Fall (28 page)

Ruben stood on the ledge beneath the attic window and looked down at the grass underneath his feet. He'd broken into a few places in his life when things became desperate – once into his own bedroom after his parents had caught him out in the night and barred him from coming back in. A storm was brewing beyond the tree-lined park, just beginning to sprinkle the cars parked alongside the iron gates with rain. He'd spent the afternoon listening for sounds in the attic room, and when he was convinced no one was home, he began to climb. On top of the garage, he suddenly remembered the white van, and peeled back a worn sheet of corrugated iron to peer into the gloomy space. The van was gone.

He was well aware that his curiosity about the person in the attic room had crept beyond healthy interest. When he stood on the steps outside the police headquarters with his papers in his hands, he had questioned what drove him, what sick pull had hold of him and was reeling him in towards the attic room. He felt pain and terror behind the door at the top of the stairs – but it was more than that. He had told the disinterested Australian policeman he thought that whoever was in the room was the killer. The words had rolled off his tongue, and it was only as he said them that he knew he'd believed this
from the moment he read the gossip articles about the Harper girl, and that this had grown and swelled in his mind when he heard the snarling beyond the door.

The Harper kid is a psycho … The physical and psychological fallout from bad choices …

Bad, bad, bad. There was no better word for what Ruben had heard centimetres from his fingertips, a person, a thing, raging at the wood, a slave to the badness infecting its own body. He couldn't see her, but Ruben could feel the black cloud swirling inside the room. He felt the chill of its wispy fingers slithering under the door in his first moments in the Harper house. There was no cleaning away that badness, no matter how hard he scrubbed.

The boy reached up, gripped the chipped railing beneath the attic windows and pulled. He flipped his elbows up onto the ledge, pushed up and shoved at the windows. Blessedly, they gave easily. He slid over the windowsill and through the curtains.

It was dark inside the attic room, and the air was thick with mould, the wet, damp mould of old bathrooms, metallic on the tongue. There was no light. He scrambled to the wall and tried the light switch by the door. A bulb, long-unused, snapped on above him, shuttering to life angrily like a child shaken awake. At once, the faces pressed in on him as though they had been waiting for him in the dark. It seemed, in the first moment of terror, that they all turned towards him. But in a moment he realised that there were too many. That the hundreds and hundreds of faces were static and not real. He realised, as he crouched by the door, that they were all the same face.

Joan Harper. The sharp blonde woman from the gossip columns, the one photographed sitting placidly at a restaurant
with a friend. There were pictures of her littered over every surface, tacked to every square centimetre of wall. Photographs from the house. Young Joanie in her teenage years, squeezed into frame between two other blonde girls, her white teeth gleaming in a Cheshire cat smile. Joan Harper on the bow of a yacht, her short hair whipped across her forehead. Joan Harper on her wedding day, pulling on her snow-white heels. Leaning against one corner was a huge oil painting of Joan Harper reclining in a red leather wingback, her fingers coiled daintily around the stem of a wine glass.

All the pictures were eyeless. Where the eyes should have been were ovular black hollows, scribbled out so that the paper tore and black lines wound around and around the taut cheeks of the Joans crowding up into the corners of the room. The mouths gaped in identical black ovals, howling, hundreds of ghoul Joans screaming from the walls.

Ruben was trembling. He crawled to the table beside the window, put his hand down to steady himself and gagged as a grey puff of mould swirled around a collapsed plate of what might have been cake. Tiny flies billowed from a stack of mould-encrusted plates covered in photographs of Joan, eyes stabbed through, mouths swirling black abysses. Ruben pulled the window closed, felt rain on his cheeks.

I'm not cut out for management. There's too much standing around. Captain James has about forty-eight ‘poised-but-ready' poses that he does around the office. But I'm just not that inventive.

As soon as I got to the command centre in Macquarie Street I knew I wasn't going to be there long. Four fold-out tables sliced the little tent in two, cords running over the pavement to wide computer monitors. Eden's scribbled mess of a map was pinned to the inside of the white marquee. The makeshift room was lit by a series of twenty-dollar Ikea lamps someone had run out and grabbed at the last minute, giving it the strange feel of a university dorm room. An esky at the side of the tent was packed with cans of Coke. Every now and then the blue arm of a beat cop slid through the wall and grabbed one before disappearing again, the hammer of boots or the ticking of a pushbike signalling his return to the beat.

Hooky was all over her iPad, tapping, shifting things around. I stood and watched alerts coming up on the screens in front of the cops sitting at the computers, listened to them chatter back and forth over their radios. An officer had dropped out of the other command centre over in Kensington and was in the process of being replaced. Descriptions of the killer were
being passed around, and to me it sounded as though we were hunting a ghost. I shifted from foot to foot for a while and then went to the tent flap and looked out at the empty road. A flash of lightning between the buildings on Bridge Street lit up the glass façade of the Museum of Sydney.

‘They're almost on us,' Hooky said.

I looked down Macquarie towards the Opera House and picked out a couple of runners, hovering silhouettes on the black asphalt. In seconds they were upon me, a tight group of leaders galloping by, faces set and cheeks sucking at cheekbones. Behind them was a steadily growing wall of humanity, the swinging arms and gaping mouths of an army of machines. The runners came up the hill and shot past, rubber soles clopping on the oily road.

A couple of officers at the edge of the tent cheered them as they went by. One or two of the runners raised their hands in the air, pumped fists in response.

Someone was going to die tonight.

I could feel it in the air. It was too jubilant. Too innocent. The runners had the look of happy sheep enclosed in the lush wet valley of the city buildings. But darkness was approaching. When I looked back down the street towards the harbour, I couldn't see the runners coming off the Cahill Expressway anymore. It was all shadow down there.

I went back inside and took Hooky's arm.

‘As they say in the classics: let's get outta here.'

‘Don't lose it,' she said. ‘We've gotta stay level. The first alerts will come in soon.'

‘And I want to be there,' I said. I walked out of the tent, knowing she would follow. Three police Honda bikes were standing in a row by the fence, helmets at the ready.

‘You can't ride one of these,' Hooky smirked.

‘You want to make a bet?'

I chucked her a helmet. I felt a surge of delight at the flash, however brief, of admiration on her face. Her iPad blipped as she was pushing the helmet onto her head. She grabbed it from where she'd set it on the back of the motorbike.

‘It's an alert,' she said. ‘One of the half-marathoners has missed a checkpoint on the Pacific Highway.'

‘Jump on, kid,' I said. Maybe it was too much.

 

Eden ran. In her ears, snippets of police conversation rolled over each other, the whole of the festival police command buzzing frantically against the steady beat of her breath.

‘Lyrebird to Central Command. Shifting units four-seven-zero and four-seven-one to Domain sector four. The five K runners are half done. Over.'

‘Central Command to Lyrebird. Roger the last. Over.'

‘Currawong to Command, have sighted the first marathoners. Over.'

‘Command to Currawong, roger that. Waterhen, let me know when you've got the first runners down where you are, mate. Should be twenty minutes or so.'

‘Waterhen. Gotcha, Command.'

The Central Command's voice was not Frank's. Eden did not pick his voice above the gentle spattering of talk and radio whistles as the marathon runners moved slowly towards Kensington. Around her on the wide road, runners bopped along, each with a distinctive shuffle – long-legged antelope people galloping ahead of her and short plump people with swift, shallow steps falling behind.

The storm was upon them now, but it was not as furious as it had appeared raging and flashing over the Blue Mountains. The rain fell in hard heavy drops, pattering on her shoulders and chest. It would be gone before it could dampen her socks, dissolving out over Coogee.

As the mass of runners around her approached the sprawling front gates of the University of New South Wales, a troupe of students wearing matching pink T-shirts began to swirl and bounce, buoyed after a gap in the crowd, their banners swaying from side to side above grinning heads.

If your partner is violent, don't be silent.

Fear is not a substitute for respect.

A young girl with electric blue hair approached Eden with a paper cup of orange liquid. She shook her head and kept trotting.

She didn't need sustenance. She needed painkillers. The old wound from sternum to pelvis was burning again, the tortured muscles beneath twisting as she loped along, tearing at hardened scar tissue. She kept her eyes on the group, slowing a little to keep herself in the middle of the stretch of two hundred or so runners. If she turned her head, Eden could see runners a kilometre or so behind her, some the same distance ahead. It was only a selection of those who were running the marathon, but it was a good chunk. She would leave them to catch a ride with a squad car somewhere before La Perouse to be with another group running up along the coast.

She couldn't be stationary. Not with so much prey around. Some little corner of Eden's mind acknowledged that the very thought of the killer being out there somewhere like a snake poised beneath a rock waiting for the perfect victim to sidle by would awaken the same deadly instinct in her. Because she
knew someone else was hunting, Eden felt her own hunter instincts stirring. When a couple of runners came up behind her, hooted and cheered at her side for a second, having seen ‘Police' on the back of her T-shirt, it was all she could do not to reach out, grab fabric, hair, skin.

At La Perouse, she trotted past Long Bay prison and its golden-lit towers. She watched the diamond wire bouncing with the motion of her body, saw the silhouettes of guards in the birdcage, the first intake area for new prisoners arriving in vans. Eden had put quite a lot of people into the Bay. Her parents' killers had been there together. She'd visited its dark concrete halls many times, looked out from the offices at the manicured internal gardens littered with cigarette butts. The place was so familiar she felt like waving as she passed. When she turned back to the road, she saw the face in the dark, a slice of face beyond a black hood, white in the glow of the moon. For just a second the person in the jacket looked back over its shoulder at Eden, grinned and turned. Eden felt the fine hairs all along her arms stand on end.

The hooded runner sped up. Eden pushed and felt her thighs respond immediately with a bone-deep ache at her new momentum, a ripple of electricity through her chest and shoulders as her body responded to the increase in effort. She watched in the grip of breathless fury as the runner in black began edging his way towards a female runner, drifting sideways, closer and closer to a woman in purple. The woman didn't even glance at him. She was locked in that face-forward position, the same that had blocked all Eden's senses as she ran through the park at Rushcutters. The hypnotic rhythm of feet, knees, hips, breath, arms had captured her, and all it took was one good knock from the side to send her stumbling towards the concrete gutter.

Eden looked around quickly. They were almost alone. What had been a tight pod of runners was now spread across the island in the centre of Anzac Parade, trees shielding their view of the attack. There were runners behind, but when Eden looked back at them, all she saw were blank faces, swinging arms, puckered mouths. The hooded runner grabbed the girl in purple by the back of her neck and pushed, let the momentum of the slope of the hill carry her down towards the tennis courts, her feet struggling to find traction in the wet grass.

Eden sprinted over the gutter, over the hill, launching herself down the slope towards the fence around the courts. Her numb fingers fumbled for the gun at the base of her spine. She had the weapon in her hands when the two runners hit the fence in a jangle of wires, tackling each other, the crash almost loud enough to drown out their laughs.

Eden skidded to a painful halt.

‘We got her,' the boy laughed, dragging off the hood. He was an androgynous kind of creature with chocolate curls and big lips, grinning at an almost-identical girl. Brother and sister, Eden guessed. ‘We fucking got her.'

‘That was too easy,' the girl snickered. ‘We're sorry, officer. We just couldn't help ourselves.'

Eden licked her lips. Stood waiting in the dark and the rain for more to come, but none did. The kids stood laughing against the fence, the boy hugging himself with a helpless kind of hilarity that Eden thought was reserved for childhood. When she'd heard enough she strode forward, and with one heavy swing cracked the boy's nose with the butt of her pistol.

The girl's laughter turned to screams as though a switch had been flipped. Blood gushed down the boy's face, over his lips and hands, an inky torrent.

‘What did you do? What did you do?' the girl screamed.

‘Sorry,' Eden said. She slipped her gun back into the belt holster. ‘Couldn't help myself.'

She ran back up the hill to the road.

 

The first alert was on the Pacific Highway. When Hooky and I got there, and she recovered from the very impressive skid I did right where the checkpoint was marked, we found the runner being taken care of by a few spectators. She'd rolled her ankle on one of those rubber pipes that crosses the road surface to measure the frequency of cars. By the time we arrived, Hooky was dealing with two more alerts over the police radio. A runner had gone down with a dodgy knee back towards the Harbour Bridge, and an old man was being hauled off the hill over on the fifteen-kilometre course with chest pains. I drove Hooky back across the bridge towards an alert in the Domain. Glancing in my rear-view mirror, I saw her looking up at the giant ribs of the bridge as we passed.

‘Pretty good, ay?' I yelled, my words muffled by the helmet. I felt her laugh against my back. A group of organisers heading back towards the Domain cheered at us from the side of the bridge. It might almost have been fun, burning across the empty bridge on the hot, humming machine, had there not been half a city under threat from a being whose work I had seen firsthand. All the while the radio crackled in our ears.

‘Lyrebird to Command. We're getting reports of an assault on an individual near Little Bay Road, just after the prison. They're saying it might have been a police officer. We'll send a unit out.'

‘Archer to Command. Don't bother with that one. Couple of crybabies.'

Eden's voice. I listened hard.

‘Command to Lyrebird. Archer confirmed. Let the ambos clean it up.'

I swung the bike down the Cahill Expressway. There were still runners on the road, mums chattering as they pushed their sleeping children in prams down the road, groups of teenagers determined to be last, all enjoying the novelty of the empty expressway. To our left, a massive cruise ship lit up like an apartment building blocked the view of the bridge.

The crowds in the Domain parted as I slid the bike through. All the serious competitors had finished and were mingling among the market stalls set up on the oval, sweaty brows wiped and grins spread across faces, bubbles sparkling in plastic cups. I could smell curry burning. I nosed the bike through the crowd and gunned it up a short hill behind the café onto the road in front of the art gallery. The runners were faster here – trying to give it everything they had as they came down the hill towards the finish line in the bus loop before the gallery.

‘What number?'

‘Ends in 583,' Hooky yelled.

I started driving back through the runners, looking for a bib number that ended in 583. The runner had missed the last two checkpoints before the finish line. I'd told Hooky to tell me if the person came through, but she hadn't said a word, so I had to assume she was still stopped somewhere in the last kilometre of the race. Runners swaggered past me, hardly noticing the plainclothes cop on the bike, eyes set on the finish line. Arms once swinging rigidly in parallel arcs now flailed. Mouths
howled for air. I inched up the hill and around the corner to the top of Macquarie.

Numbers flashed past me. I looked down the hill and could see the end of the crowd, the mothers with prams I'd seen ten minutes earlier.

‘Where are they?' I asked. Hooky didn't hear me. I burned down the hill, my pulse steadily increasing, making the helmet shift against my throbbing skull. I looked down alleyways, swept the bushes at the edge of the park with my eyes, half-hoping, half-dreading the sight of a shadowed figure bent over a fallen runner. Hooky wriggled behind me, pulled the iPad out of her jacket. I slowed the bike, listened to its rhythmic beat.

‘Still hasn't checked in,' she said. ‘Must be here somewhere.'

I let the bike roll, looked at the doorways of the buildings. Runners wandered past, these ones too unfit to finish at a jog. I scanned their numbers: 671, 332, 400.

We were parallel to the row of green and yellow porta-loos when the door of one crashed open. Hooky and I swung around at the noise in time to see a huge hulk of a man emerge from the weak grey light inside a cubicle onto the wooden crate steps beneath the doors. He tugged his sweat-damp shorts up over his hips and wiped sweat from his neck onto a hairy forearm. He spotted us and shot me a sickly half-grin. I looked at the race bib pinned crookedly to his shirt. 11583.