Fall (12 page)

Tara thought about killing for the first time when she was sixteen. She was standing on the sports field at the edge of the cricket match, the sun blazing on her classmates' uniforms, making them sting in her vision. Mr Willoughby was yelling instructions from the side of the field, but Tara couldn't hear them. To her right, a group of girls had given up covering their section of the field and sat in a group stringing pieces of grass, some lying with their heads in the laps of others having their hair braided.

Tara watched their easy physical intimacy and wondered about them, the popular girls, why they felt the need to constantly touch, what message that was supposed to convey. Because everything that came from them had a message. Nothing was said explicitly. Looks pierced her, words jabbed at her, turned backs left her cast out. The popular girls were always hugging and holding hands. They announced their morning greeting hugs with gleeful cheers, outstretched fingers. They shamelessly caressed and groomed each other, rubbed lipstick smears from the corners of gaping mouths. Now and then they would fall on a boy, all of them at once brushing his hair and massaging his shoulders, gripping the impossibly hard muscle through the fabric. Peter Anderson was always among
them, whenever the teacher's back was turned, guiding their hands towards the hardness of his thighs, laughing when they squealed. Girls he had known since primary school, who he watched blossom slowly. Tara felt hot, seeing them there.

No one ever touched Tara. In the second grade the girls and boys in her class had developed a terror of her ‘germs'. If any of them touched Tara, they would have ‘Tara germs'. Anyone who touched the infected child would also have them. Tara was infectious. The game made the boys and girls squeal and run and slap at each other with their dirty, infected hands. Touching Tara meant social rejection, so when it came to grabbing a partner, getting in a group, forming a circle, Tara always found herself isolated in metres of space. The game had ended finally, worn off, over the summer holidays. But the symbolic infectiousness seemed to linger, even now that all of them were older, no one came near her.

They seemed to touch each other all the more when they knew she was near.

She watched the ball bounce heavily nearby, walked after it as the class howled, and it was then the thought came to her.

Kill all of them.

The words in her head shocked her. They were almost spoken. She was almost tempted to look around, to see if they'd been whispered from a body outside her own. But she was alone, of course. Always alone. She squinted in the sun and heard the voice again as the bell rang and the popular girls sprang to their feet.

Kill all of them,
she thought.
Make them touch each other, if that's what they want. Make the boys force their fingers into the girls until they scream. Make the girls strangle each other. Make
them beg. Make them grip at each other. Make them writhe together like worms, naked, flushed with blood.

By the pile of equipment, Mr Willoughby was teaching a group of boys about the seam on the ball while Steven Korin wanked a cricket stump, holding it against his crotch, jerking the softly sanded wood. His eyes rolled up in his head. The boy directed the stump at Mr Willoughby's back, then turned on Tara as she got close and jabbed the dirt-clotted tip of the stump into her thigh.

‘Oh Nuggy, baby,' the boy groaned. ‘Gimme some of dat sweaty lurve!'

The boys turned and howled with laughter. Tara jammed her hands into the wet patches beneath her arms, started to run. They called after her, loud enough so that she could hear them as she ducked into the girls' bathrooms. The second bell rang for the younger kids and a crowd swelled under the awning, tiny Year Sevens with their immaculate hats and bags and huge folders bursting with books. Tara watched them pass beyond the door. She thought about their little necks in her fingers, their knobbly little knees struggling and bumping on the ground as she took them.

One day every week, Imogen took time away from her commitments at the clinic to work on her superhero life. Her pursuit of Eden Archer. Or Morgan Tanner, as Imogen was now sure was her real name. The anniversary of little Genny Bainbridge's disappearance was a month away and Imogen knew increases to the reward money for missing children nationwide would be generous, especially for a double tragedy like the Tanner children. She was confident she would have enough on Eden to scoop up the reward money almost immediately after it was announced. With the bump to the reward for any information on the disappearance of Morgan and Marcus Tanner rumoured at a hundred thousand dollars, she had to make sure she kept her investigations quiet. There would be other armchair detectives and cybersleuths out there with search engine traps who would happily hack her once they realised she was picking around the case. She'd run into some hardcore players in her time on the job, professionals who travelled the globe picking up reward money for missing kids, rich dead husbands and wives. Some were so established they handed out business cards at candlelight vigils and hounded victims' families on their doorsteps, shoulder to shoulder with the press. Imogen couldn't dream of that sort of commitment,
not yet. Her clinic kept her low-level obsession with police officers under control, kept her interested in her side games with the missing children. Imogen needed multiple forms of entertainment. She'd always been a restless girl.

In her mind there was a future growing and developing slowly of her and Frank as a partnership, using his police skills and her investigative drive to make a real living out of being armchair detectives, or ‘web sleuths', as the young people called them. She twirled the bracelet he had given her, a guilt token he'd come home with after the scene at Malabar. He could be bossed around. That was the first tick on Imogen's list. He had access to things she usually had to beg her way into – criminal records, driving records, family medical records, cop-shop talk and lawyer buzz. If Imogen could bring down Eden Archer, right in front of Frank, it would show him how clever she was, how blind he'd been to the possibilities of using his skills outside his dismal job with its dismal salary. It would show him that if he followed, she could take him places. She could train him up, show him the ropes, give him a taste of investigative work beyond the badge. Open his eyes to his true potential. What she was doing was sometimes rougher, sometimes harder, than being a boy in blue – but she would show him he was capable, let him be her sidekick. The hunky meathead hero rescued from the force and put to real work – it would make a great story for her girlfriends. Imogen's uni buddies had all married psychologists. She liked being the wildcard among them.

Imogen ordered a latte from the young waitress and spread her things out over the table. She pushed her glasses up her nose and prepared to make a summary of what she had on Eden. From the moment she spotted the birthmark on Eden's
side in the newspaper coverage of Rye Farm, Imogen's information had grown substantially. Sunlight filtered through the trees lining Macleay Street, making patterns across her papers. The barista, a Brazilian girl, juggled the orders of the men and women around her, designers and architects and the bored housewives of Potts Point beginning their day with newspapers and little biscotti on organic pottery saucers. Imogen always came here, to Marcelle's. It was close enough to the Strip that she often saw junkies walking past the huge double doors, hearing them before they appeared, their cat-calling and grumbling as they shuffled quickly between hits. A troupe of detectives from the Kings Cross police station across the road frequented the café, so she got to eavesdrop on their conversations as she worked, live their adventures on the drug beat vicariously. The staff at Marcelle's let her work without hassling her for the table after an hour and only two coffees. Imogen was settled and ready to make some real progress. She felt warm and happy with purpose.

Her first assumption was that Eden Archer was an adult Morgan Tanner. This raised a few markers for confirmation. The birthmarks seemed the same – she'd tried for a photograph of the mark on Eden's side but hadn't managed one yet. Eden was the right age, according to her service record. She looked very much like the child in the missing posters – the same sharp features, Daddy's black hair and iceberg blue eyes. If Eden Archer was Morgan Tanner that meant there was a good chance that her deceased brother, Eric Archer, had been Marcus, the other Tanner child. He was the right age. Three very good coincidences, if that's what they were – the brother, the ages, the birthmark.

The first thing Imogen had done was investigate Eden's supposed parents. The mother, Sue Harold, had been a junkie and a dropout – a wild woman who surfed through life quickly and carelessly and who, it was reasonable to believe, departed this earth with only a box of odds and ends left at her mother Maggie's house ever suggesting she'd lived at all, her children long passed over to her ex-boyfriend and her bank accounts empty. Oddly, however, when Imogen visited Maggie Harold, asked politely to see the box of worldly possessions that Sue had bequested to her, she found not a single sentimental trace of the woman's supposed two children in it. Not a photograph. Not a card, a drawing, a teddy, not a child's blankie or a pair of old knitted booties, the kind of keepsake every mother, no matter how irresponsible, kept. There was a report card from Eric's first year at school and two copies of birth certificates. These were folded neatly and sitting in a single envelope, together, pristine, as though they'd barely been glanced at on receipt and then tucked away forever.

Imogen inferred two things from this. One, that Sue Harold did not own any mementos of Eden and Eric's early life because she had not, in fact, been there to experience it. Two, the records Maggie had were pristine and contained in the same envelope because they'd never been removed from said envelope, because they were fakes. There was no proving either of these things beyond reasonable doubt, however. Imogen had thanked the old woman, sweetly enjoyed a cup of tea beneath the stained-glass windows of her little house in Scone, fondling the plastic tablecloth, avoiding eye contact. Why didn't Maggie have any mementos of her grandchildren? she asked. Any photographs? Any children's books she'd read
to them before Sue handed them off to their father? They'd not been close, the old woman said. Her daughter had always been unstable. Flighty. All over the country chasing men. The ancient woman's eyes wandered the walls, evasive, a little nervous. Imogen thanked her and left.

Imogen spread out the photographs she had of Eden Archer – one leaving her huge boutique apartment and studio in Balmain, one of the beautiful detective getting her nails done at a local salon, one of her standing outside the Parramatta headquarters smoking a cigarette. Eden hadn't been a smoker when Imogen began tailing her – had something rattled her? Did she feel herself being watched? Eden had slipped away over the weekend, out from under Imogen's watchful eye. Did something happen? Did she know, in fact, who she was – was she willing to protect her secret, if that's what it was?

As the story went, Sue Harold had dumped Eden and Eric off on their biological father, Heinrich ‘Hades' Archer, when the girl was seven and the boy was nine – the exact ages that Morgan and Marcus Tanner were when they were abducted. The two grew up in the care of the decidedly older parent at the Utulla tip, surrounded by mountains of the city's discarded household waste – and, it was rumoured, the city's discarded souls. Eden's father was an interesting character. An underworld figure seemingly retired when the two children arrived, living the quiet life in his garbage wonderland. If he had been the one responsible for organising the Tanner murders, why on earth did he keep the children?

Imogen unfolded all the news reports she had on the Tanner case and spread them over the top of the photographs of Eden, a layer of black and grey sadness. The joyous faces of the Tanner
parents on their wedding day, his hand on the belly of her pristine satin dress, lips by her ear. A whisper, a laugh. Had Marcus, or Eric, been in there, already conceived? A cheeky secret, the doctor and the artist knocking boots before the formalities, before the families approved of the union. The faces of the children in close-cropped pictures beneath the heavy headlines:
BROKEN GLASS, SHATTERED LIVES
–
INSIDE THE TANNER FAMILY MURDERS
.

Theories swirled through the papers, of Dr Tanner's academic rivals worldwide, his incredibly flush research funds, Mrs Tanner's questionable friends during her youth. Some were sure the two children had been snatched up to be sold into international sex rings – they'd appeared with their father in a photograph in
Scientist Weekly
, looking like beautiful, vulnerable porcelain dolls. Had someone fallen in love with the two of them there on the cover beside Daddy? Morgan's shy, downturned eyes, Marcus' devilish grin at the camera.

There had been four to six men involved in the incident at the Long Jetty house, when the children's parents had been slain and the children disappeared off the face of the earth. Bikies, the police insinuated, had been the ones who did it – smash-and-grab kidnappings were decidedly their style. But how did this connect to Hades Archer? The old man had never been involved with bikies. And using hired muscle to do his dirty work wasn't him either. He'd always been a sort of gentleman overlord, a fixer of problems and mediator of disputes, too high up, too detached, to hire people to go after the petty cash of a civilian couple staying with their kidlets at their overly extravagant, barely used holiday house. The whole thing made no sense.

WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN
? the headlines roared.

Bikies were the scapegoats, Imogen decided. An international sex ring was a long shot. But so was Imogen's growing sense that the two had been adopted by Hades Archer, raised as his own to be police officers, unaware – or perhaps tight-lipped – about the lives they had lived before. The Tanner family fortune had remained untouched. If it was an unsuccessful murderous kidnapping, why would Eden and Eric remain quiet about it? Is that why Eric had been killed? Had he been on the cusp of revealing everything?

Senseless. Senseless. Imogen stared at her untouched coffee, at the foam top adhering to the edge of her cup in caramel clouds. The whole thing was senseless – but she had faith that the right clue would fit all the pieces together. Imogen had always loved puzzles. She never let one defeat her.