Fall (6 page)

Eden's mistakes at Rye Farm had left her with much more than a slit belly, though that was the worst of her physical injuries by far. The incision the killer made began just above her belly button and travelled upwards, deep enough to completely ruin all core strength she had previously possessed but blessedly not deep enough to spill her guts. In the violence before this injury, she had her nose broken, four teeth cracked, tendons permanently ruined in her neck and her left eye socket fractured. She compressed a disc in her lower back falling from the twine that had suspended her in the pig kill sheds.

All of these things took time, and money, to fix. Some things Eden knew would never be right, not in the days in the hospital, or the weeks in the rehab clinic, or the hours she spent on massage tables trying to repair ruined bits of herself. Eden had trusted one of her attackers, a foolish young girl she thought she might be able to help. It would be the last time Eden let the human part of her grow through the cement cracks – that struggling, pesky weed had almost got her killed.

She had let herself enjoy the company of another human being, feel genuinely connected. The girl's laughter, her touch, her big, trusting eyes. Eden was shocked how easily she'd accepted the lies of another monster. It was frightening to
realise that there were hunters out there even more skilled at killing than she was. Masters of disguise even she couldn't pick.

Never again. She would trust no one. She would let no one in. One person, and one person alone would touch her, and it would be Merri, her massage therapist. That was it.

By the time Eden arrived at Pearl Massage in Vaucluse that evening she'd reverted to using both her aluminium crutches. The day had been nothing but waiting, but it had weighed on her shoulders so hard that she now walked bent in the torso, her neck twisted slightly to the side. Her eye socket throbbed. She and Frank had stood by the secondary crime scene for four hours while tyre tracks and footprints were cast, photographed and collected. Slowly, details about the girl at the park began to flood through their mobiles as forensics, photographers, beat cops and secondary detectives phoned in. They sat side by side, taking down details in their notebooks, pointing with their pens when something relevant came up. Ivana Lyon. Twenty-three. Flight attendant. Strangulation. Blunt force. Single. No bad relationships. No kids. Apartment. Coogee. No indications of SA.

No indications of sexual assault. Eden paused at that one and tapped the paper a few times with her pen. She waved at Frank, the phone hot and wet with sweat in her fingers, and underlined the words. He frowned, but no time had presented itself throughout the day to discuss what that meant.

Eden thumped into Merri's brightly lit salon and received silent glances from three of the nail artists grinding at the fingernails of their middle-aged clients. Merri came out from the back room and smiled at her, all dazzling white teeth. She was a short woman, Thai, the hard, high shoulder pads of her black jacket making her look like a tiny war general,
a Napoleon with painted eyebrows far too long and square to appear even close to real. Merri was a brutal woman. Her words to the young nail girls were short, sharp and loud. One of the girls flew from her client, dropping her tools on the white towel on the table, and began making Eden a herbal tea.

‘Darl-eeng,' Merri said, taking Eden's arm in her cold, hard hands. ‘You need help. You come. You come now.'

‘I do. Thanks.'

Eden followed the little woman into the candlelit back room. She stripped to her underpants in the warm glow, breathed in the lavender incense choking the oxygen out of the room. She lay on the towels and sighed, trying to control the physical twitches that always began when she knew she was about to be touched, the quivering in her calves, the chemical desire to flee. Merri gathered her long black hair, rolled it and tucked it into a towel. Merri was a small woman, but she was strong. It had taken Eden a long time to find someone who would push her as hard as she needed to find relief. She needed to go well beyond a normal client's pain barrier. Far enough that the pain cancelled out all else – the worry and confusion over Ivana Lyon, the image of her ruined face on the grass.

‘Afterwards, we talk, darl-eeng,' Merri said lowly, positioning Eden's feet at the end of the bench.

‘Talk?' Eden lifted her head from the towel. ‘About what?'

‘Not now. We talk after. We fix you first.'

‘No, tell me. What are we talking about?'

‘You quiet,' Merri said and forced her knuckle into Eden's sole. Eden felt the heavy air rush into her, let it ease out as she relaxed back onto the bench. It was never long enough. She needed to focus on every second.

Afterwards Eden lay in a half-sleep, listening to the meditation album playing on the old CD player in the corner, the bird sounds and rolling waves, the gentle pipe music. The extraordinary pain Merri forced on her had receded into an intoxicating warmth, a pleasurable ache in her muscles. She turned her head and found the little woman sitting on a plastic chair beside her, pouring her second cup of tea. Eden propped herself up, took the little china cup and sipped from it, felt the steam on her damp upper lip.

‘Someone come here for you,' Merri said, holding her own tea. Eden felt like she was pulling herself out of a drunken stupor, though it had been years since she had been drunk. She lay and looked at Merri, let the tea rest in her hand on the top of the bench. The older woman seemed worried. Eden frowned.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Two day ago. Someone come here, for you,' Merri said. ‘They want give me money for photo of you.'

Eden pushed herself up, her body slowly becoming colder in the warmth of the room. Merri stood and the two women stared at each other in the dark.

‘A woman,' Merri said.

‘A woman asked you for a photograph of me?' Eden pointed at her chest.

‘Yes.'

‘You're … you're not making any sense.'

‘She come here, a lady. Pretty lady. She has picture of you.' Merri illustrated with her hands, held up an imaginary photograph. ‘She tell me, “Get picture of Eden Archer. I give you five thousand dollars. I give you five thousand – one picture.”'

Eden felt her heartbeat quickening. She felt it all over her body, her fingers pulsing as though being squeezed by invisible hands.

‘When was this? What kind of picture did this woman want?'

‘She want picture of this,' Merri said. The little woman reached out and touched Eden on the bright pink birthmark beside her left breast. Eden lifted her arm and looked at the mark, at Merri's white fingers pressed gently into the coloured flesh. She felt her stomach plummet. All the muscles in her back tensed at once, tugging her straight spine crooked once more in one huge simultaneous spasm of terror.

‘Get me my phone,' Eden said. ‘Now.'

In the old days, the Raymond Chandler days, homicide detectives used to spend the first forty-eight hours of a case running up leads themselves without eating, sleeping or shitting, without consulting anybody or writing reports or logging every goddamn sneeze in an incident log. Those days are gone. In the initial flurry after a murder, in between reporting to management every time someone swings their dick anywhere near the case, you field eight thousand phone calls. They're half organisational, half procedural. You assign everybody a place on the case – make sure no one you're working with has a conflict of interest, knew the victim or anyone related to the victim. You get your secondary detectives and their assistants all in a row, give them jobs and make sure they do them. You make contact with all the relevant medical bodies. The pathologist, his or her assistants, and various organisations that will take charge of and then pass the body on its way through the hospital, down through the morgue, into the freezer, back out again. It's kind of like organising a gigantic, gruesome surprise party – the details need to be managed in their millions, and it's all got to be kept secret from the press. Dozens of journalists call while you're putting things together, and you have to fend them off one by one with convincing lies and warnings so they don't get in the middle and blow the whole thing.

In general, I hate being on the phone. Unidentified numbers. The awkward silences. Trying to decide when the conversation is over or how to end it in an appropriate manner. The terror that someone's going to ring and they're going to remember me and I'm not going to remember them. I know. It's weird. My mother had it. The stuff I've done. I've chased guys with guns into dark warehouses. I took a crowbar to the head in an airport loading dock and then nearly got shot in the face. A German shepherd took a chunk out of my calf the size of a lemon on the way into a drug dealer's house. But none of that is as uncomfortable as when you're on the phone, particularly if it's to someone in authority, and you can't hear them clearly. And you have to say so, and then the person on the other end speaks louder and you still can't hear properly.

I found that the best way to deal with my phone phobia is to make sure I'm doing something else at the same time. So I invested in a hands-free set. I hooked the phone up while I worked on my house that evening. I cleared the kitchen of dust and hair and fluff with a broom and then started chipping out the burned bricks from where the oven had caught fire. The roofing guys had been in during the day and closed up the hole above me, but the ceiling was still incomplete, exposing wires and lightly charred beams. I put the bricks in a pile and sat looking at the hole I'd left with a tired satisfaction, fielding calls from the younger detectives and sucking a non-alcoholic beer.

In the first few hours, the minion detectives didn't know much more about Ivana Lyon that could help the case. The autopsy was being done overnight and I could view her in the morning. Apparently there were no leads in the family – no one was acting weird, they were all horrified and the mother was
in a Valium-induced coma. Ivana had been a mild-mannered, hard-working girl who was popular. She liked to party but wasn't a tweaker. We had plenty of friends and ex-boyfriends to sort through for potential suspects. Everything was fine at her job. Her colleagues were all your garden-variety flight attendant types – clean, neatly dressed people with lots of Tupperware.

I wasn't too enthusiastic about there being leads among Ivana's friends. If the attacker knew her, it seemed a strangely risky move to grab her off the side of the Centennial Park jogging track in front of dozens of potential witnesses. He'd have had a much easier time grabbing her in her apartment, or at her car, or a million other less populated places she probably frequented. My guess was that the murderer didn't know her, that she'd been a random pick. But then again, that didn't fit with the brutality, the obvious fury of the attack. Who gets that angry at a perfect stranger? I sat on the floor and looked at the black bricks and felt confused.

Imogen walked in at nine carrying takeaway boxes. The smell of curry preceded her. I tried to shake away the cerebral impulses that started zapping at the sight of her, those mental flashes that put my girlfriend and the murdered girl I'd spent all afternoon staring at together and transposed the images before my eyes, my police brain trying to terrify me.

‘It's my baby!'

‘Hi, baby.' She looked around, looked at me, looked at the three empty beers by my hand. Her pretty upper lip curled. ‘You know you're filthy, right?'

‘Give me a kiss.'

‘No.' She stepped awkwardly around the pile of dust and stuff I'd swept from the floor, pulled a plastic step ladder
from the wall and brushed it off before sitting on it. ‘You're drinking again?'

‘They're virgins.'

‘Still.'

‘I know,' I sighed. ‘I'll start again tomorrow.'

‘We should really go to my place. Get you a shower.'

‘I thought women liked men who worked,' I said. I flexed my biceps. She missed it.

‘Women like men who can afford other men to work for them.'

I pointed at the ceiling. She looked up at the newly patched roof.

‘Impressed?'

She said nothing. A call came through in my ears and I answered it with the button on the cord at my chest.

‘Frank Bennett.'

‘What's up, dickhead?'

‘Well, well. What's up, Hooky baby?'

‘I called to see what's happening with that girl,' Hooky said. ‘The park girl.'

‘Piqued your curiosity, has it?' I laughed. Imogen was watching me carefully. I made an apologetic motion and got up, heard both my knees crack. I moved down the hall.

‘I like to keep abreast of these things,' Hooky said. I could hear a train in the background. ‘North Sydney's not letting me have any fun while my exams are on. My life has become very pedestrian very quickly.'

I walked out the front of my terrace and told Hooky what I knew so far about Ivana Lyon's murder. It was a cool night, but nice. Next door, the young family was getting ready for bed,
bath-damp little kids around the couch, and mother brushing hair out of eyes, getting her sleep-time promises. A little fairytale behind glass, like those robotic Christmas displays they used to put up in shopping centres. Mum perpetually smiling, nodding. Shiny boxes around a pipe-cleaner tree. I watched a possum clamber along the guttering above the upper-floor windows of my terrace and slip silently through the broken front window into the empty upstairs bedroom. I updated Hooky on everything I had. When my eyes fell I saw Imogen standing in the doorway. I made another apologetic wave and finished up with Amy, grabbed Imogen and kissed her as I walked inside.

‘Who was that?'

‘Girl who works for my old station,' I said, half-dreaming at the sound of my feet on my own floorboards.

‘Woman who works for your old station,' Imogen corrected.

‘No, actually,' I laughed. ‘Girl. She's seventeen. Does some consulting work for us.' I could hear the possum on the upstairs floor. I banged on the wall and listened to it scurry in terror. Imogen followed me back into the kitchen, where I retrieved the curry boxes, snuck a forkful of massaman from one. ‘We can go to yours now, if you like. I'm done here.'

‘Great.' She slapped my butt when I bent to get my backpack. She stood in the doorway as I gathered up bits and pieces I needed – mostly paperwork.

‘What's a seventeen-year-old girl doing calling a middle-aged man on his mobile?' she said suddenly. The words tumbled out of her fast, as though she'd spent the last couple of minutes holding them back, trying to talk herself out of them.

‘Huh?'

‘It's just a little bit slutty, isn't it?'

I laughed. It was a half-humoured laugh, half-shocked one. I wasn't used to Imogen using dirty words. And the thought of Hooky being anything close to warranting the term ‘slut' was absurd. I thought of her as something like an odd ball little sister, or a niece. A little bird I'd seen take a big hit once, but I was now happy to see flying again.

‘Slutty? Oh my god! She was just calling for an update on the case.'

‘An update on the case,' Imogen scoffed. It wasn't a pleasant sound. It was half sneer.

‘She was.'

‘Is it her case?'

‘No.'

‘Uh-huh,' Imogen folded her arms. ‘You called her “baby”.'

‘Holy crap, you're jealous. This is hilarious.'

‘Is it?'

‘I've always called her “baby”. It's not baby like … baby. Amy is a baby. She's like … a little girl.'

‘You call me baby.'

‘Ah. Well, I use the term with a different intention.' This conversation was getting weird.

‘Uh-huh,' Imogen said.

She looked at me standing there with the curry boxes in my hands and my backpack on my shoulder. It was almost as though I'd been caught out on something. Guilt churned in the pit of my stomach. Once again, I felt the sting of being unable to understand the ways of women, their secret codes and inferences. We'd slipped into another language. I didn't even have a basic grasp of what was being said here, what I'd
done wrong. I bit my lip and replayed the conversation with Hooky, tried to decide if anything untoward had been said by either party. But it hadn't. It really hadn't. There'd been work stuff only and a bit of the bantering that we always did. I couldn't even begin to conceive of there ever being anything else to it.

‘Baby,' I said, reaching for Imogen, ‘don't be silly.'

‘Come on.' She jerked her head towards the front door. ‘Let's go. It smells in here.'