Fall (16 page)

‘Not just found him, mate,' Charmaine smiled. ‘I fucking whacked him.'

‘This is incredible,' Eden said, sitting back in her chair. I think she meant ‘incredible' in the true sense of the word. Not to be believed.

‘George Hacker is in custody. He's on his way here. He's been treated and released to us.'

‘And it looks good?' I said.

‘From what we found on the video camera, it looks pretty good.'

‘Video camera?'

‘The suspect was found videotaping joggers. Women only. Navy blue hoodie, black tracksuit pants, crouching in the bushes videoing women coming up the path and back down again. Lots of close-ups. From a raid on his apartment, there are plenty of tapes. Edited tapes. Compilations of women's breasts, arses, their … their front … parts,' Tony coughed.

‘Navy blue hoodie, was it?' I asked.

‘Yep.'

‘And no weapons? No guns or anything?' Eden asked.

‘No, nothing like that.'

‘And this occurred just now?'

‘Four o'clock this morning,' Charmaine said. ‘On the dot. I never believed people got up that bloody early. But the place was full of people doing yoga and running and stretching and doing that … what's that one they do?' She waved her arms, hands flat.

‘Tai chi.'

‘Tai chi,' she confirmed. She drew a long breath, eased it out slowly. She was wavering between talking about her daughter's
murder like she was talking about someone she didn't know and approaching the edge of that terrifying reality in her mind. I could almost see her back away from the emotion like it was a seizure that was threatening to come over her.

Keep talking. Keep talking and you won't have to think.

Eden and I looked at each other for a beat. She turned the golf club over and over on the tabletop.

‘Okay. Well, look, Charmaine,' I sighed, ‘I'm sure my colleagues here will agree with me in saying that, speaking for the New South Wales Police Force, we never encourage vigilantism. What you did was reckless and dangerous. You acted without authority, without sufficient evidence, and you might have gotten yourself killed or worse out there. I mean, that was mad, lady. It was a mad, mad thing you did, and I hope you never do anything like it ever again.'

Charmaine sat and looked at me. The dog beside her started panting, its tongue slicked with foamy saliva. It swallowed loudly.

‘Speaking as myself, though,' I shrugged, ‘I think you're pretty fucking awesome.'

Eden sighed.

‘I agree,' Tony laughed. ‘What a tiger. Pow.' He gave an imaginary golf swing, shielded his eyes as he followed an imaginary decapitated head across an imaginary skyline. ‘Do you even play golf?'

‘I'm going to try to maintain the integrity in the room and bid you farewell,' Eden said as Tony and I continued miming golf-themed assaults. ‘Frank and I will keep you up to date with the case as it progresses, Ms Lyon. Thank you for your assistance.'

Eden shook Charmaine's hand and left.

‘You two better punish this fucking guy.' Charmaine pointed at me, chewing her lips. I thought I saw a shimmer of emotion in her eyes, but before I could lock on it, it was gone. ‘I'm serious.'

We had the paramedic team turn around and deliver George Hacker right to his apartment on the upper level of a colourful row of terraces in Redfern. The street smelled of beer and rotting vegetables, and Otto bins stood sentry in all positions – behind buildings, on the kerb, in bushes, on landings – like faceless bottle-green robots in colourful hats. Everything smelled pissed on, both by stray dogs and drunks. The light rain that had recently passed seemed to enliven the smell. This was a place where people knew cops, uniformed or not. A group of teenagers split from the front of the house next door as we arrived, heads down and hands in pockets. They took up residence on the opposite corner and loitered, as kids do, kicking stones and glancing at us over each other's shoulders.

There was blood on the yellow front door of George's place and an army of ants trailing under the rubber liner at its bottom, fat-bellied ants grown lazy on a gluttony of leftover pizza boxes within. The government had allotted George the upper floor and given the ground floor to a family of five – a single mother who used the back door of the building, minded her own business, and didn't seem to know George had been living above her at all, let alone whether he drove a van. She
didn't know when she'd seen George last or what her birth date was or whether or not she'd been arrested in the last six months. She slammed the door in my face in a mixture of disdain and relief when I bid her goodbye. Her kids were milling around her skirt as we spoke, grubby-faced and grey-toothed like little trolls under a tree, kids who spent their whole day with a baby-bottle of Coke or chin-staining strawberry cordial between their jaws. Kids who slept through fistfights and sirens, budding versions of the loiterers across the street. There was a surprising number of children visible from the front of George's row, looking out the windows of upper floors and peeking through mail slots. Dirty hands, faces that wouldn't smile back at you no matter what you were offering.

We hadn't let Anthony know how far from likely it was that George Hacker was our man. Anthony had been so smugly excited about Charmaine Lyon's find that I couldn't let him down by telling him that the hoodie was the wrong colour, the guy had been stalking joggers at the wrong time of day, there was no weaponry or abduction material found on or near him and he'd taken a little red Hyundai, rather than a van, to the park that morning. George Hacker dropped out of school in Year Nine to take up an apprenticeship as a mechanic, a qualification he proved incapable of completing due to literacy skills so poor that even TAFE exams were too much for him. He was likely too dumb to know what a tranquilliser was, let alone their different chemical nuances. He had one sexual assault charge dating back to age seventeen when he'd groped a teenage girl in the surf, making out like he was trying to break his fall from a dumper. He'd been warned about his busy hands in the white wash before, but didn't heed the caution. He only
served a month, being a teen and all. He'd steered clear of much trouble after that.

Like most degenerates, George was an emaciated character, short with a big forehead like something in his skull had swelled and stretched the cranium out, pushed the parietal bone back so that it shadowed the nape of his neck. Collarbones like external plumbing popped out almost on top of the skin. He emerged handcuffed from the cab of the ambulance and stood squinting on the street, looking up at the windows of the adjacent terrace house and spying the children there watching the drama. The back of his head was bandaged, two spots of dark red blood seeping through the patch like little eyes.

‘Fark off, ya little farkers,' George sneered at the kids in the windows and kicked the front gate. ‘Go find something else to watch, ya nosey farken mongrels.'

‘Right-o.' Eden strode forward and took George's arm. ‘That's enough. We're all very impressed.'

‘This here is harassment.' George spat on the ground, barely missing Eden's brown leather boot. ‘You cops've had it out for me since I was farken born. This is the third time I been picked up this month. I ain't done nothing. You been watching. You been waiting. But I wasn't doing nothing but –'

‘This is a Redfern street, not the State Theatre,' I said. ‘Let's save the dramatics for the official statement.'

He continued unabated, spat again. ‘I ain't done noth–'

‘No one's listening,' I said. ‘No one cares. And you spit near my partner again and I'll put your head through that fucking mail slot.'

That really set him off. Eden unlocked his cuffs and glanced at me, weary. She knew now that I was going to be the
antagoniser, which made her the empathiser. Classic good cop, bad cop. The system was traditional because it worked, but I knew that Eden liked being the bad cop. She got bored being nice to crims. Was hardly convincing at it. That's why I liked to snatch it off her early. I didn't like good cop either.

I told George Hacker that no one cared for a reason. It's as effective as a sucker punch, without all the police brutality charges. Telling members of the lower socio-economic rungs of Australia that no one cares about them really gives them the shits and, I'll admit, I find that amusing. I know. It's a lowly and cruel kind of amusement. I'm always entertained by how shocked they are about it. They never expect it. If you listen to them in Centrelink queues, in police station waiting rooms, on the corners and in the shopping-centre car parks of Redfern, Kings Cross, Punchbowl, Campbelltown, all they talk about is how no one cares about them. No one gives a shit about them. The government. The police. The child welfare people. So when you tell them that actually, yes, you really don't care about them, it confirms everything they're been telling their friends and colleagues and drug dealers all their adult years. They're simultaneously infuriated that you admitted it and horrified that none of their friends, colleagues or drug dealers was around to hear the admission, hear them vindicated. I took George by the back of his neck and pushed him into the house. Eden followed us, half-heartedly trying to talk me down from being too rough.

I tossed George onto his sagging grey couch and looked around the little flat in disgust. There were a couple of centimetres of brown city dust on everything, blown in from a dozen construction sites between his apartment and the CBD. The place felt damp and cramped, like most drug hovels do, some
thing mildly sexual about it, like regret felt after a cheap affair, sweaty sheets and head-impressed pillows. I brushed crumbs off a plastic outdoor chair that was waiting in the entrance to the kitchen like a neglected child. Sat down, looked at George.

‘I want all the tapes. Everything you've got,' I said. ‘And I don't want to have to get it by rummaging through your filthy drawers.'

‘I'm not –' George snivelled, already looking to Eden for help. ‘This ain't something I do, alright? Alright? I was just out there, this one time, just trying out me new camera. Some bitch whacks me right in the fucking head while I'm playing with a camera in a park. I'm innocent, mate. I ought to sue that farken bitch, get me some compo for this shit. I ain't got no farken tapes, so you can –'

‘People like you always keep tapes, George.'

‘The fuck you mean, people like me?'

‘George,' I sighed. ‘The tapes.'

‘Tell us where the tapes are, George,' Eden said.

‘I don't –'

‘Tell us where you keep them.'

‘I ain't got no farken tapes,' George screamed and bounced once on the couch like something had bitten him. A frustrated half-leap. ‘Jesus farken Christ you coppers, you don't listen, you –'

I stood up and went into the kitchen. Grabbed a tall water glass from the sink, cloudy with fingerprints. Came back. Eden watched me walk over to a small rectangular fish tank on a wooden stand beside the television set, a sad little orange and white goldfish bobbing weakly around the surface of the water, hunting for rainbow flakes. I looked at George, waited, but he
didn't speak. I lifted my arm and swung my elbow into the front of the fish tank. The glass popped, and with a satisfying glubbing sound the contents began to empty onto the carpet at my feet, splashing up against the glass front of the television stand.

‘Fark!' George screamed, rising up off the couch. Eden pushed him down, one-handed, bored. ‘You stupid prick. Look what you've done.'

‘Detective Bennett,' Eden sighed. ‘Is that really necessary?'

I waited calmly as the tank emptied, the water slapping on the carpet, making a large dark blue stain that reached almost to the couch. The goldfish, strangely serene, circled the tank until the flow of the water took him through the hole in the tank and into the glass in my hand. I set the full glass, goldfish bobbing on its surface, on top of the television set.

Now the room smelled of algae and fish turds. I tried to decide if it was an improvement.

‘Listen, you piece of shit. I don't have anything to give you.' George's bottom lip quivered. ‘I'm not some crazy sicko out filming women. This whole thing, this is a fucking … misunderstanding. It's a mistake. Don't break any more of my shit, or I swear to god, I'll farken kill you!'

‘Oh. Is that a threat?'

‘Detective Bennett.'

I pushed over a CD rack. It crashed to the floor.

‘Detective Bennett!'

‘Let's see where a casual search takes us,' I said. I walked to the bookshelf under the window and selected a DVD from the extensive collection there. Scumbags always have huge collections of DVDs displayed in racks like books. I wondered idly if they emulated the bookshelves of more learned environ
ments, the offices of lawyers who handled their compensation claims, the libraries where they conducted their job and rental searches. This was an idiot's depository of knowledge.
Wild Wild West
.
Die Hard III
.
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
. I popped open the plastic case in my hands.
Titanic
. I looked at the disc. It looked legitimately made but I doubted it had been legitimately paid for.

‘Nope,' I said. I closed the case and flung it casually out the open window, over the balcony and onto the street.

‘No. Stop. Stop.'

I popped open
Terminator II
. Clipped it closed, sent it spinning into the air.

‘Not here either.'

‘Please, please, tell him to stop.'

‘I suggest if you want him to stop, you give him what he wants, George.' Eden was sitting on the back of the couch, her arms folded over her chest. I flipped
The Godfather
and
Alien
off the balcony. The teenagers from the corner sprinted across the asphalt and started scooping up the DVDs as they clattered onto the road. They'd spend the next few days getting stoned and watching them, then take them straight to Cash Converters.

‘Please.'

‘Not here. Not here. Not here.'

I flipped DVDs, put a good spin on them as they flew through the air like playing cards. The wind caught them and they curved away from the teenagers' hands. They laughed. It's always good to see teens laughing. It's not an easy thing to achieve.

‘George, give Detective Inspector Bennett what he wants. Right now we can sting you for public nuisance at best,' Eden
said gently. ‘Tell us where we can find your collection, or we'll get more creative. Detective Bennett will start pulling apart your furniture and I'll start thinking of interesting ways to fuck up your world. I'm thinking use of surveillance devices to record a private activity without consent. I'm thinking filming for indecent purposes, or maybe committing indecent or offensive acts in a public place. I mean, are you absolutely certain all the runners you were filming were adults, George? I'm wondering if making indecent visual images of a child under the age of sixteen might be on the cards.'

Eden was very good with verbatim material on offences, their minimum and maximum terms. I'd always thought it was very impressive, imagined her sometimes lounging in the bath reading law manuals and shaving her legs. I flipped
Dodgeball
out the window and one of the teen boys jumped and caught it one-handed like a cricketer.

I broke three plates, kicked over a pot plant and spilt a bag of rice all over the countertops and the floor before George finally submitted. Eden had bargained and begged and bribed him as much as her black heart would allow for a good hour and a half, but I think it was the rice that finally did it. No matter how much you try, you'll never recover all the grains after a major spill. You'll still be finding them when you do your final bond clean before moving, years from now, a marriage had and failed, the entire apartment painted three times over and the kids next door grown up and moved away.

Rice. It's a bastard.

Underneath the sink, behind a row of greasy cleaning liquid bottles, a plastic Tupperware container of George's homemade DVDs lay waiting for us. We left George crying on the couch
and complaining of a migraine and took the discs back to the station for analysis. Five officers on ten computers gave the recordings a quick play, so we could get a feel for George's tastes, whether they were violent or not. Eden and I stood at the front of the computer room, allowing it some distance, considering the collection of windows before us, the women huffing their way from one side to another, their dogs and prams and children out in front.

There was no overtly violent material present on any of the discs.

Now some people would say that in a way the tapes were violent, that George's predatory gaze symbolically assaulted the women he filmed for his own gratification while they frolicked freely, as they rightly should be able to, in the assumed privacy of what should be an ungendered, totally ‘equal' public environment. That the penetrative lens of the camera reduced these women to sexual objects with the same type of aggressive and oppressive sentiment that a rapist might using his body, and that the non-consensual filming, or ‘upskirting', of women, should in no way be considered harmless sexually themed play.