Hades (6 page)

At night Hades read to the children in the tiny living room, sunk into the couch with one on either side, a scotch resting in his lap. He couldn’t think of another way to educate them. He read to them from Dickens and Wordsworth, James and Haggard. When Eric showed interest, he read them Patrick Suskind’s
Perfume
and the dark tales of Poe. He indulged Eden with Shakespeare, which Eric hated.

 

 

A
ccording to the missing persons report filed by her parents, eleven-year-old Courtney Turner had disappeared on the short walk home from a sleepover at her friend’s house. Courtney had left the Oberon Street house at seven o’clock in the morning, crossed the Randwick cemetery on Malabar Road and gone missing somewhere between Elphinstone Road and her house on Jacaranda Place. Nobody saw a thing. I knew that area. It was quiet and leafy and narrow back there behind the cemetery—rolling hills and shadowy lanes and plenty of housing commission flats. Endeavour House was near there, full of navy and army boys.

At eight o’clock the morning she went missing, Courtney’s parents had phoned her friend’s house. At half past, they’d gone for a drive. At ten o’clock they’d arrived at the Maroubra police station and sat in the waiting room among the families of drug addicts and drunk teenagers for an hour. They were turned away. It was too early to file a report, they were told. At midnight they’d sat down with an apologetic Constable Alan Marickson to make a full report. Courtney was long gone by this time and everybody knew it. Gone, baby, gone.

It had been two weeks since Courtney disappeared when Eden and I turned up on the doorstep of the Turner house. Until now, the case had been handled by the missing persons department. From my discussions with them that morning it seemed they’d tried to hand the case over to homicide after a week and had been knocked back due to lack of evidence. And the big bosses were reluctant to cause a stir in the press by hinting that a child killer might be lurking around its pretty beachside suburbs. Lately, it seemed like missing persons had been whining a lot about a steep caseload and no one had taken them seriously. The discovery of the Watsons Bay bodies seemed to justify their concern about an upsurge in their work.

Courtney’s mother clearly recognized Eden from the news reports about the bodies in the boxes. Her knees went and I caught her before she hit the deck. I heard her husband calling from the kitchen.

Soon the screaming stopped and the numbness set in. The four of us sat around the glass-top table in the Turners’ stylish dining room, burning in the silence. Courtney’s mother, puffy-eyed, sat beside Eden, staring at her reflection in the microwave. The father chewed his knuckles.

I’d been in this situation a number of times and this was usually how it went. They howled and denied and threw things around. They sobbed and moaned and blamed each other. After a while the awkward presence of the cops was noted and everyone was invited to sit down. Then the parents closed up.

Eden was making notes quietly in her notepad. It looked like she was plotting a novel. I glanced around the kitchen, counting the purple tiles on the splashback above the sink.

Courtney’s mother was a small, thin blond woman. Her husband, by contrast, was huge and red-haired, like a caricature Viking. Agony was thick in the air. There were framed photographs of the girl everywhere. On the kitchen counter sat a stack of posters with her face. I couldn’t draw a correlation between the smiling preteen beauty in the “missing” posters and the sunken-eyed corpse I’d seen in the morgue only hours before.

I lost track of the conversation thinking about Courtney. Eden was cracking her knuckles. She made a few pages of notes from the barely whispered words of the mother.

“Who’s Monica?” Eden asked softly. Eliza Turner bit her lips. She took a breath and sighed. The gold bracelet found in the box with Courtney’s body was in the center of the table, still in its evidence bag.

“We have another daughter, two years older than Court,” Eliza whispered, glancing at her husband. “Derek and I have been fighting ever since . . . ever since that night. We sent Monica to stay with Derek’s mother. In Richmond. So she. You know. So she . . .”

“So she would be protected,” Eden said.

“Monica and Court sometimes swap bracelets. They have a matching pair. I don’t know why they do it,” Eliza sniffed. “They’ve always done it.”

I noted the mother’s use of the present tense. It made me want to chew my fingernails. I looked around and took a closer look at the photographs I’d been avoiding and noticed that, yes, there were two daughters. They looked so alike that on first impression it seemed an extensive collection of school portraits and dance troupe action shots and grinning Christmas pictures of one girl. Courtney and Monica—two peas in a pod. There were only a couple of them together and they seemed like twins.

“None of our other victims were found with jewelry,” Eden said carefully. “We’re missing wedding rings and earrings and piercings. Can you think why Courtney might still have had this with her when we found her?”

Eliza and Derek looked at each other. He shrugged.

“The girls were very protective of these bracelets. Court was almost paranoid. Maybe she . . . hid it from him. I don’t know.”

“Seems to suggest she knew what was going on. That she felt threatened,” I said.

“Jesus.” Derek rubbed his eyes.

“So, Derek, you’re the girls’ stepfather?” Eden asked.

“Yes.”

“Where’s their biological father?”

“He died. In 1998,” Eliza chipped in. “Heart attack. Monica was four when Derek and I married. Courtney was two.”

Eden continued writing.

“Ever had any problems with the two girls, Derek?” I asked.

“Why is that relevant?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. If I was trying to ruffle your feathers, you’d know about it. Everyone has problems with their step-kids. I’m just trying to get a picture.”

“They were both pretty good about it,” Derek sighed. “They were young enough that it didn’t really matter. Courtney gave me some a few years ago about not being her father but . . . I guess that’s pretty normal.”

“Did you notice anyone suspicious hanging around your neighborhood or your house in the days before Courtney’s disappearance?” I asked. “Did you have any strange phone calls?”

“No.”

“My colleagues tell me you guys moved into the area just a few months ago,” Eden said, looking at her notes. “The girls started at a new school. Anyone at the school you’re having trouble with?”

“No, no one.” Eliza sniffed. “Everyone’s been lovely. All the neighbors . . .”

“We answered this sort of stuff with the missing persons people,” Derek murmured.

“I know. We have to ask again, in case anything new comes to mind.”

“Courtney’s blood type was O negative,” Eden said carefully. “Which is reasonably rare. If you had to make a list of people who knew that, who do you think you’d start with?”

“Jesus. I don’t know.”

“Try,” Eden said. “As best you can. Take your time.”

Eden passed her notepad to Eliza. Eliza took one look at it and rose from her seat, walking drunkenly into the kitchen.

“I’ll make tea,” she said. “We should have tea.”

 

 

“That’s rough,” I said. We were in the car. The rain had cleared and the afternoon sun was blazing red between the billboards advertising new apartment buildings over fenced-off sandy wastelands. I’d offered to drive but Eden said she liked it. I could understand what she was talking about. Concentrating on the road. Avoiding hazards. Analyzing and predicting the actions of others. Anything but the thought of your child suffering. Anything but the thought of the years ahead without her.

“For the money or for the love. What do you reckon?” Eden asked eventually.

I thought about the question. How much was our killer making by offering a new life to patients staring down the barrel of oblivion? Was he doing it because he wanted to profit from the suffering of others? Or because there was a certain thrill in deciding who gets the chance to live and who slowly wastes away in the hospital waiting for the stroke or car accident that would bring a new kidney, a new heart, a new set of lungs?

“He gets a kick out of this,” I concluded. “He has to. There are twenty bodies that we know of so far. You don’t do something that many times for the money. You don’t do something that many times because it’s a chore.”

“I wonder if they knew, the recipients,” Eden mused. “I wonder what he told them. He could easily have spun some lie to make the whole deal more appealing. If you were dying and I told you I had a kidney that I was shipping in from some death-row inmate overseas, would you take it? I mean, it has to go somewhere.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve been on the waiting list for six months. Ten months. Two years. You’ve been bedridden for two years.”

“I’d have to think about it,” I sighed. We passed a billboard advertising end-of-fiscal-year clearances in bold red letters.
Prices slashed!

Neither of us spoke.

 

 

Jason stood in the field by the boarded-up house and looked at the mountains. A storm was creeping towards him from deep in the dusty West, and though he couldn’t see it, its earth-stirring smell had reached him an hour before. He had gone out into the long grass to wait for it.

Storms always reminded Jason of his father, whose return from the office each day had been very much like the stomach-thumping power of Mother Nature. The bright heat of midday always made the little house on Greendale Road seem like a dark cave because his mother, a slave to the drowsiness the heat produced, would pull down the blinds and shut the doors and windows, turn out the lights and let the quiet soothe her into a doze. The temperature dropped, the silence came, and he and his slobbering, bumbling little brother Sam played in silence in those afternoon hours as the pressure slowly mounted. His mother woke each afternoon at four and busied herself with preparations for his father’s arrival, spinning and spinning around the house in faster and ever-tightening circles, crackling with energy, brushing and scrubbing and polishing things. When his car rumbled into the driveway she would stand with the two boys at the end of the hall and listen to his footsteps getting louder. The adult Jason remembered these times with terror and glee as he stood looking at the black mountains, the white light snapping between their jagged tops and the dark ocean blue of the clouds above.

He stood in the field and remembered the perfect storm, one of the last storms before he and his father left the house on Greendale Road. It had come from another of Jason’s experiments. Jason was just about finished with his games with the birds and their strange, wordless marriages in the wild. But he was still thinking about the bonds between creatures. He’d been inspired to find out more about the bond between mother and child when he discovered the deflated body of an infant brown dove at the bottom of a tree by the lake, its gnarled claws and hollowed eyes crawling with ants, its thin leather skin receding from the tiny skull. Jason looked up and spied the nest, and almost in the same instant heard the chirping and pipping of the other babies in their bowl of sticks and mud and feathers. He was amazed. What was different about
this
baby that it had been forced to suffer such a cruel fate? How did the mother, who he was sure could feel and share love, switch off her love for this offspring so completely? He walked home, carrying the tiny dried carcass in his hands, placed it carefully on a tissue atop his tiny wooden desk and began to read.

The night of the greatest storm had begun like any other. The darkness of the afternoon descending over the house, his mother’s bare feet crossed at the end of the tightly made bed, the quiet tumble of wooden blocks on the polished floorboards as Sam played. Jason watched Sam for a long time—the clumsy grip of his pudgy fingers, the translucent string hanging from his dimpled chin. Jason knew there was something different about Sam. Something weak. His mother had told him that Sam had to be treated gentler than Jason’s other little cousins because Sam wasn’t as strong, that he hadn’t grown as well, that something had gone wrong in Mummy’s tummy when Sam was in there waiting to be born. Sam was different from the other babies. Jason watched Sam and wondered. Why didn’t his mother push Sam out? Did she want to? Was something stopping her? Was pushing Sam out the
natural
thing to do?

As usual Jason’s mother woke at four o’clock and began her polishing and scrubbing and spinning around, pushing open the windows, wiping the countertops, fussing with the couch cushions and muttering to herself. She fixed Jason’s collar and combed his hair and wiped his cheeks like she always did, sighing with annoyance at the dirt on his palms and the leaves in his shirt. Then she looked around for Sam. Father had come home and she wasn’t ready, and the two of them got to talking quickly and loudly and then to shouting. Jason watched, curious. His mother started crying and his father erupted, and soon enough the two of them were screaming and running around to all the rooms in the house, their voices loud as thunder. As they ran out into the yard calling Sam’s name, Jason followed, his head cocked, trembling with excitement as his experiment unfolded.

They’d never find Sam.