Darkest Place (28 page)

Him instead of Carly. Him instead of her friends.

And now it was over.

She turned away from the void, got to her bruised knees and crawled. For a long time, everything hurting, no idea how many vents she passed. Thinking about conversations with police, explanations and evidence,
discussions with residents, meetings and counselling and media. Consequences.

Then she was above Nate's loft. The cover was off, the light was on. Carly looked down as Nate hobbled into view, face bruised and swollen by the man she'd just killed.

‘Carly.' It was barely more than a whisper, as though he was afraid she wouldn't answer.

‘I'm okay.'

He made sure she didn't fall, just like he said he would. Helped her through the narrow hole onto the stepladder and to the bed, where he held her as adrenaline and shock rattled through her.

Stuart was dead, she was safe. She wanted to feel relief or guilt or horror at what she'd done. But she didn't. She only saw Stuart's handiwork: the treasure boxes concealed in the ceiling, the rows of cards filed inside, the photos she'd seen and the hundreds still up there. She imagined Christina's face once she knew, Brooke's depression, the woman with the shoes. She remembered the wake under the atrium to celebrate Elizabeth's life and the way this would change things.

Carly had stopped Stuart. She'd protected people – she didn't want to hurt them now.

Finally lifting her head from Nate's shoulder, she said, ‘Do you remember that first night we had takeaway?' she asked. ‘At my place.'

‘Yes.'

‘You wanted to know what was happening. You said it didn't matter what it was, it didn't matter what I'd done. Do you remember that?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you still feel that way?'

He watched her for a long moment as if he was trying to predict what his response would mean. ‘Yes.'

She didn't know if she had the right to ask or if it was a burden that would damage him more, but she thought he would understand. ‘If anyone asks, tell them I was here with you all day.'

‘This is the last box,' Carly told Bernard as she set it on top of the two others on the trolley. ‘It's only the last bits and pieces from the kitchen now, Christina and I can carry them.'

‘I'll get this lot into the lift then.' He wheeled the load around and pointed it towards the hallway. ‘Are you going to lock up now?'

‘The place is empty and clean, no point prolonging it.' Still, Carly stood a moment in the living room, watching him trundle the long hallway to the front door, turning and running her eyes over the soaring ceiling, the exposed brick, the stainless steel and, finally, the wedge of harbour beyond the balcony that was bathed in afternoon sunshine. She'd miss this place.

‘There are two muffins left over,' Christina said from the kitchen. ‘I've packed them in plastic for later.'

‘Thanks. And thank you for your help today.' Christina had baked and brewed in her own kitchen then turned up late in the morning with lunch and rubber gloves to feed and help with the last wipe-over of the apartment. It was a lot different to the last time Carly had moved,
when she'd packed in stony silence and left behind more than she took.

‘Happy to be useful.' Christina ripped off her gloves. ‘That's the kitchen finished then. The only thing left is a walk-through with the broom on our way out.'

Carly pushed it ahead of her down the hall, only pausing for a brief glance back along its length before pulling the door closed, giving it a tug and shove to make sure the lock had engaged.

Bernard had held the lift for them and they squeezed in with the trolley. ‘We'll miss having you just downstairs,' Christina said.

‘You can visit anytime. Ring ahead and I can have dinner waiting,' Carly joked.

The doors opened on to the foyer, Carly leading the way through the geometrical shadows to Howard's apartment. It was Carly's now, at half the market rent for as long as she filled the role of building supervisor – at the interview, she'd admitted to being low on maintenance skills but on first-name basis with a classroom of tradies. The job wasn't about the cost saving, she wanted to make sure her neighbours were safe and do it better than Howard had. She would be there for three years at least while she completed the social science degree she'd started a dozen years ago. Maybe longer if she was still keen on doing her Master's after she'd worn the cap and gown.

When Howard left for the UK two weeks ago, Carly cleaned and painted his two-bedroom apartment, discovering his record keeping was as hopeless as his supervising. She'd already started a new database for residents, adding the tenant who was moving into her place and updating old records.

The first she'd refiled was the information on Stuart Mayberry, owner, south wall, second floor, whose death just over a month ago had shocked the warehouse. A cleaner replacing supplies in the storage room had noticed a funky smell, investigated, and found Stuart's body at the bottom of the ventilation shaft in the south-east corner of the building.

Police believed his body had been there for around three days. They'd found a rope tied to a ladder in another shaft and concluded he'd been climbing and fell. For almost everyone at the warehouse it seemed a bizarre thing to be doing, but it matched information from Stuart's university colleagues in the school of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy, who said he was an experienced member of their caving team.

‘The table's arrived,' Bernard called.

Carly left Christina unpacking crockery, reaching the hallway as Dietrich walked backwards through the front door, heaving one end of the dining table Carly had found with Dakota in a second-hand store. Now it was here, it looked huge. ‘Wait till you see it, Christina,' she said. ‘It's got dents and gouges and paint slops. It's fabulous.'

‘Where do you want it?' Nate asked, managing the other end easily, his limp improving every day.

‘Right here.' Carly stood between the kitchen counter and the wall, where it would fill the space and seat a dozen people with a few extra chairs.

Christina looked it over with a frown. ‘Needs a bit of work.'

‘Just a good scrub,' Carly said. ‘The scars are its history. It looks like it deserves a good home, don't you think?'

‘Chairs! Coming through!' They appeared ahead of Brooke, two stacked together and towering above her head.
She'd lost five kilos now she was walking again. She was off the antidepressants and looked happy. She'd wielded a paintbrush with Carly a couple of times during the last week and had developed a sudden interest in cycling since she'd started chatting with the guy who chained his bike to the stairs. Brooke set her load down and looked around at the stacked boxes and jumble of furniture. ‘You sure you want to do dinner here tonight?'

‘So long as no one minds a hint of disaster with their lasagne,' Carly grinned. ‘It's already made and taking up room in Christina's fridge.' And it felt like something she had to do to mark another end and another beginning.

There'd been no official signing-off of Stuart's activities in the ceilings and no funeral to mark his passing. A cousin in Adelaide had made arrangements for the body to be transported across the country for burial. Carly hadn't signed the card that went around: she'd written her name in neat, clear handwriting at the top left-hand side, like the start of a list. Maybe thinking it was to fit all the names, or maybe because no one seemed to really know him, the other residents followed suit and when it was finished there were five rows of names. Carly knew by then which ones he'd visited at night, knew also that he'd betrayed them all.

On the pretext of needing to tie up business with the apartment, Carly had called the cousin. She'd only had to ask a few questions before Phil Mayberry got talking about the relative he hadn't spoken to for three years, maybe feeling responsible for providing some sort of explanation for Stuart's unusual death.

‘I keep thinking about him up there in your ceiling,' Phil had told her. ‘He was always a strange guy.'

Stuart was five when his high-achieving parents divorced and began a long custody battle for their only child.
He saw his cousins once a year – the quiet, scrawny, nerdy kid in a big, boisterous family gathering. ‘He used to have this calm smile all the time. He got smacked in the head with a tennis racquet once and just smiled like he didn't know what else to do.'

According to Phil, when arguments started, Stuart would stand back and watch as though he was keeping out of the firing range. ‘He started half of them himself. We all knew he did it but it sounded like we were picking on the shy kid if we accused him. He'd steal toys and hide them, pinch the cricket ball so the game couldn't be finished, push the little kids over and walk away. My sister nearly drowned once, she said Stuart had pulled her into the pool but he denied it and no one saw him.'

The last time Phil spoke to his cousin was at Stuart's mother's funeral. Stuart had talked about some groundbreaking research he was working on, something about human trials, being on the verge of multi-million-dollar grants and making a valuable contribution to science.

‘I couldn't get a handle on what it was all about,' Phil said. ‘Couldn't tell if he was really smart or I was really stupid. And it turns out he was only a research student and his own father couldn't get home from Europe for his funeral.'

Carly knew nothing about psychology but after hearing Phil's stories, she'd found terms on the internet like ‘antisocial behaviour', ‘narcissism' and ‘self-serving cognitive distortions' and figured there was probably an explanation there somewhere.

She'd suggested to Phil that the ropes and harnesses left in Stuart's apartment be donated to his caving team – the Polaroid camera that had been stowed in a backpack she'd smashed and thrown away. After meeting two of his
friends in the storage room one afternoon, watching as they picked over the equipment, Carly had understood a little more about Stuart.

‘It's good gear,' one of them told her.

‘So you guys worked with Stuart?' she'd asked.

They told her they'd been pharmacology research students with him. The conversation got complicated with medical references but Carly got the gist. There were a number of long-term projects being run at the uni and an opportunity for students to shift between them, depending on funding levels. Two got her attention. The first was to do with developing new delivery methods for inhaled medicines – according to Stuart's friends, there were several devices that were proving promising that they'd tested on themselves. The other was a comparative study on psychoactive properties in drugs, comparing manufactured substances to ones produced by plants. Carly remembered Stuart's words in the tunnel, telling her she'd had
consistently good responses, especially with the plant derivatives
. Her assumption was that he'd made use of the plant-based and manufactured drugs being tested in the research and done his own comparisons on his human lab rats in the warehouse.

Both of Stuart's friends were students and cavers, and Carly wondered if they knew what he'd been doing, or even if they'd been up in the ceiling with him. Stuart had told Carly he'd found
that particular dream experience fucking mind-blowing
and she'd speculated whether the three of them had trialled the drugs together – and whether one of them had broken Nate's jaw. But both were a little like Stuart, not even close to brawny or thug-like, and Stuart had access to powerful drugs. She figured it was more likely he'd made other friends, the kind that had a
market for his concoctions – and who knew how to use a metal rod on a man's head.

By three o'clock, Carly had convinced everyone to go home. Except Nate, who was sitting on the new dining table swinging his legs when she returned. ‘Clean the table or reassemble the bed?' he asked.

‘Am I insane?' she replied. ‘Hosting a dinner party for eight the day I move house?'

‘Yes.' He caught her with his feet, pulled her between his thighs and kissed her.

The police had conducted a door-to-door canvass of residents after Stuart was found, asking what they'd seen or heard in the days before his fall. Nate was in Carly's apartment when Constable Dean Quentin came by.

‘I was here for the interviews, thought I'd talk to you myself,' Dean told her, filling her threshold again.

Carly didn't know if the body in the ventilation shaft had made him wonder about her story, but she invited him in like an old acquaintance, introduced him to Nate, his face still bruised and swollen, his knee surgery scheduled for the next day. They'd sat around her low table with coffee and some of Christina's muffins.

That was five days after she'd climbed out of the ceiling filthy and shaking and shocked. True to his word, Nate hadn't asked what had happened up there. Carly had told him, though, the next morning, after she'd scrubbed her skin raw and slept all night – a deep, black, uninterrupted slumber. And after they'd made love in the loft, naked and brazen, because Carly – the Carly she'd found in the darkness – refused to be shamed by the man who'd watched them. With no attempt to rewrite it or defend it, she'd told Nate everything. Then she'd told him how she wanted it to end.

Perhaps she had no right to decide. Perhaps the other victims had a right to cry and rail, make statements to police and talk about it, have nightmares and appointments with psychologists, be the subject of media scrutiny and targets for internet trolls, and never feel safe in their homes. But Stuart was dead, he couldn't answer for his sins … and Carly knew what it was like to survive, how it felt to have her pain part of a collective memory, and how a person could lose their life without dying. And she thought Stuart's victims deserved to keep what he tried to take for himself – their privacy.

Yes, it was for Carly, too. She didn't want this on her record – the climbing around in the ceiling, the photos and drugs, the kick that had launched Stuart into the ventilation shaft. Charges, a trial, possibly a prison term. Nate didn't give her an answer until Dean Quentin put questions to him.

‘I don't remember much from around then. I was in the hospital with this.' Nate pointed to the mass of bruising.

‘What about on the Wednesday?' Dean asked.

‘I came home that day. Discharged myself early.'

‘So you were here?'

‘Yeah. With Carly. She told me I was an idiot then lined up the DVDs and kept me company.' Nate looked at her, beside him on her sofa. ‘You worked on an assignment for a while, too.'

‘Yes, up at the table, sorting out those notecards.' She smiled, relieved for her friends, for every resident in the warehouse. And for the look in Nate's eyes that said he knew he hadn't let her drown.

When Carly walked Dean out, he'd paused at the door. ‘I wanted to ask you a few more questions. On your own.'

She wondered then if he'd figured it out – the break-ins, no fingerprints, a man falling down a ventilation shaft. ‘Sure.'

‘How are you now? Last time we spoke you weren't so good.'

The humiliating scene in the police station – she knew now the scratches were from Stuart and his drugs had still been in her bloodstream. Carly took a second to look embarrassed. ‘Yeah, that day. I'm sorry about that. I took your advice and got myself in to see someone, a psychologist here in Newcastle, and some meds.' She hoped he didn't ask who. ‘I'm feeling good and I'm all settled in and life is better now. Thanks for being nice when I was completely weird.'

He nodded, checking her over like he had on dark, scary nights. ‘I'm glad you got it sorted. It's a better ending.'

‘It is, you're right.'

Carly hadn't been able to bring herself to get back into the ceiling while Stuart's body was there, but a day after the police finished their interviews she climbed the ladder again. For two weeks, before and after classes, while Nate recovered from surgery, she trawled the entire ventilation system, checking every vent opening, removing every trace of Stuart. She'd found a file box above Christina's apartment and a second one above her own, with photos of a woman with tight, dark curls – Talia. Carly emptied the contents of every one she found, prised off the latches and glued down the lids. Then she'd stood on Nate's balcony and burned the photos and notecards in his barbecue.