ribs and sizzle down my arms and over my scalp. There wasn’t time to shout out, ask questions. A man was in my kitchen and he was swinging at me viciously with a baseball bat, my own bat, a weapon I’d been keeping just inside the front door to threaten the vigilantes with. He swung again and got me in the upper arm. The pain blinded me. I put my hands up, a reflex. The bat was coming again. I couldn’t see my attacker. It was happening too fast. Shock of blond hair. Black eyes. I bowed and threw myself at his waist.
We crashed into the dining-room table and chairs. Ridiculously logical thoughts started zipping through my brain, caught and pulled down randomly from the whirlwind. The geese were screaming in the yard. The lights were on, and I hadn’t turned them on. There was blood on my hands. The man had hit me in the face and I hadn’t even felt it. I was yelling ‘Fuck! Fuck!’ and he was saying nothing, determined only to hurt me, to bring me down.
He wasn’t bigger than me. Not many people are. But there was a fury in him so hot and wild, he had all the impossible strength of a cornered animal. His anger would trump my desire to survive in this struggle. I knew it, but I kept fighting, kept growling, kept trying to get a hold of any part of him, his shirt, his hair, his sweat-damp neck. He dropped the bat. I pinned him and he bucked and I fell against the cupboards. His fist smashed into the side of my head from low down, a full-arm swing up and into my temple. The floor smacked my face. Hands around my throat, a tight band of fingers crossing my windpipe. I didn’t even have time to fear that I was going to die. I grabbed at his knuckles and then passed out.
The sound of the geese woke me. They make a peeling, squealing kind of distress noise, a screaming punctuated by deep, growling honks. I remember thinking as I lay on the floor of my kitchen and listened to them that the sound meant they were still alive, and that was all that mattered, really. I was lying on my front with my hands at the small of my back. As I shifted, I felt one of the cable ties I’d pulled from the bottom drawer around my wrists let a little blood flow into my numb fingers. Prickling, stinging. A black boot passed near my face.
He was raiding my house. I’ve been raided a few times since all this began, my house turned over by Crimson Lake cops with a grudge. I’ve come to recognise the sound of it. A crash, the whisper of papers sliding across the polished wood floor. A drawer clunking as it’s wrenched from the dresser. I looked around. All the kitchen cupboard doors were open, smashed cups and plates, Tupperware containers on the floor. Wine everywhere, running down the cupboards like thin blood. One of the chairs was broken. He’d started here, moved from room to room. I tried to shift upwards, assess anything broken or bent inside me. Everything hurt in equal measure.
‘Don’t move.’
The boot came back, emerged from the blur at the corner of my vision and shoved me back down onto the floor. I heard a goose’s wings flapping on the porch. I watched the blond man as he disappeared again into the bedroom, came to the kitchen table and righted the remaining dining room chair. He sat, dumped my laptop on the table and pushed it open.
‘There’s nothing in the house,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you kept it online. Too traceable that way. But maybe I’m wrong.’
He became distracted, clicking through the inner workings of my computer. I braved a covert, awkward shuffle into the corner of the kitchen. I pushed myself up, took a moment to look at my attacker. I was steadily growing hotter. My entire body boiling beneath my clothes. Recognition. I knew this man. I knew his thin, angular face and big, dark blue eyes.
‘What are you doing?’
‘What do you think I’m doing?’ He clicked around the computer, glanced at me. Looking at my face brought him out of his frenzied search of the laptop. I shifted backwards, but there was nowhere to go. ‘I’m looking for pictures. Videos. Documents.’
He was looking for child porn. Whoever this man was, wherever I had seen him before, he was associated with my case. This wasn’t a robbery, although I’d known that from the anger. This was personal. I felt blood running down my jaw, tasted it between my teeth. His shirt was torn. I hadn’t made much of an impact.
‘If you leave, I won’t call the police,’ I said.
‘Do the police respond when you call them?’ He snorted. Bitter. ‘I wonder how far they’d have to come. Whether they’d make it in time.’
‘Look, I don’t know who you are –’
‘You don’t?’ The man’s brow dipped just once. Genuine shock. ‘Really?’
He grabbed the baseball bat from the floor and came towards me. My stomach plummeted.
‘Please don’t.’
‘You really don’t know who I am?’
‘Please.’
I squeezed my eyes shut. He grabbed my jaw and shoved my head against the cupboards until I opened them.
‘Look at me,’ he snarled. ‘Look at my face.’
I could hardly breathe. If I didn’t get the picture soon he was going to kill me. I could see him losing control again. Twitching in the muscles of his tight, red neck. His heart was hammering – jugular ticking fast beneath the skin. I searched his face and cringed as it came to me.
‘Oh god. You’re Claire’s father.’
The baseball bat was in his fist. I cowered into the corner, expecting another blow as he rose to his feet.
‘That’s right, shithead.’
I’d hardly looked at my victim’s parents during my trial. Not my victim. Claire. I had to stop thinking about her that way. The way the rest of the country was looking at her. Because I didn’t deserve this. There were angry tears on my face as a brief swell of defiance prickled in my chest.
‘What took you so long?’ I asked. ‘I expected you to be out there with the mob when they televised where I lived six months ago.’
‘Yeah?’ He sat down again. ‘Sorry. I wanted a more personal visit.’
‘What are you gonna do?’ I asked. It wasn’t a challenge. I was serious. Because whatever he’d told himself about coming here and finding child porn and having me sent back to jail wasn’t going to pan out, and he was starting to realise that. He could do whatever he wanted to me out here, and no one would hear me scream. I wasn’t sure a beating would satisfy him. If he was going to kill me, all I wanted was to be sure he wouldn’t touch my fucking geese. I started working my way mentally towards an argument for them. Towards getting him to make me a promise. But it was hard to maintain complete consciousness. He’d really smacked me around, maybe even after I’d passed out. The lights above me weren’t completely clear. I had the feeling I’d been kicked in the chest a few times. Things were crunching and rattling as I breathed.
He was back in the chair, ignoring me. Head in his hands, fingers gripping his hair, thinking, as I was thinking.
‘I kept a picture of you,’ he said. He drew a long breath, let it out slow. ‘Since Claire picked you out of the photo line-up. I asked the cops to show me the line-up, show me who she’d identified. You. I asked if I could take the picture. I kept it in my wallet. I would look at it sometimes to remind myself that you were just a man. That you weren’t some … thing. A ghost.’
A car drove by on the road outside. I thought about screaming.
‘I figured if I let myself get overwhelmed by the idea that you were more than you really were, then I’d start to see you everywhere,’ he said. He rubbed his hands together. Examined his skinned knuckles. ‘Rose, my wife, she was seeing you everywhere even after you were arrested. Big men hanging around little girls. Fathers with their daughters, you know? No. I’d take out the picture and look at your face and I’d think to myself, He’s a man, and he’s in prison, and he can’t hurt her anymore.’
His lip twitched. I saw a flash of teeth.
‘But then they let you out of prison,’ he said. ‘And I didn’t know where you were. And you kept hurting her. Even though you were nowhere near her. She hurts. Every day. Just … just being alive.’
I was shivering from head to foot. The new calm that had overtaken him was sending my terror into overdrive. This man had the capacity to kill me. Not as he had been before, blinded by fury. But like this. Calm, and methodical. No one would investigate my death very deeply. Any number of people all across the country wanted me dead. They’d have to leave my grave unmarked, so that the vigilantes didn’t come to piss on it.
‘Listen to me,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t hurt your daughter.’
‘I thought about this for so long. It was the only way I could get to sleep at night. I’d think about buying a plane ticket, coming here, finding you.’ He opened his hands, gestured to my kitchen. The shattered glass and plates at my feet. The broken chair by the door. ‘I thought about all sorts of things. About cutting you. Hanging you, for a while. Shot-gunning you in the face. I had all these fantasies. They were so real, I could feel them.’
He was suddenly crying. Manic. He pulled his hair, scratched his scalp hard with both hands. Rubbed his face with his palms like he was trying to wake from a dream.
‘And now I come here and I find you’re just a fucking man,’ he said. ‘Just like I told myself. You’re just a man.’
I didn’t know what he was talking about. All I could think of was my own survival. I’d heard men talk like this before, about their fantasies falling in a heap, their plans coming undone. In my job as a cop I’d listened to them on the radio, standing in the street looking up at them on ledges, just beyond the reach of a negotiator. He was going to kill me. It was all he could do. My lips were so dry I could hardly form words.
‘Please. Please listen. There’s a yellow envelope among my papers,’ I stammered. ‘In the second bedroom. I’ve been … I was working with a partner. She found some things on the man who really did hurt Claire. Some leads. I haven’t done – I didn’t –’
He stood and I tried to scramble away, got nowhere, curled into a ball, thinking he was coming for me again. But he just turned down the hall and left the house.
There was a shoe by my face, but it wasn’t a black boot this time. It was a dirty pink Converse sneaker with wet grass sticking to the shoelaces. A thin ankle covered with tattoos of yellow tigers and wet jungle leaves straining as she stood over me. I felt Amanda nudge me in the side with her other shoe. I made a sound of life.
‘Ted! You are alive!’ she said, but her jubilation plummeted quickly into irritation. ‘Damn it. I just lost a bet with myself.’
She leaned on me, and I felt her slip a knife or scissor blade into the cable tie at my wrists. My hands flopped onto the floor, numb and useless.
‘Birds,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘The birds.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Good point.’
She walked away, through the porch door, letting it slam behind her. I lay on the floor and dreamed. I’d taken a few beatings in my time, in prison and out, and I knew the worst thing I could do right now was try to get up too fast.
Amanda Pharrell was my investigative partner, a strange tattooed pixie who could be brilliant in the throes of a case, but annoying as a poke in the eye in equal measure. I’d been working with her since I moved to Crimson Lake, my old life on the drug squad with the New South Wales Police Force long forgotten. I guess you could say she ‘hired’ me; I was technically employed by her private investigations firm, the only other person on the payroll. But our partnership had been more of a beautiful accident, the hand of fate pushing us together. When I fled Sydney, I’d stopped and decided to settle in Crimson Lake by chance. And by chance, there was someone in town who everyone hated just as much as me. It was my lawyer who had put us together, and somehow – I still struggle to understand how – it had worked.
Like me, Amanda was never going to be welcomed back into the loving circle of civil society. She’d stabbed a seventeen-year-old schoolmate to death after the two sat in a car in the rainforest together, about to walk up to a party. It wasn’t her fault, but like my crime, hers was a one-way ticket out of the ‘normal’ world.
It was Amanda who had brought me a yellow envelope one day shortly after our first case together, a package containing papers detailing exactly what she’d managed to find out about the man who really did abduct and rape Claire. I’d been too scared to look very closely at them. She hadn’t pushed me on the issue. It was my decision what I did with the investigation of my own case, and in the weeks that had followed, all the envelope brought me was worry and terror at the possibilities. Maybe if I went looking for Claire’s attacker, I’d never find him. Maybe I would find him, and he’d get away. Maybe I’d try to find him, and only further implicate myself somehow, or be unable to prove it was he who’d attacked Claire Bingley. Maybe I’d ignore the envelope altogether, and he’d do it again, and this time he’d kill someone, and that would be my fault. I didn’t think any good could come of what was contained in the envelope, no matter what happened.
I heard Amanda thump back up onto the porch.
‘How many geese did you have before?’
‘Seven,’ I groaned, pulling my legs towards me slowly, easing my way up onto my elbows. ‘Six grey, one white.’
‘Yeah, they’re all there.’ She sniffed, kicked the porch door closed behind her like she owned the place. ‘They’re just puffed up. Cranky.’
‘I’m pretty cranky myself.’ I staggered to my feet. She slipped under my arm and tried to help me to the bathroom, but being so small, she wasn’t very useful. I smeared blood on the doorframe, made footprints on the divorce paperwork my wife had sent me, still unsigned. In the bathroom mirror, my face was awash with blood, one half swollen so that the eye was a slit between two purple lumps, patterned with a cross from lying on the kitchen tiles.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked her.
‘I figured something was up,’ Amanda said, helping me to sit on the edge of the bathtub. ‘You don’t go to bed till ten. Weren’t answering your phone.’
‘How do you know I don’t go to bed till ten?’
‘I’m a supersleuth. An investigative genius. A deductive savant.’
‘I might have been out. Had visitors.’
She laughed as she wet a face washer in the sink. She was right, of course. I went to bed at exactly ten. In prison, lights out had been exactly eight. So I’d extended my sleep time to normal adult hours when I was freed, but I kept to the exact timings because too much free will was still uncomfortable for me. I got up at six. Had breakfast at six-thirty. Lunch at midday. I went to my room to go to sleep at exactly 9.45 pm and played with my phone until lights out. Nothing else felt right.
‘This will need stitches,’ she said, touching my face. Amanda had a dozen or more strict rules about working with her, and one of them was that I never touched her. But the longer I’d worked with her, the more she touched me. She seemed to be holding part of my cheek up. ‘You want me to call that quack?’
I craned my neck and looked in the mirror again. There was a curved five-centimetre gash under my eye, hanging open, revealing raw red flesh. ‘That quack’ was a coroner I’d befriended who saw to all my medical needs. I couldn’t see regular doctors, attend regular hospitals. Even to buy groceries I had to go two towns over, wear sunglasses and a cap pulled down low, and make sure I didn’t talk to anybody. In and out, breathing deeply and sweating, like a man on a bank heist. Once, I’d been the only face on the cover of every newspaper nationwide. When people recognised me, there was a range of reactions. Men sometimes tried to punch me. Women tended to go all cold, walk away, ignore me until I left. Old ladies shouted and pointed at me. I was terrified of having to see a dentist.
I took the face washer and pressed it into the wound.
‘It’s fine. I’ve got to go. I’m going to catch him before he leaves.’
‘Who?’
‘The guy.’ I looked at my partner. ‘It was Claire Bingley’s father.’
‘No way!’ She slapped me in the chest. I winced.
‘Way.’
‘What are you going to do? You going to bash him? I’ll come.’ She punched her palm, her jaw jutted. ‘I like a bit of argy-bargy.’
‘I’m not going to bash him, I’m going to talk to him.’
‘Talk to him?’ Amanda baulked. ‘About what, exactly? The dude just KO’ed you on the kitchen floor. Seems like he might have got his point across. Or are you confused by his message? I can spell it out for you, Ted – he wants you dead. He wants to shred your oversized head. Grind your bones to make his bread.’
‘I got it,’ I said. ‘But I think I have a right of reply.’
She looked me over, took in my injuries, seemed to assess my chances in another tangle with Mr Bingley.
‘You’re not in a good way.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Your employee health insurance doesn’t cover suicide missions.’
‘Amanda.’
‘Can you even walk? Did he get you in the nuts?’ Amanda cringed in expectation of my answer.
‘I don’t know. Everything hurts.’ I stood.
‘If I finally got hold of the guy who’d raped my daughter, I’d have gone right for the nuts,’ she mused. ‘I’m not sure I’d have used a baseball bat, either. Pair of scissors, maybe. Icepick.’
‘This isn’t making me feel better.’
‘I don’t know why you’d want to go anywhere near that guy again.’ She shook her head. ‘You got something to say, send an email.’
‘I’m going. Help me get cleaned up and get me to my car, would you?’
‘You’re stranger than pie, Ted Conkaffey. If you want to go get yourself murdered, fine, but you’re not going anywhere with half your face falling off.’ Amanda took me by the shoulders and pushed me back onto the toilet. ‘I’ll fix it. Have you got any fishing line?’
‘Forget about it. I’m not letting you anywhere near my face, with or without fishing line.’
‘What, you think I’m gonna mess it up? You’re not a pretty man, Ted Conkaffey.’
‘Yes I am.’
‘You don’t need to be a doctor to stitch a guy’s face,’ she said, lifting my chin, examining the wound. ‘I’ll do it. It’ll be great. It’ll be very erotic. Like when Val Kilmer cuts his face in The Saint and Elisabeth Shue stitches it for him. Urgh, Val Kilmer. Val Killlmerrr. I’m sorry. I need a moment.’ She sighed and hung her head back, her eyes closed, remembering. Gave a warm, wide smile.
It turns out that a lot of women have stitched men’s faces in movies. Amanda told me all about them, straddling my lap in the bathtub, where the light was best, her breath on my face as she fed the fishing line through my skin with a sewing needle, ignoring my whining. Aside from Elisabeth Shue and Val Kilmer’s soulful interaction in The Saint, Rooney Mara stitched up Daniel Craig’s brow in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead put some stitches in John Goodman in 10 Cloverfield Lane.
It wasn’t all that odd to have Amanda sitting on me, crotch to crotch, jabbering excitedly about erotic moments in movies, neither of us feeling anything remotely sexual. There was nothing erotic about us. In fact, Amanda seemed to have little concept of regular emotions. She was exactly as bright and cheerful about me not being dead as I imagined she’d have been about finding my corpse. She used weird expressions like ‘stranger than pie’ as if everyone should know what they meant. Her social–emotional barometer had certainly been bashed around by her murder conviction, by her decade in prison. But I wasn’t exactly sure it had been firing on all pistons before that.
She helped me out to the car and I got on the road, my hands locked on the wheel, everything pulsing with pain in protest to the movement. I should really have been in hospital. But then, I hadn’t been where I was meant to be or done what I was meant to do in a very long time.
I was working on a hunch that Claire Bingley’s father had flown in to Cairns to confront me, and that it wasn’t the kind of mission that would be extended out so that he could go sightseeing, maybe catch a jumping crocodile cruise. I figured he’d have left my house and gone right back to the airport to catch a plane home. The whole mission seemed badly planned, spur-of-the-moment. He might have seen a reflective feature story mentioning me and snapped. Might have just been thrown out by his wife. Maybe something had happened with Claire. He’d acted out of rage, and now that the deed was done and the dream was broken he’d be running, wondering if I’d called the police, if they’d answer, if they’d be waiting for him at the terminal.
I drove to Cairns Airport, speeding all the way, now and then scratching at my bruised nose as blood dried inside my nostrils. I didn’t know if I’d find him. It was a terribly long shot. But I’d been too terrified to say what I needed to say at my house, and the man had been too angry to hear it.
I parked in the short-term car park and walked across the front of the long, squat buildings, looking in the windows at the empty check-in counters, receiving worried looks from the red-jacketed receptionists as I passed. The front of my shirt was splattered with blood, and I limped heavily on my left side, one arm hugged close to my body to brace what were probably cracked ribs against the jolting of my steps.
When you’ve been beaten up a few times, as I have, you learn that the best way to manage the pain is to keep moving if you can, even if very slowly. The first time I’d been smacked around in prison – a misunderstanding over some newspapers in the rec room – I’d gone to the infirmary and curled up in the nice, soft bed and surrendered to the blessed desire to sleep. I’d been in general population until my segregation was approved. It was safer to sleep in the hospital there than it was in my cell; the beds were better, the place was cleaner and there were more guards around. It was so quiet that I’d been able to delve briefly into a fantasy that I was free, outside, in a regular hospital. Big mistake. All my muscles seized up and all the fluids in my joints settled, and I woke up in more pain than when I’d arrived.
When I found Mr Bingley, he wasn’t inside the airport at all, but sitting in a rental car in the hire lot. I spotted the white-blond hair, his head buried in his hands, defeated, just as I’d seen him in my kitchen. I stood nearby for a while waiting for him to lift his face, but he didn’t. I went to the passenger-side door and opened it, and when I got in he shuffled violently against the driver’s door, grabbing for the handle.
‘Wait,’ I said. I held my hands up, palms out. ‘Just wait.’
He froze, staring at me, wild-eyed. I pulled my door closed slowly, its weight agonising for my bruised arm. We were sealed in silence, closeness. I fancied I could hear his heart beating, a smashing rhythm that reverberated through the car around us – but maybe it was my own. I carefully pulled the folded yellow envelope out of my back pocket and held it between us, a peace offering wavering over the handbrake.
‘You forgot this,’ I said.
‘I don’t want anything from you.’ His jaw was twitching, teeth clamped together. ‘I need you to get out of this car. Right now.’
‘This is what my partner has been able to find out about –’
‘Get out of my car!’
‘– about the man who raped your fucking daughter!’
Our voices swelled against the roof of the car. Neither of us could look at the other. We sat staring ahead, panting, two passengers in a vehicle going nowhere.
‘I did not rape your daughter,’ I said after a time, chancing a glance in his direction. ‘I don’t expect you to believe that until you’ve looked at this.’ I threw the envelope into his lap. ‘I hope you’ll look at it. But I don’t expect you to do that, either.’
He didn’t move.
‘Why did you come here?’ he asked eventually. ‘Why did you follow me?’
‘Because I want him caught too. Can’t you understand that?’ Suddenly I was on the edge of shouting again. Thumping my sore chest. ‘I. Didn’t. Do. This.’
He was stiff, the muscles of his neck pulled taut, eyes locked on the dashboard. His hands were in his lap, under the envelope, one raw, bloody knuckle visible. It was my turn to put my head in my hands.
‘I don’t even know your name,’ I said.
‘How the hell do you not know my name?’ His voice was a low, dangerous monotone. ‘How did you not recognise my face?’
‘Because from the moment I was arrested I was terrified for my fucking life,’ I said. ‘I lost my family. I lost my job. I lost my house. I was put in chains and thrown in prison with a bunch of psychopaths. My own colleagues interrogated me. My friends. The whole world was upside down. My brain didn’t have room for you. Or your wife. Or your daughter, for fuck’s sake.’
He shifted at the mention of the child. I took a breath and continued carefully.
‘I saw Claire for a few seconds on the side of the highway that day, and I never saw her again. You understand? I had no idea who she was. I didn’t even remember seeing her, in the beginning. All this has been just a fucking idea to me. It never actually happened.’
I stared at the side of his head. I wasn’t sure he understood at all, or if he even should. Long minutes of silence passed.
‘My name is Dale,’ he said eventually. ‘Now get the fuck out of this car.’
I got out and shut the door, stood there wondering if there was anything else that I could or should say. But there wasn’t. I walked away and left him.