E
very now and then Harry Ratchet took a moment to close his eyes and enjoy his space. He had been alone a long time now, and yet still, once a day at least, he would stand in the silence of his tiny caravan in Cronulla among the things that were his and solely his—his Ned Kelly memorabilia collection and the damp towels on the floor and the empty pizza boxes on the sink and the Jimmy Barnes records—and feel blissfully alone.
There was barely floor space in this place, a few footholes in the dark between the door and the end of the bed and the television stand, a square of bathroom mat before the bathroom annex. But these were his for treading and no one else’s. The shower cubicle he stood in, mere centimeters on all sides of his round and taut and hairy body where weak but blistering hot water fell, it was his. His space. It was all about space for Harry. A handspan of Harry Only Territory was something hard won, and he was determined to enjoy it.
Scarlett had no idea about space, which made Harry laugh now, because the woman had been obsessed with being close. In the early days after Harry had found her, she an uptight career rabbit and he a lazy but presentable week-to-week hound, Scarlett had been able to make a two-hundred-square-meter penthouse in Mosman feel crowded, following him around the huge balcony while he watched the yachts being tossed around, rubbing up against him.
Her couch had been the length of his current lodgings and had cost more, but he’d fought for a centimeter of room on it. She’d have a room full of television personalities and socialites and politicians spread out around her at one of her charity gigs, lights on her perfectly sculpted biceps, everyone’s favorite weather girl, male models adjusting their trousers at the sight of her, and she’d cling to Harry’s arm like she hadn’t found him in the dark one afternoon on set, fumbling with wires, swigging Coke and itching in his uniform polo. He was her star. Her home. The rock she anchored to. Harry could hardly breathe but he liked the money, so he learned how to distract her and slip away, look at the sky, have a smoke without her jabbering at him.
After a year or so Harry got sick of ducking and diving away from Scarlett whenever he got the chance and tried to train her, because the big Four-Oh had made him realize he was onto a good deal and starting again would be a hassle. She’d made the national news, too, so he could give up the audio-rigging game. If it was going to be the long haul with Scarlett, Harry needed to straighten her out and show her who was boss.
The first thing he did was take the money. The second thing was push her mother and her loudmouthed friends out of the picture with a few carefully placed ultimatums. Step three in his plan was positive reinforcement, the way you train little wide-eyed terriers with liver treats—be a good girl, a quiet girl, and I’ll come home on time. I’ll come home sober. I’ll come home and cuddle you. Everything had been snap, snap, snap, the way he wanted it. Sit! And she slammed that ass on the floor before he’d finished making the sound. Then one day she presented him with a white plastic strip with two blue lines and tears in her eyes and talk of names for it. And all his hard work had come down to nothing.
Trump card.
Plan B. His pup had gone wild. Nothing to do with a wild animal but put it down. He’d nudged her down a flight of stairs one afternoon before Christmas, when the thing inside her had started to take hold and ruin her body and her logic. Hadn’t worked. A couple more knocks, a couple more quiet nudges, and she’d presented him with the perfect solution to his problem. A 9mm bullet, right in his guts. He lay in the hospital bed and watched her trial, chatted up the rehabilitation girl about it as he clambered along steel bars and walked himself up and down the wide halls with a walking frame—poor Harry, abused and misused husband just trying to learn how to love again. When they carried Scarlett off kicking and hollering on the evening news she’d once sparkled on, her regrowth showing and her eye makeup smudged in a way he knew she’d hate, he thought he was free.
He begun claiming his space again in a little apartment in Eastlakes, steadily chewing through her cash on pretty horses and Blue Label and little Asian women with perky tits. Then a couple of drably dressed social workers had knocked on his door and put a baby in his hands.
Another trump card.
Even from behind the razor wire she was still in his space, filling up the place like a bucket of water in a paper cup.
He took it inside, forgot it for days, lay in the bed in the other room and cried about it, cried louder than it did. He sat on the carpet in its room in those dark first days and watched it wriggling and screaming, the stink of its piss taking up the air. People brought him clothes and toys and bedding for it, so much stuff he had to pile it in corners like he was preparing for a winter, the kitchen cluttered with sour milk and colored plastic and empty jars of muck.
He stood in the shower with it, slept on the floor with it, sat in the car with it, beating the steering wheel, beating his head, beating the windows. He sat outside his ruined apartment with it at the top of the concrete stairs and watched it shuffling and inching around on the damp at his feet like a swollen, snotty grub, watched it edge toward the empty space before the five-flight fall, bulging backside waggling, worm toes squirming up and down.
Harry stood, looked at the fall, the screen doors, dozens of them, most hiding angry Indians in leather jackets who would hardly know how to answer a phone let alone testify to his possible negligence as a father. Harry stood. Harry watched. Then Harry put his foot out, pressed against the soft, papered rump with his toes, gently-gently, softly-softly, until it tipped.
Harry stood now in his shower remembering his own screaming. He kept screaming and screaming when the ambulances arrived, screaming and screaming when the cops arrived, screaming and screaming when the two homicide detectives showed up. A lanky guy with dead eyes named Doyle and some black-haired vixen he couldn’t remember the name of, distracted as he was by the way her jeans cupped her apple-shaped rump.
He sat on the edge of the ambulance and watched that perfect posterior through tear-soaked hands as she wandered, calm and curious, through the tarpaulin barrier to where the thing lay dead, around the thing and the people chalking and photographing it, up the stairs, down the stairs, all around. The guy with the dead eyes came over to him and talked and made notes and gave condolences and numbers to call, but the dark apple-bottomed beauty just stood there, off and away from the crowd, looking up at the top of the stairs, looking down at where the thing lay.
Harry was getting a cold feeling about the way the woman was standing and looking and frowning and thinking when she disappeared and he felt safe again. Days turned into weeks. Grief counselors came and went. The sun set and the evening news came on. Harry swelled, slowly opening like a wary flower, and filled up his space.
He toweled off now in his little caravan bathroom annex, stretched his limbs, ruffled his hair in the mirror, laughed. Almost a year had passed, and still the thrill of a room empty but for him. He was smiling at the feel of it as he entered the caravan, but the smile disappeared when he found a woman sitting on the end of his bed with her hands between her knees, restful. He didn’t recognize her as the apple-assed stunner from the day the thing died until she stood, turned toward him, looked at him, set her feet apart on his crowded floor. She rolled her shoulders. He noticed the knife in her hand when she adjusted her grip, flicked the thing open so that it shone in the light from the bathroom.
“What the fuck is this?” He threw the towel around himself.
She glanced at his naked chest, belly, wrinkled her nose, sniffed the air. She flicked her chin toward the bathroom as she came toward him.
“You used soap in there, right?” she asked.
I
made no appointment at Galaxy Fitness, Randwick. There’s a certain joy in being able to walk into anywhere and stop things in their tracks in the name of the law. A couple of middle-aged women at the counter were chattering and filling out forms, their towels hanging over their shoulders, and a young man behind the counter who I’d have said was on roids from the sheer unnatural shape of him. All wads of muscle on probably tired bones and snaky veins, the sculpted eyebrows of someone who waxed weekly.
I went straight to the young woman beside him, a tanned and toned Jack Russell of a creature, caramel colored, short, and stringy. She smiled as I entered and I smiled back and it was on—train departed from Flirt Central. Sometimes it can be like that.
“Morning.” I put my badge and a bunch of papers on the counter in front of the girl. “Detective Frank Bennett, CID. I’m going to have to be really annoying and serve a warrant here today.”
Everyone looked. The girl’s smile dropped. Captain Eyebrows shouldered in beside Jack Russell.
“Morning. I’m the floor manager, Steven Kent. How can I help?”
“Good to meet you.” I shook his hand. He squeezed too hard. “Hoping to make this short and sweet. I’m on the tail of a missing person and need some questions answered.”
The girl was looking at my badge. The plastic one pinned to her sculpted chest read “Clarinda: Customer Service.”
“Well, I hope I can be of some help.” Eyebrows puffed his chest out. “Shall we go back to the staff office?”
“It’s all right, mate, go ahead see to these ladies.” I waved at the women at the counter, who bristled like birds disturbed. “I’m sure Clarinda here can help me.”
If Jack Russell girl had a tail she would have wagged it. Steve scowled, then laughed, hard.
“That’s nice but Clarinda’s hardly the person to talk to. I’m in charge here. I’d be the most qualified to help you get what you need.”
“Uh huh,” I said. “That’s also nice. But you’re busy. I try not to interrupt busy people.”
“I can assure you—”
“Unfortunately, regardless of your being in charge, or the best person to get me what I need, a warrant of this type requires me to be overseen in the entirety of my operations here today by the person I serve it to.” I shrugged helplessly. “Clarinda, honey, looks like you bit the bullet here.”
“But,” Steven the Floor Manager opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again, “she hasn’t signed anything.”
“She sighted my paper first.” I curled my lip at Clarinda. “Sorry, Bub.”
“What’s . . . what’s this all about?” Steve squinted.
“Clarinda, have you got an office we can use with computer access?”
“I don’t think—”
“She’s got it, Steve,” I winked at him. “Haven’t you, Clarinda?”
Clarinda almost stumbled over her own feet.
“Yep, got it, Steve.”
Jack Russell girl came out from behind the counter with a set of keys. Steve swallowed, did some funny jerking thing with his neck.
“Yes, uh. Yeah, Okay. Clarinda, if you could help the detective with anything he needs.”
I slapped Steve on his iron-hard back as I passed. Clarinda led me to a room off the side of the free-weights section where laborers and retirees were squatting and staring themselves down in the wall of mirrors. Nearby I could hear an aerobics instructor shouting over some thumping bass music. The little room held a table and a laptop and a couple of desk chairs, some anatomy pictures. There was a set of scales in the corner and a measuring tape pinned to the wall.
“Jesus.” She sunk into the desk chair and crossed her legs, adjusted the bottom of her gym tights. “You’re going to get me sacked if you’re not careful.”
“I can’t help what the warrant says, young lady. That’s the law.”
“That was all bullshit about the warrant. Wasn’t it?”
“What an accusation.”
“Uh huh,” she smirked. Swung sideways back and forth in the desk chair like a bored kid in the computer room at school. “So, what’s the deal here? Are you looking for one of our members?”
“Well, I might be,” I said, sitting down in the other chair, pulling it close so she could smell me. “I’m here on a real long shot and, yes, it’ll involve looking at your member files. What we’re looking for might take a while. So I hope Steve will forgive me for not wanting to spend the next couple of hours in here with him.”
“Oh, he’s a pretty forgiving guy.” She smiled, played with the mouse on the desk beside her.
“Lucky.”
“I didn’t catch your name out there in all the macho games.”
“Frank.”
“Well, Frank, thanks for getting me out of membership emails for a few hours.”
“My pleasure. You think our forgiving friend Steve would make us a couple of coffees?”
“He’ll burst in here in a minute or so to see what we’re up to. So, I guess you could ask him. You’d be pushing it.”
“A bit protective of what goes on around his floor, is he?”
“Certainly is.”
“Floor manager. The pressure.”
“It’s tough,” she sniggered.
“All right, well, we haven’t got all day to exchange pleasantries.” I set the folder on the table beside the laptop and extracted a series of photographs. “This is the girl I’m looking for.”
Juno had done a great job on the footage the Manning boy had sent me. All the green grain was gone, and the sound had been clarified down to individual breaths and wheezes, muttered words. He’d even transcribed the few words said on the twelve-minute clip and sent a file of ten stills that best showed the girl’s face.
“Oh my God.” Clarinda the customer service girl frowned at the photos. “What is this?”
“It’s no one’s idea of a good time.”
I’d cropped the photos dramatically, but what was left wasn’t exactly family picnic album.
“You’re looking for this girl?” She touched the girl’s face, the duct tape. “This is . . . Is she . . . ?”
“It’s from a video. We’re not sure yet if it’s fake, so don’t freak out,” I told her. “We see a few of these every now and then. People find them online, report them, identify people making them and passing them around. It’s common. Don’t worry yourself too much about what might be going on—that’s my job. You just focus on the girl.”
“How do you expect to find her? Do you know her name? Is she a member?”
“Well, see. I’m here because I’ve been looking at these pictures all night long and there are a few things I’d like to test my brain against.” I folded my arms, looked at the shots in turn.
“Okay.”
“We don’t know this girl’s name. We don’t know anything about her. But she’s pretty damn toned, don’t you think?”
Clarinda looked at the photographs. There was no denying the girl in the photograph had amazing biceps and the kind of abs a man could comfortably stand on while waiting for a train. In one shot, where the girl in the photograph was down on her hands and knees, her right calf muscle was strained tight, showing the taut slope and ball of muscle you only get from hours of riding bikes. Clarinda took a while to look, before she began to nod.
“Okay. So she works out. That’s a clever thing to notice, I guess.”
“I thought you might agree. Then there’s this. See this here?” I lifted one of the pictures. The black shadow leaning against the wall was so small and fine I could only indicate it with the edge of my little finger. “Is that one of your gym bags?”
Clarinda took the photograph from me. Held it close to her nose. Stretched her arms and frowned in the light.
“Jesus. This
is
a long shot. It kind of looks like a jacket to me.”
“Yeah, maybe. But at the start of the video one of the guys has it in his hand. One hand. And he sort of swings it. It hits the wall and falls in a heap. When you throw a jacket or a piece of clothing on the floor you sort of drop it, don’t you? It’s got no weight. This is like a . . . like a swing and then a thump and then a slide. What would you carry into a room and drop like that? A bag. A bag you’d been carrying for a while.”
“Um. Okay.” She didn’t sound convinced.
“Maybe I’m being overly hopeful.”
“Maybe.”
“It does look to me, after staring at it for a few hours, like one of those blue and black bags you’ve got hanging above the counter out there, though. I see them everywhere. College kids carry them. You give one out to every new member, don’t you?”
“I can’t see the blue.” She looked at my eyes. “Couldn’t it just be any old backpack?”
“A very clever colleague I’m working with tells me that in pixelated form, whatever the hell that means, there’s half a grade median tone difference between the top half of the bag, assuming it’s a bag, and the bottom half of the bag—which might suggest that the top and bottom halves of the bag are different colors.” I took the picture back. Showed her. “Your bags are blue on the top and black on the bottom. So it’s possible, right?”
“It’s possible.” She shrugged at the pictures. “But shit, man, I don’t know how the hell you get anything from this. It’s all shadows to me.”
“Well, it’s worth a try.”
“Yeah, I suppose it is.”
“So if we get that far, and we’re right, we need a name. At one point in the tape that these images are from, one of the men in the room calls the girl ‘Shelly.’ So what I’m working on here are the extraordinarily unpromising ideas that maybe the girl in the pictures is so amazingly toned because she spends a lot of time in gyms. Maybe that’s her bag that the guy carried in and threw in the corner. Maybe it’s a Galaxy Fitness bag, and maybe we can find a girl on your system whose name is Shelly or Michelle who has crazy curly black hair like this girl does.”
“What if it’s Rochelle?”
“Don’t rain on my parade, Clarinda.”
“God,” she laughed, rubbed her eyes, turned to the computer. “I don’t like your chances here, mate. Do you know how many tens of thousands of members we have, just in the Sydney region? Do you have any idea how many of those are going to be Michelles? There’ll be hundreds.”
“Let’s stay positive. Think big. Over the mountain. Go hard or go home. All that shit.”
“Right.” She clicked. Checked me out from the corner of her eye to see if I was still smiling. I shifted closer and watched. She smelled like sweat. Not body odor, but sweat, woman sweat, the kind that gets into your sheets and leaves you thinking about her days after she’s left your life.
“Is all your work like this?”
“Sometimes it’s worse.”
“Is she in trouble, this girl?” she asked, took a chance and looked right at me. “Is it, like . . . Is it bad?”
“We’ll see,” I said. “If it’s that bad you’ll see it on the news. You might even see me there. Here. You can tell your friends you know that ugly copper on Channel Seven. Friends in high places. Celebrity connections. You could call me to prove it.” I took a card from my back pocket and tucked it into hers. I wasn’t usually this obnoxious, but the look on her face told me she didn’t mind. She shook her head. Steven Kent the Floor Manager swung open the door without knocking. Clarinda was tapping away at the keys.
“How’s the floor?” I asked.
“Fine, uh, good. Clarinda able to help you with what you need?”
“She’s invaluable, just like the coffee you’re about to make me, which is going to rescue my entire morning. Hot, white, and strong, just like me. And Clarinda . . . ?” I pointed to the girl.
“Oh. Uh, black, Steve. Sorry.”
“Sorry, Steve,” I agreed.
Steve grumbled and disappeared.
“You’re such a dick,” Clarinda the Jack Russell girl said. She gave me a cute scowl like she meant it. But I knew she didn’t. She’d call.