Fall (22 page)

Eden didn't spend a lot of time imagining herself as a victim. It wasn't really in her nature. She assumed that when her parents had been murdered was the time to form her childish conception of victimhood. The moment to discover the benefits so many lifelong victims became addicted to – the attention, the comfort, the slow, heroic climb of recovery, little encouragements treasured along the way. But something had gone wrong that night as she sat on the table in Hades' kitchen and let him wash the blood from her face. Something had failed to connect. Psychiatrists would say that her neurological pathways leading that way, towards victimhood, were damaged or non-existent. A priest would say she had half a soul. But whatever the case, Eden had picked up her life again the next day, mildly afraid of the man who had become her new guardian, concerned whether her brother would survive, whether she would have to face this strange new life alone. She was nothing of the victim. She wondered if, even then, there'd been too much of the natural predator in her to really know how victimhood worked.

Had the night her parents died made Eden what she was? Or had the malevolent thing that made her kill always curled inside her, sleeping, until the sound of the guns shook it awake?
Had it been Hades who made her what she was? Or if, by some twist of fate, she and Eric had survived the night of their parents' murders but ended up in the care of a regular person, might they have ever killed? Did her parents' murders open the door on who Eden was, or close it?

Over the birthmark that connected her to the child she had been, Eden asked for an ornate door to be tattooed, a big oak thing with a stained-glass panel in its top depicting birds fluttering between tree branches. It was a door she knew well.

Her lack of victimhood made her job as a detective interesting. Empathy was something she tried hard at. Often she had to distinguish exactly what victims in their many varieties were feeling, what their dying faces expressed, what the escapees of dungeons and bedrooms and long rides into dark bushland were experiencing when they made it back to safety. She deeply admired Frank when he connected so instantly and completely with his now-dead girlfriend Martina after her initial escape from Jason Beck. Frank had been able to feel what she felt. He felt moved to protect her. He loved her, and then he grieved for her. He was probably still grieving now, Eden imagined, but she couldn't be sure. Why else did he bury his head so firmly in the sand in terms of his current squeeze? Imogen was so completely wrong for him. He needed someone pretty and simple and gentle, like Martina. Was he afraid of being alone? Eden had heard it was difficult to sleep when a partner you'd got used to was suddenly gone from the bed, that even washing the sheets didn't stem the desire for their presence, their warmth, the roll and tumble of them on the mattress as they twisted in the night. Their snores. Was Imogen a bed-filler to Frank?

If she was, Eden suspected she was not the first.

She sat on the bench by the water and thought about victims. She tightened the laces of her runners, drew them tight, down over her now soft, pampered feet, gone to custard through her recovery. She'd enjoyed running once. Liked looking down at the hard yellow calluses that formed at the tops of her toes, her heel, runner's feet, feet that could count kilometres, swollen and aching beautifully. Eden had not run in the street since Rye Farm. She stood and rolled her shoulders, looked at the gently jostling yachts in the harbour. She imagined herself as the Sydney Parks Strangler's next victim. Anonymous female runner catching a couple of quick Ks before dinner. She opened a run-keeper app on her phone, hooked up her earphones as she watched the tennis court café bubbling and writhing, and parents with kids on the green. The evening night wind was slowly stirring. Eden stretched her calves and began to trot. Immediately the pain swelled in her hips, her abdominals. She pushed it aside. Think victim.

There was something so blinding about running, she thought as she fell into an awkward rhythm, trying not to favour her left hip where the muscles wanted to bunch. The rhythm of her body locked her head forward, shook everything in her periphery. The motion seemed to want to dissolve all threats but that which was directly ahead. When she turned to look at families strolling the sandstone blocks by the water's edge and couples taking pictures before the glittering city across the bay, her body wanted to slow, wanted to turn, like a horse being pulled sideways by reins. Running required concentration, self-focus. She listened to her breathing, her steps, her mental commentary of aches. This hurts, this hurts, this hurts, her ankle said.
Stop, stop, stop, her shoulder pleaded. She forgot about the path ahead and ducked between two walkers. She only knew when a faster runner approached a second before they passed, a sudden colourful presence and then their calves in front pumping as they pulled away. It wouldn't be hard, she realised, for someone to creep up on you like this. Mindlessly chugging along, slipping down a dirt path between the roadways and feeling a dull tap in your thigh. The sudden presence of another being behind her, and the glorious exhaustion of a run almost completed, suddenly and shockingly increasing, gravity turned up, legs buckling. The guiding arm of the stranger directing the drunken runner to the nearby roadside, to the open van doors. Keeping vertical would be struggle enough.

She lifted her head and sucked in the cooling night air. Rushcutters Bay Park was not a likely candidate for the killer's next hit – it was expansive and bare in parts, heavily populated by fitness groups, bordered on one side by dozens of yachts with their hundreds of gaping eyes. What trees there were mainly huddled at the roadside, the city sparkling between then, lighting hidey-holes between which possums crept and shuffled, babies gripping at their shoulders. Eden didn't see herself accidentally running smack bang into the parks killer on the hunt, didn't hold out Charmaine Lyon's naïve hope. She just wanted to run. To get into the parklands. To try to understand the hunting grounds.

She wondered at the brazenness of the attacks. What kind of hunter risked parks bathed in twilight for their playground? Eden understood parks as the wonderland of rapists – they were usually drunk or high when they committed the acts, and half the time were homeless, so the parks were where they got their food,
shelter, rest. Why not their sex? Eden listened to the growing evening. It was quiet out. Children's squeals of delight echoed across the water. A truck in the distant after-work rush for home shifted gear as it headed into the Cross City Tunnel. Lights came on in the pastel-coloured apartment blocks, one by one.

As she trotted along, she reviewed the evidence over and over in time to her footfalls, hoping to see a pattern, a beat, like the tempo of her soles on the concrete.

Black tracksuit. CCTV. Female runners. Bludgeoned faces. Lost identities. Strangulation. Revenge. Tranquilliser. White van.

The white van might not have caught her attention, might have been lost in the mess of thoughts, had it not crossed right in front of her as Eden turned onto the long stretch of path between the water and New Beach Road, heading towards the dead end at the lip of the bay. Eden fell victim to her curiosity immediately. She lowered her head and sprinted across grass to the road, knowing the van would have to turn and head back at her before it could escape the loop. As she teetered in the uneven gravel near the roadside, she saw the van making a three-point turn in the cul-de-sac. Two joggers stopped and watched her as she leaped out onto the asphalt, speeding up to a bone-grinding pace as the van turned around a small roundabout and headed up the hill onto Yarranabbe Road.

She stopped, her hips screaming. Eden gripped at her abdomen, at the ridges of pain that throbbed and felt splintered. She closed her eyes and briefly remembered the knife inside her, the blood running up her neck. It took a moment to realise the pair of joggers had crossed the road and were standing near her, nibbling at her attention with their presence. They were laughing. Eden tugged the headphones from her ears.

‘Thought you spotted the Sydney Parks Strangler?' the man said. They were a couple. The shoes were his and hers versions of the same fluorescent green, scored in a two-for-one deal. The young man grinned at her, his glasses fogged with perspiration.

‘Couldn't help myself,' Eden said. The girl was delightfully curvy but painfully aware of it, tugging at her sweat-patched top now and then, trying to pull it down over the brown slit of flesh above her tights. Pixie ears and a sheepish smile. Eden licked sweat off her upper lip.

‘I thought you might have been onto a winner,' the girl said. ‘Every time I see a van around near the park now I fucking freak. Are you a police officer?'

‘A watchful citizen.' Eden started walking. ‘Bye.'

‘Wasn't him.' The male of the pair held up his phone. ‘He was just spotted ten minutes ago in Trumper. That's why we're here. We thought, they'll chase him away. It'll be safe. We haven't been out since it all started. Jenny used to go alone, but no more. No more, Jenny.'

Eden watched the boy shake his finger teasingly at the girl. Tried to recall if she had indeed just said goodbye aloud, and if so, figure out why they were still talking to her.

‘He's like a shark,' the girl commented. Looked to her partner for approval. ‘A shark going up and down the coast. Once you know which beach he's at, you can go play at one of the other ones.' She giggled at her cleverness.

People liked to talk about things that scared them, Eden mused. Talk too much about them. She shook the fog from her head suddenly. The endorphins from the run were pumping through her, old friends missed. ‘Wait, did you say ten minutes ago?'

‘Yeah. Trumper Park.'

Eden snatched the man's phone, flashed her eyes over the crowdsourced news site. Her mobile rang in her sleeve.

 

Frank was standing by the bonnet of one of the station cars, a map spread out before him, directing two uniformed officers. Eden parked in the mess of vehicles blocking Royalson Street and glanced at neighbours in the apartment buildings beside the oval. They were standing sentry on their stairs and balconies, arms folded, sceptical. A couple with a dog had taken a seat on a bench as close to the busy police officers as they could get. They sat transfixed, listening to the radio calls. The oval was empty. On the other side, the tree line was impenetrable. Trumper Park was perfect for the killer's next hunt. Eden knew it well. The leafy tracks behind the residential buildings, dug in by the feet of hundreds of joggers. The shady ponds and wooden stairs leading deep into the undergrowth. She came up behind Frank and looked over his shoulder at the cordons he was trying to impose – an impossible gesture given the limited manpower – encompassing two dozen streets or more.

‘Lock up the CCTV for Ocean Street, Craigend, Glenmore, Hargrave and Jersey,' he said into his radio. ‘If he's gone to ground he'll be in that ring. Secondary cordon from O'Sullivan to the Eastern Distributor.' Frank looked at her for a second, hardly seeing. ‘Get someone down to Oxford Street in case he went that way.'

‘Copy that.'

‘What was it?' Eden asked as the officers went to work. Frank had changed his shirt since she'd seen him at the
office. He'd been buried in paperwork and phone calls, now and then lifting his head to moan about how much he hated Caroline Eckhart. She'd hardly spoken to him all day. When she saw him on the smoker's balcony he'd been listening intensely to a phone call from Imogen, who was doing most of the talking.

‘Could be a false alarm,' he sighed. ‘Dog walker saw a person lingering on this side of the oval, in the trees over there. Black trackies, black hoodie. Doesn't know what he was looking at. When he found himself being watched he fled to a van.'

‘Fled?'

‘Walked quickly, head down.'

‘What's she doing on this side of the park?' Eden squinted at the tree line, two hundred metres away. ‘The hunting ground's over there.'

Eden puzzled at it. The stars were emerging slowly from the burnt orange hue above the city. It was the right time of day. A good place to hunt. The description was accurate. Were people becoming hysterical? Or was the killer really here? Was this a reconnaissance trip? She realised after some time that Frank was staring at her. Her lips were still salty with sweat.

‘Where have you been?'

‘Me?' Eden swiped a stray hair from her brow. ‘Jogging.'

‘Where? Here?'

‘No, Rushcutters Bay. I came in the car.'

Frank looked past her, followed her gesture to her car. He averted his eyes quickly, cleared his throat as a uniformed officer came for more directions. Eden watched him. His hand fluttered restlessly by his eyes, scratching at nothing. The eyes did not come back to her.

‘What?'

‘What?' Frank sniffed.

‘You're acting weird.'

‘Oh. Finally,' he smiled crookedly. ‘My turn to act weird.'

Eden watched him. He looked around at the officers busy working on maps, radioing in colleagues, following the progress of checkpoints. Nearby a woman with a dog was talking animatedly to a group of young female officers, pointing to a tree by the public toilets. Frank looked stressed. He tugged at the shirt. Eden only realised, as he touched it, how ridiculous it was on him. Too tight, salmon pink with a collar liner of little cross-hatches, peach, apricot, baby blue. He must have been on his way out to dinner with Imogen. No idea he'd be seen by his colleagues in it. He kept closing it at the throat to hide the colourful lining. Something twitched on the edge of his lips. Unspoken words.

‘Look at what you're wearing,' he finally said. Eden glanced at her tracksuit pants. Her hoodie. Black. She smirked, tried to meet his eyes, but they were locked on the trees.

‘Look at what you're wearing.'

‘I'm just saying,' he shrugged stiffly.