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Epub ISBN: 9781473539952

Version 1.0

Published by Arrow Books 2017

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Copyright © Candice Fox 2014

Eden extract © Candice Fox 2014
Cover photographs © Getty Images

Candice Fox has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain by Arrow Books in 2017

(First published in Australia by Bantam in 2014)

Arrow Books

The Penguin Random House Group Limited

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Arrow Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781784758332

PROLOGUE

As soon as the stranger set the bundle on the floor, Hades could tell it was the body of a child. It was curled on its side and wrapped in a worn blue sheet secured with duct tape around the neck, waist and knees. One tiny pearl-coloured foot poked out from the hem, limp on his sticky linoleum. Hades leaned against the counter of his cramped, cluttered kitchen and stared at that little foot. The stranger shifted uneasily in the doorway, drew a cigarette from a packet and pulled out some matches. The man they called Hades lifted his eyes briefly to the stranger’s thin angled face.

‘Don’t smoke in my house.’

The stranger had been told how to get to Hades’ place but not about its bewildering, frightening character. Beyond the iron gates of the Utulla tip, on the ragged edge of the Western suburbs, lay a gravel road leading through mountains of trash to a hill that blocked out the sky, black and imposing, guarded by stars. A crown of trees and scrub on top of the hill obscured all view of the small wooden shack. The stranger had driven with painful care past piles of rubbish as high as apartment buildings crawling with every manner of night creature – owls, cats and rodents picking and shifting through old milk cartons and bags of rotting meat. Luminescent eyes peered from the cabins of burned-out car shells and from beneath sheets of twisted corrugated iron.

Farther along the gravel path, the stranger began to encounter a new breed of watchful beast. Creatures made from warped scraps of metal and pieces of discarded machinery lined the road – a broken washing machine beaten and buckled into the figure of a snarling lion, a series of bicycles woven together and curled and stretched into the body of a grazing flamingo. In the light of the moon, the animals with their kitchen-utensil feathers and Coke-bottle eyes seemed tense and ready. When the stranger entered the house he was a little relieved to be away from them and their attention. The relief evaporated when he laid eyes on the man they called the Lord of the Underworld.

Hades was standing in the corner of the kitchen when the stranger entered, as though he’d known he was coming. He had not moved from there, his furry arms folded over his barrel chest. Cold heavy-lidded eyes fixed on the bundle in the stranger’s arms. There was a Walther PP handgun with a silencer on the disordered bench beside him by a half-empty glass of scotch. Hades’ grey hair looked neat atop his thick skull. He was squat and bulky like an ox, power and rage barely contained in the painful closeness of the kitchen.

The air inside the little house seemed pressed tight by the trees, a dark dome licking and stroking the hot air through the windows. Hades’ kitchen was adorned with things he had salvaged from the dump. Ornate bottles and jars of every conceivable colour hung by fishing line from the ceiling, strange cutting and slicing implements were nailed like weapons to the walls. There were china fish and pieces of plastic fruit and a stuffed yellow ferret coiled, sleeping, in a basket by the foot of the door, jars of things there seemed no sense in keeping – coloured marbles and lens-less spectacles and bottle caps in their thousands – and lines of dolls’ heads along the windowsill, some with eyes and some without, gaping mouths smiling, howling, crying. Through the door to the tiny living room, a wall crammed with tattered paperbacks was visible, the books lying and standing in every position from the unpolished floorboards to the mould-spotted ceiling.

The stranger writhed in the silence. Wanted to look at everything but afraid of what he might see. Night birds moaned in the trees outside the mismatched stained-glass windows.

‘Do you, uh …’ The stranger worked the back of his neck with his fingernails. ‘Do you want me to go and get the other one?’

Hades said nothing for a long time. His eyes were locked on the body of the child in the worn blue sheet.

‘Tell me how this happened.’

The stranger felt new sweat tickle at his temples.

‘Look,’ he sighed, ‘I was told there’d be no questions. I was told I could just come and drop them off and …’

‘You were told wrong.’

One of Hades’ chubby fingers tapped his left bicep slowly, as though counting off time. The stranger fingered the cigarette he had failed to light, drawing it to his lips, remembered the warning. He slipped it into his pocket and stared at the bundle on the floor, at the shape of the girl’s small head tucked against her chest.

‘It was supposed to be the most perfect, perfect thing,’ the stranger said, shaking his head at the body. ‘It was all Benny’s idea. He saw a newspaper story about this guy, Tenor I think his name was, this crazy scientist dude. He’d just copped a fat wad of cash for some thing he was working on with skin cancer or sunburn or some shit like that. Benny got obsessed with the guy, kept bringing us newspaper clippings. He showed us a picture of the guy and his little wife and his two kiddies and said the family was mega-rich already and he was just adding his new dosh to a big stinking pile.’

The stranger drew a long breath that inflated his narrow chest. Hades watched, unmoving.

‘We’d got word that the family was going to be alone at their holiday house in Long Jetty. So we drove up there, the six of us, to rattle their cage and take the babies – just for a bit, you know, not for long. It was going to be the easiest job, man. Bust in, bust out, keep them for a couple of days and then organise an exchange. We weren’t gonna do nothing with them. I’d even borrowed some games they could play while they stayed with us.’

Hades opened one of the drawers beside him and extracted a notepad and pen. From where he stood, he slapped them onto the small table by the side wall.

‘These others,’ he said, ‘write down their names. And your own.’

The stranger began to protest, but Hades was silent. The stranger sat on the plastic chair by the table, his fingers trembling, and began to write names on the paper. His handwriting was childlike and crooked, smeared.

‘Everything just went wrong so fast,’ he murmured as he wrote, holding the paper steady with his long white fingers. ‘Benny got the idea that the dude was giving him the eye like he was gonna do something stupid. I wasn’t paying attention. The woman was screaming and crying and carrying on and someone clocked her and the kids were struggling. Benny blew the parents away. He just … he pumped them and pumped them till his gun was flat. He was always so fucking trigger happy. He was always so fucking ready for a fight.’

The stranger seemed stirred by some emotion, letting air out of his chest slowly through his teeth. He stared at the names he had written on the paper. Hades watched.

‘One minute everything was fine. The next thing I know we’re on the road with the kids in the boot and no one to sell them to. We started talking about getting rid of them and someone said they knew you and …’ The stranger shrugged and wiped his nose on his hand.

For the first time since the stranger had arrived, Hades left the corner of the kitchen. He seemed larger and more menacing somehow, his oversized, calloused hands godly as they cradled the tiny notepad, tearing off the page with the names. The stranger sat, defeated, in the plastic chair. He didn’t raise his eyes as Hades folded the small square of paper, slipping it into his pocket. He didn’t notice as the older man took up the pistol, actioned it and flicked the safety off.

‘It was an accident,’ the stranger murmured, his bloodshot eyes brimming with tears as he stared, lips parted, at the body in the bundle. ‘Everything was going so well.’

The man named Hades put two bullets into the stranger. The stranger’s confused eyes fixed on Hades, his hands grabbing at the holes in his body. Hades put the gun back on the counter and lifted the scotch to his lips. The night birds had stopped their moaning and only the sound of the stranger dying filled the air.

Hades set the glass down with a sigh and began to trace the dump yards around the hill with his mind, searching for the best place for the body of the stranger and, somewhere separate, somewhere fitting, to bury the bodies of the little ones. There was a place he knew behind the sorting centre where a tree had sprung up between the piles of garbage – the twisted and gnarled thing sometimes produced little pink flowers. He would bury the children there together and dig the stranger in somewhere, anywhere, with the dozens of rapists, killers and thieves who littered the grounds of the dump. Hades closed his eyes. Too many strangers were coming to his dump these nights with their bundles of lost lives. He would have to put the word out that no new clients were welcome. The ones he knew, his regular clients, brought him the bodies of evil ones. But these strangers. He shook his head. These strangers kept bringing innocents.

Hades set his empty glass on the counter by his gun. His eyes wandered across the cracked floor to the small pearl foot of the dead girl.

It was then that he noticed the toes were clenched.

1

I FIGURED I’D struck it lucky when I first laid eyes on Eden Archer. She was sitting by the window with her back to me. I could just see a slice of her angular face when she surveyed the circle of men around her. It seemed to be some kind of counselling session, probably about the man I was replacing, Eden’s late partner. Some of the men in the circle were grey-faced and sullen, like they were only just keeping their emotions in check. The psychologist himself looked as if someone had just stolen his last zack.

Eden, on the other hand, was quietly contemplative. She had a flick-blade in her right hand, visible only to me, and she was sliding it open and shut with her thumb. I ran my eyes over her long black braid and licked my teeth. I knew her type, had encountered plenty in the academy. No friends, no interest in having a mess around in the male dorms on quiet weekends when the officers were away. She could run in those three-inch heels, no doubt about that. The forty-dollar manicure was her third this month but she would break a rat’s neck if she found it in her pantry. I liked the look of her. I liked the way she breathed, slow and calm, while the officers around her tried not to fall to pieces.

I stood there at the mirrored glass, half-listening to Captain James blab on about the loss of Doyle to the Sydney Metro Homicide Squad and what it had done to morale. The counselling session broke up and Eden slipped her knife into her belt. The white cotton top clung to her carefully sculpted figure. Her eyes were big and dark, downcast to the carpet as she walked through the door towards me.

‘Eden.’ The captain motioned at me. ‘Frank Bennett, your new partner.’

I grinned and shook her hand. It was warm and hard in mine.

‘Condolences,’ I said. ‘I heard Doyle was a great guy.’ I’d also heard Eden had come back with his blood mist all over her face, bits of his brain on her shirt.

‘You’ve got big shoes to fill.’ She nodded. Her voice was as flat as a tack.

She half-smiled in a tired kind of way, as if my turning up to be her partner was just another annoyance in what had been a long and shitty morning. Her eyes met mine for the briefest of seconds before she walked away.

Captain James showed me to my spot in the bull-pit. The desk had been stripped of Doyle’s personal belongings. It was chipped and bare, save for a black plastic telephone and a laptop port. A number of people looked up from their desks as I entered. I figured they’d introduce themselves in time. A group of men and women by the coffee station gave me the once-over and then turned inward to compare their assessments. They held mugs with slogans like ‘Beware of the Twilight Fan’ and ‘World’s Biggest Asshole’ printed on the side.

My mother had been a wildlife warrior, the kind who would stop and fish around in the pouches of kangaroo corpses for joeys and scrape half-squashed birds off the road to give them pleasant deaths or fix them. One morning she brought me home a box of baby owls to care for, three in all, abandoned by their mother. The men and women in the office made me think of those owls, the way they clustered into a corner of the shoebox when I’d opened it, the way their eyes howled black and empty with terror.

I was keen to get talking to people here. There were some exciting cases happening and this assignment was very much a step up for me. My last department at North Sydney had been mainly Asian gangland crime. It was all very straightforward and repetitive – territorial drive-bys and executions and restaurant hold-ups, fathers beaten and young girls terrorised into silence. I knew from the media hype and word around my old office that Sydney Metro were looking for an eleven-year-old girl who’d gone missing and was probably dead somewhere. And I’d heard another rumour that someone here had worked on the Ivan Milat backpacker murders in the 1990s. I wanted to unpack my stuff quickly and go looking for some war tales.

Eden sat on the edge of my desk as I opened my plastic tub and began sorting my stuff into drawers. She cleared her throat once and looked around uncomfortably, avoiding my glance.

‘Married?’ she asked.

‘Twice.’

‘Kids?’

‘Ha!’

She glanced at me, turning the silver watch on her wrist round and round. I sat down in Doyle’s chair. It had been warmed by the morning sun pouring in through the windows high above us. I knew this and yet my skin crawled with the idea that he might have been sitting here, moments earlier, talking on the phone or checking his emails.

‘Why’d you take this job?’

I could smell her as I bent down and lifted my backpack from the floor. She smelt expensive. Flash leather boots hugging her calves, boutique perfume on her throat. I told myself she was probably late twenties and that women that age looked for guys a bit older – and the ten years or so I had on her didn’t necessarily make me a creep. I told myself she wouldn’t notice the grey coming in from my temples.

‘I lost a partner too. Been alone for six months now.’

‘Sorry.’ Again that flatness in her voice. ‘On the job?’

‘No. Suicide.’

A man approached us, circled the desk and then sat down beside Eden, one leg up on the desktop, facing me. There was a large ugly scar the length of his right temple running into his hairline like white lightning. It pulled up the corner of his eye. Eden looked at him with that embarrassed half-smile.

‘Frankie, right?’ he grinned, flashing white canines.

‘Frank.’

‘Eric.’ He gripped my hand and pumped it. ‘This one gets too much for you to handle, you just let me know, uh?’ He elbowed Eden hard in the ribs. Obnoxious. She smirked.

‘I’m sure I’ll be fine.’

I began to pack my things away faster. Eric reached into the tub beside him and pulled out a folder.

‘This your service record?’

I reached for the manila folder he was holding. He tugged it away.

‘Yeah, thanks, I’ll have it back.’ I felt my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth. Eden sat watching. Eric stood back and flicked through the papers.

‘Oh, look at this. North Sydney Homicide. Asian gangs. You speak Korean? Mandarin? Says here under disciplinary history you got a serious DUI on the way to work.’ He laughed. ‘On the way to work, Frankie. You got a problem with that? You like to drink?’

I snatched the folder from him. His wide hand thundered on my shoulder.

‘I’m just giving you a hard time.’

I ignored him and he wandered back to the group of owls. He jerked his thumb towards me and said something and the owls stared. Eden was watching my face. I scratched my neck as the heat crept down my chest.

‘Fucking jerk.’ I shook my head.

‘Yeah.’ She smiled, a full-size, bright white flash. ‘He’s good at that.’

2

I FOUND OUT Eric was Eden’s brother minutes before we got called away from the station to a crime scene. I don’t know why the resemblance hadn’t struck me before. They shared the same bold dark features, the same contained power and malice. Bored and powerful – misfit siblings. Eric looked wilder than Eden. I couldn’t decide who was older. She sat in the driver’s seat beside me, both hands on the wheel, chewing on her bottom lip as though she had heavy things on her mind. She seemed like someone holding onto a terrible trauma, something that stained her days and picked at her insides at night. Secrets and lies. Eric struck me as the life of the party, uncontrollable and unpredictable in turns.

The traffic was at a standstill on Parramatta Road almost directly out from headquarters on Little Street, heading in towards the distant blue outline of the city. We crept across an intersection and stopped again outside a Greek restaurant where a young man was scraping spray-painted snowflakes from the windows, months late. A giant red and yellow sign hanging over a DVD rental place asked if I wanted longer lasting sex, in bold typeface lit up by an already blazing sun. The Greek boy’s father came out and hustled him to work faster, gesturing at the Thai restaurants wedged on either side with their immaculately polished windows.

‘So, a drinker and a serial marrier.’ Eden smiled suddenly, as though only just remembering. ‘No wonder your partner necked herself.’

‘Give me a break.’

‘Don’t let Eric get to you. He’s just having a dig.’

I struggled not to burst into profanities. I knew that being bothered by what he had done would only make things worse. So I’d been DUI-ed. Who hadn’t? So it had been on the way to work. I’d had a rough year.

‘Working with your brother. That’s a little incestuous, isn’t it?’

She smiled. I’d expected a laugh. She shifted lanes, flicked her blinker with her little finger like she’d owned the car for years.

‘We’re never partnered,’ she offered. ‘Conflict of interest, you know.’

We pulled up at a small marina on Watsons Bay, east of the harbour and between the Navy base and the parkland. The street was lined with rendered pastel-coloured apartment blocks, with the obligatory banana chairs on the balconies and striped beach towels hanging artfully on chrome racks. The local butcher’s shop advertised garlic and rosemary sausages on a chalk board, eighteen bucks a kilo. Everyone, it seemed, knew the dress code: boat shoes and cargo pants, men and women alike. The change in scenery was jarring. What seemed like minutes earlier we had been driving past the above-shop brothels of North Strathfield, through the shadowed shopping districts of Edgecliff. Now, for some reason, sausages were ten dollars dearer and wet exotic plants brushed the windows of the car as we parked. I sighed and got out, feeling unwelcome.

Eden stood by the car, polishing her Ray-Bans on the edge of her shirt and glaring coolly at the dozens of apartments at the edge of the road. Boaties locked off from their yachts and gawkers from the surrounding parklands were perched on the hill, holding their hands up against the white glare of the morning and ignoring the insistent tugging of a variety of compact dogs on leads. Poop bags jangled on key-chains. They spotted a couple of homicide detectives straight away, nudging each other and pointing. Yes, things just got interesting. Grab a latte and settle in for the long haul. Some journalists snapped shots of Eden talking to a security guard. They seemed to miss me.

At the epicentre of the gathering of cop cars and paramedics was a lone young man wrapped in a grey blanket, sitting on the edge of an open ambulance. The overkill meant something god-awful had happened to him. I stood to the side, studying the man’s downturned face and desperate eyes, and let Eden go in. People made way for her. I was surprised no one wanted to accidentally brush against her, try to soak up some of that power and beauty. They seemed to know her, seemed to possess some prior knowledge of her dangerous nature.

‘Go ahead.’ She flicked her chin at the man in the blanket.

‘I told that cop in the hat I didn’t wanna make a statement,’ the man trembled, nodding toward a chief standing smoking by the gates. ‘You got what you need. I wanna go now. I wanna get outta here.’

I was beginning to notice bumps and grazes on the man, blood matted in his hair. His ankles were rubbed raw and his left foot was splinted. He jogged his right foot up and down, sniffling and letting his eyes dance over his surroundings.

‘One more time.’ Eden slid her notebook out of her pocket. ‘Then we can think about letting you go.’

There were track marks on the man’s arms, purple and wet as he ran a hand through his damp hair. He seemed to want to pick at an old sore that wouldn’t heal on his left cheekbone. He glanced at me. I leaned against the ambulance, my arms folded across my chest.

‘I was up on the road.’ The junkie shuddered, nodding toward the boat ramp leading down to the marina. ‘I was trying to get a ride back to Bondi where I’m staying with mates. But none of these posh fuckheads would stop. It was maybe … three in the morning. I saw a guy backing a van up through the gates, pulling it alongside a boat. The gates were open so I thought I’d, like, see if I could slip in, you know? I was gonna set off by myself down the marina but I decided to keep watching the guy with the van.’

‘You were going to roll him?’ I asked.

‘Maybe. I was thinking about it. I was trying to make out what he had. I reckoned whatever he was shifting at that hour might be good for me. Whatever he had was locked down tight in one of those nice shiny steel toolboxes you see tradies carrying on their utes – about a metre long. He must’ve been a big bloke because he was carrying it lengthways across his chest with an arm on either end. He set it on the boat and went round the van. I waited to see him come out the other side but he didn’t. I waited for ages and he just didn’t come. I was just going to shift around the back of the trees to see where he was when I hear this massive crack and then there was just nothing.’

The junkie reached up and touched the back of his skull, feeling stitches. Eden stood with her boot on the folded ramp at the back of the ambulance, watching the man’s eyes.

‘I woke up on the deck of the boat with a big chain around my ankles.’ The junkie twitched, scratching at his stubbled beard. ‘I didn’t think we’d left the marina, the boat was so still. It was getting light so I must have been out of it for ages. There was blood everywhere. I rolled over and saw him shoving the toolbox toward the edge of the deck. I followed the chain attached to my ankles and saw that it led to the box.’

‘Christ.’ One of the cops behind me laughed. I looked over my shoulder at him. I’d forgotten about the crowd around us, all street cops with their arms folded, cigarettes between their teeth. The water beyond the pier sparkled between them. I squinted.

‘I went over.’ The junkie trembled, his right leg jogging faster, up and down like a piston. ‘I hit the water.’

The junkie in the blanket burst into tears. The cops around me twisted and looked at each other and shook their heads and scoffed and laughed. Eden was perfectly still, her sharp face resting in the palm of her hand, her elbow on the knee of her jeans. Breathing, long and slow. The junkie swiped at his eyes with a skeletal hand. Long fingernails. Before he could resume his story, one of the cops piped up:

‘So how the fuck are you sitting here, Houdini?’

The junkie tossed an evil look at the men and women around him.

‘Broke my foot when I was a little tacker,’ he murmured. ‘Clean across the middle – dancing.’

‘Dancing?’

‘Yeah, dancing,’ the junkie sneered. ‘I was fucking dancing in one of those primary school talent shows. I jumped off the stage and landed on it wrong and snapped it right in half behind the toes. It’s been off ever since. When I was going down I was pulling and tugging and struggling with the chain. As I got deeper I just reached down and broke it again.’

Everyone looked at the splint running up the side of the junkie’s ankle. A low moan of appreciation went up from the bodies around me.

‘You must be the slipperiest fucker alive.’

‘Hallelujah. You been touched by a goddamn angel, son.’

‘You got a lot of will to live for someone who spends all day jacking themselves with deadly chemicals,’ another cop said.

The junkie wiped dried blood from his nose onto the back of his hand.

‘Thanks, mate.’ He scowled. ‘Thanks for that.’

‘No problem.’

‘Okay, okay,’ I cut in. ‘Back to the story. Did he see you when you came up?’

The junkie bristled. Eden was watching me, expressionless.

‘When I got up he was long gone,’ he said, staring at the concrete in front of him. ‘I got picked up by a couple of guys in a tinny and brought back here maybe an hour later. Was too far out to swim and I couldn’t use my foot. I thought I was going to get my arse eaten by something. I thought I was really gone, you know?’

He sobbed once, hiding his face in his fist. There was silence all around us.

‘So what are we looking for?’ I sighed, taking out my own notebook. ‘A man, a boat, a silver box.’

‘I can’t help you with the descriptions,’ the junkie said. ‘I tried already. He was wearing a jacket zipped up to his nose and a fucking hat on top. The boat was white. I don’t know nothing else about it. Big. White. Boat-shaped. You want to press me about it, go ahead. That cop in the hat already tried.’

‘What about the silver box?’ I asked, putting my foot up on the ramp so I could balance the notepad on my knee. ‘It have a name on it? Anything written on the side?’

‘No,’ the junkie shook his head. ‘It was plain, like all the others.’

‘All the others?’ Eden asked, her voice ringing out so much finer and smoother than those around her, like a bird song. ‘What do you mean, all the others?’

The junkie wrapped his arms around himself and stared at the ground, his lip trembling like he wanted to cry again.

‘When I was going down I had time to look around me,’ he gasped, squeezing his eyes shut. ‘The morning light was cutting through the water. There were others down there on the bottom of the ocean. Heaps of them.’

Blood had soaked into the sheet around her head, there were bloody prints on the cotton. Hades unwound the duct tape holding the sheet and rolled her out onto the floor. Tape around her wrists and face, sticking in her hair. She howled as he ripped it off her mouth, long and loud and full of fear.

‘There’s another one,’ he said to himself, hearing his voice tremble as it never had before while his fingers fumbled with the tape at her eyes. ‘He said there was another one.’

Hades left the girl on the floor and ran out of the house, his fingers slick with the blood that had coated her face. He smeared it on the keys as he tugged them from the ignition of the beaten-up red Ford, on the boot as he shoved them into the lock. The little girl tottered drunkenly out of the house behind him, her long dark hair lit gold by the light of the kitchen. She watched soundlessly as he opened the boot and dragged the other bundle of sheets from the darkness, her eyes lifeless orbs in a mask of red.

‘Oh please,’ Hades heard himself murmuring. ‘Come on. Please.’

The head of this body was soaked through with blackness. He pulled the damp sheets away and cradled the broken skull in his fingers. A face carved from onyx. Gaping mouth and sunken eyes. The man pushed his fingers into the slimy neck of the child. There was nothing. Warmth and stillness.

‘Come on, boy. Come on.’

Hades didn’t beg. Not to men, anyway. He’d begged plenty of racehorses in his time. Begged greyhounds zipping across static screens. He was begging a boy now. Begging him to live. He bent his stubbled mouth to the boy’s wet lips. The girl watched, her hands gripping the front of her dress. Hades pinched the boy’s tiny nose and chin in his huge fingers, watched the little chest inflate and deflate like a wet balloon. As he pumped the small birdcage chest with his palms he looked up at the girl, watched her shaking in the light from the kitchen without really seeing her. The seconds lagged on. Peacocks made from twisted pieces of an old car stood and watched the happenings before the house. A bronze wolf howled in silence. In the kitchen, the stranger’s blood made a thick dark pool on the linoleum.

The body in his fingers bucked and coughed. Hades shook the boy roughly and thumped his back.

‘That’s it,’ he growled. ‘Come back now. Come on back.’

The boy vomited, gurgled, fell limp again. Hades knelt over him in the gravel and dust, his heart raging as it had not done in some time. He reached down and wiped the strands of matted black hair from the massive wound in the side of the boy’s head. Clotted flesh and frayed skin, the beginnings of bone underneath. Hades looked up at the sky and hated the stranger. Hated him over and over as the boy slept.

The girl followed Hades as he carried the boy into the kitchen. The child was so much smaller in the light, white skin between ink black and ruby splashes and streaks. He laid the ruined doll out on the table. Hades looked down at the boy, inspecting him like a butcher with a slab of meat, noticing the bulbous joints where cartilage strained and contracted, the limp feet and curled hands. He turned and looked at the sagging body of the stranger in the chair, and then his eyes fell to the girl who stood close by, her hands by her sides, her eyes locked on his face. Breathing, thinking, sorting through frantic voices in his head. For a moment the man and the child simply watched each other and wondered what was to come next. Hades seemed to decide what it was and reached out, encircling her thin arm in his massive fingers.

‘Come with me,’ he murmured, pulling her forward. She let herself be led. In the cramped hall between the bedroom and the living room Hades rose up onto his toes and reached over the top of the ornate plastering that lined the wall, punching a hidden button. The wall sunk and slid away, folding into itself seamlessly. He pushed the girl into the tiny room. She glanced about her at the shelves that lined the three walls, the stacks of cash and dismantled weapons, the locked boxes and safes, the dozens of passports and forged birth certificates lying in neat piles.

And then she turned back to him. He reached up and pressed the button again.

‘No!’ she gasped, holding her hands out as the hidden door slid shut. ‘No! No!’

She screamed. Hades felt his face burn as the door closed and her fists began pounding on the other side.

‘It’s only temporary,’ he grimaced. ‘I’m sorry. It’s only temporary.’

He was speaking more to himself than to her. He could barely hear himself over her cries.

3

EDEN COORDINATED EVERYTHING from the shade of a blue plastic tarp strung up between two paddy wagons, leaning with her long legs crossed against the edge of a makeshift desk. She held a map of the marina in her hand and with her fingernail she drew a line around the boundary where she wanted the place cordoned off, her eyes lowered with the unenthusiastic appreciation of someone reading a tabloid magazine. The junkie was stripped, wiped down and photographed, and the ambulance where he’d been sitting driven off to the lab. The junkie himself she had driven away for a proper forensic examination. He put up a fuss but she ignored him. Her directions had a calm finality to them as though to defy them would be an act of idiocy.

Within an hour the barricade at the entrance to the marina was packed with spectators. Nothing will make strangers talk to each other more than a good scandal. The place was abuzz with gawkers leaning, murmuring, pointing, folding their arms and predicting. Helicopters whumped overhead, winding a circuit up and down the coastline. Four patrol boats were being prepared to deploy divers in selected spots around the bay.

I stood by the desk and sipped a coffee someone had brought in on a cardboard tray. I felt like mentioning to Eden that there was little chance the junkie had been in his right mind when he saw the other boxes, chained as he was to a weighted toolbox and sailing towards the bottom of the ocean in the dim morning light. What he’d thought he’d seen were probably rocks, submarine pipes, crab cages or illegally dumped waste. I didn’t say anything though. Eden hadn’t consulted me on the coordination process and so I was happy to let her make a fool of herself if it all went pear-shaped. She folded her arms and stared out at the hive of activity around her like I wasn’t standing there. I cracked a couple of jokes and she ignored me. I could see the cool arrogance of her brother in her then.

One of the technicians, a young Filipino guy with acne scars on his cheeks, brought a laptop over and dumped it beside Eden. I recognised him as one of the frightened owls from back at headquarters. He ignored me as he opened the computer and clacked away, adjusting a wireless modem and linking up to a satellite service.

‘What have you got?’ I asked, moving around behind him. His shoulders seemed to lift up around his ears as I spoke, as though he were bracing for a blow. Eden squeezed in beside me and the technician shivered.

‘I’ve got a link to the main patrol boat’s computer,’ the owl murmured uncertainly. ‘They’re going to feed us the diver’s vision. The coastguard has spoken to the two guys who picked up the witness and got their GPS position. Calculating current, drift and the estimated time he was in the water, we’ve got a pretty good idea of where he was dumped. We’re going to put a team of divers down and see if they can locate the boxes. We’ve tried to pick them up on sonar but it’s not precise enough at that depth.’

The owl pulled up a GPS map of the coastline beyond Watsons Bay. The sea was illustrated in a pristine, depthless blue. There were animated arrows and markers on the screen, ten or twelve vessels depicted with Xs and triangles. I watched the tech click away at the black laptop keys. In minutes he was showing us heavily delayed muted vision from a camera that was strapped, it seemed, to a diver’s helmet. The screen showed a blurry shot of the patrol boat deck with the commander of the team giving a brief as other divers suited up around the one with the camera.

Eden and I stood behind the owl and watched as the brief was conducted. The divers zipped up their suits and moved into position. The sun was warm on my shoulders and I shrugged off my jacket. When I turned up my shirt sleeves, Eden glanced at my tattoos. I folded my arms and closed my eyes, feeling drunk on the warmth of the morning. It was the kind of day for lunching in outdoor cafés on the harbour, for strolling home and snoozing in the afternoon with Eden stretched out beside me. Her long white limbs sweat-slicked and stark against the sheets. Who wanted to work on a morning like this? The weekend was coming. The surf would be up.

The divers submerged and the camera delayed for a moment or two with the jolt of the water around the diver’s head. More people had crowded in around us. For ten minutes there was nothing but blue and black shadows dancing on the screen. The audience murmured in anticipation. I glanced over and saw Eden’s limbs had tightened, the stringy muscle of her forearms flexing in the shadow of the tarp.

Twenty minutes – and nothing more than the flailing of the nameless diver’s limbs and the occasional glimpse of the others as they sunk together. The rise of the seabed materialised on the screen, and there was a notable shift in the mood of everyone around us. There, on the screen, was the rocky edge of what looked like a wide sea cavern. And in the cavern were about twenty weed-and sludge-covered toolboxes.

It was two hours before Hades opened the door to the hidden storage room again. The little girl was crouched in the corner farthest from the door, her arms tucked against her chest and her eyes wide. Hades hefted the limp body of the boy up onto his shoulder and spread a thick blanket out on the concrete floor. He let a pillow fall from his fingers and laid the body down. The girl watched, taking in the bandages around the boy’s skull and his sunken eyes with barely contained terror. The boy was wearing an unfamiliar man-sized T-shirt. Hades groaned as he crouched above the boy, spreading a thinner blanket over his sleeping body and tucking it under his chin. When it was done he stood and met the girl’s eyes.

‘Come with me,’ he beckoned, reaching out his hand.

She didn’t move.

‘If I was going to hurt you, I’d have done it by now.’

The girl shifted on her blood-stained feet, thinking. She rose up slowly, taking tentative steps towards the man.

Hades took her hand and led her into the kitchen. He directed the girl to sit on the edge of the table where the boy had been lying minutes before. The stranger’s body was gone, the pool of blood mopped up and bleached away. There were bundles of bloody rags on the table beside the girl, cotton bandages and the clipped ends of medical wire, an open first-aid kit and a pair of scissors. The girl recognised her brother’s soiled clothes dumped in a black garbage bag on the floor.

Hades filled a bowl with warm water. He set it beside the girl. Her eyes followed everything – his hands, his face, his tired steps back to the sink where a bottle of Johnnie Walker now stood. He poured two glasses. The girl shook violently as he approached her, her tiny nostrils flaring.

‘This’ll make you feel better,’ Hades said, taking her hand and pressing one of the glasses into it. Her fingers were sticky with blood. She looked at the whisky, then at his face. Hades swallowed his drink and set the glass down with a sigh. The girl hesitated.

‘It’s okay. I promise.’

The girl gulped the scotch as she had seen the man do. She winced and coughed.

‘Good work,’ Hades said.

He half-filled her glass again. When he picked up a cloth and rinsed it her brother’s blood turned the water in the bowl a pale pink. Hades tried to take the girl’s chin in his hand but she flinched away. He seized her face in his wide fingers and she whimpered.

‘Settle down.’

The scotch worked quickly in her veins. As he began cleaning the mask of blood away she was stiff and resistant. She soon softened up. Hades dipped her face and inspected the deep gash in her forehead. It was about four centimetres long, running across her hairline. He put down the cloth and looked at her. She had a chiselled appearance that would make her seem sharp and calculated when she was older. Dangerous and beautiful. Both children were greyhound thin. Hades wondered which dead parent they took after. The girl sighed with exhaustion as Hades cleaned her hands.

‘What’s your name, girl?’

‘Morgan.’

He spread her fingers and examined the grazes on her palms. Her face was inches from his, her big eyes downcast to the ruined flesh. He tried to guess how old she was. Probably five, he supposed.

‘What did they hit you with, Morgan?’

‘A stick,’ she whispered, tears sliding down the edge of her jaw.

Hades wrapped her hands in bandages. He took out the needle and the wire and her eyes followed his fingers, drunk and sad.

‘Did they mean to kill you both?’

‘I think so. They said so. They made us kneel on the gravel. They yelled at each other.’

Hades nodded, threading the fine wire through the soft white flesh surrounding the gash in her head. The girl didn’t flinch. She stared at his chest, licking her wet coral-coloured lips.

‘What’s going to happen to Marcus?’ she asked.

‘He’ll either wake up or he won’t.’

‘Are we going to stay here?’

‘For now,’ Hades said, pulling the second stitch tight. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure something out.’

Outside the house, beyond the mountains of trash, a truck blasted its horn on the highway. The sound spoke of the world outside the kitchen, an unimportant and distant place. A place of lost things. The girl’s tears were silent. Hades rested his palms on her forehead as he worked to pull the wound closed. When he was done he patched the wound with a clean cotton bandage and stood back like an artist assessing his work.

The girl whose name was Morgan sat still, studying the floor as though she had forgotten he was standing there, as though considering some terrible decision. Hades frowned and felt a knot grow in his stomach. There was a strange coldness to her eyes now. It gave him the feeling that something he couldn’t name, something that had been there only moments before, was now dead and gone.

He had never seen a child look that way.

4

WE OPENED THE first box on the concrete marina between two police buses, protected from the media by more blue plastic tarps. Everyone was pretty sure what we were going to find, but rather than driving people away it sucked them in, a macabre freak show. Eden and I crowded around the box with the area chief and a forensic specialist while the nobodies of the investigation whispered and shushed each other. The sun beat in on the side of the tarps, illuminating the shadows of dozens of bodies.

The forensic guy knelt down and wedged a chisel under the rusted lock of the toolbox, prying it open gently. Eden stood over him with her arms folded. She took off her sunglasses and her dark eyes examined the careful process, her head tilted slightly as though she could already smell the terrible stench that would erupt when the sludge seals were broken.

I saw the face first. The girl hadn’t been cut up to fit into the box, as we found later that many others had. She was curled in a foetal position with her hands and feet tucked under her body, her torso a perfect fit for the confines of her coffin. Her face was pressed into the dark corner, her nose a little lifted and her milky eyes wide open. She was fresh. Around a week dead by my guess. Tiny life-forms panicked and streaked over the surface of the water in the box, taking shelter in the folds of her body. The girl’s long blonde hair was tangled around her throat, swirling like seaweed in the disturbed water. There were wounds on her, deep grooves in her lower back, but the inside of the box was dark and I couldn’t see them properly at my angle. Her thin bony back was milk white, blotched here and there by the draining of blood and fluids. It was as though she had curled up in there to hide and someone had sunk her to the bottom of the ocean.

I looked at Eden. There was no emotion in her face. She stared down at the girl as though she were reading the fine print on a contract, attentive but distant. The area chief covered his mouth and nose with his hand against the smell.

‘What is she?’ I asked the forensic guy. ‘Sixteen?’

‘Eleven. Twelve.’

I chewed my lip. When no one spoke, I shrugged and said what everyone was probably thinking.

‘She’s pretty fresh. Probably that missing girl.’

‘Shut it up,’ Eden ordered, turning and pulling away a corner of the tarp where men and women scrambled back to let her through.