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Mak smiled at the compliment.

‘Who has good contacts,’ she added sharply. ‘Nearly all of my investigators have police contacts of some kind, Mak. No one is expecting you to jeopardise your relationships for an investigation. That would be counterproductive.’

Mak nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said, though she still wondered if those relationships were the main reason she had been chosen. Her ties to the police—to both her lover, Andy, and her friend Detective Mahoney—might give her an advantage in a case like this, but if either of them helped her out with information and was discovered, it could put their careers at serious risk. So far, she had not considered exploiting them for that kind of help.

Marian slid a piece of paper with a name and address on it across the desk. ‘The client took his PA to a party on Wednesday night and that was the last he saw of her. Yesterday she left him a message that worried him. That was the last anyone seems to have heard from her. The client thinks she might have gone home with someone who was there called Simon Aston. He wants you to check him out.’

Sounds like a jealous lover to me.

‘Where was the party on Wednesday night?’ Mak asked, her pen poised.

‘He wouldn’t say.’

Mak frowned. ‘He wouldn’t say, or he didn’t say?’

‘He wouldn’t say,’ Marian repeated.

‘Well, do I get to meet the client? Ask him a few more questions?’ Mak asked eagerly. She was new to the business of private investigation, but it seemed to her that she could get a lot more information if she just talked to the client directly.

‘No. As far as he is concerned you don’t even know his name, so there are to be no mentions of him and no contacting him. He is paranoid about his confidentiality.’

‘Oh,’ Mak replied, disappointed. She thought for a moment. ‘Is he married?’ She suspected a guilty affair with the deceased.

‘Yes,’ Marian answered, but failed to add any juicy personal details. ‘Mak, stop analysing the client. That’s not your job.’

Mak smiled.
Sorry.

‘There’s more.’ Marian closed her eyes again as she continued to speak. It was one of her unusual quirks that she spoke this way—eyes closed—when recalling details of a case or a conversation. It was rumoured that she had a photographic memory. Mak sometimes found this mannerism of Marian’s unsettling. She never knew where to look. The tops of her boss’s lavender-painted eyelids? The desktop? ‘The client wants everything you can get on the victim’s life in the weeks leading up to her murder—her close contacts, secret lovers—everything, and any relationship she might have been having with this
Simon Aston, any contact they had with one another.’

Mak nodded. She was beginning to see why it would take a week. In fact, it would probably take longer with that kind of field work. ‘That’s a lot to cover.’

‘He has you on retainer for a week, all expenses. Get everything you can.’

This was definitely Mak’s biggest job to date. With any luck she would be able to tuck another couple of grand into her savings account soon. ‘Does he want photographs, a log of the guy’s activities, anything like that? Does he want this Simon Aston followed, or does he just want information?’

‘Information. He already knows Aston and what he looks like. Follow him if it helps, but the client isn’t asking for surveillance.’

He just wants to know if the guy was banging her. And maybe if the suspect was too. I get it.

‘No problem. What do we know about the guy in custody?’

‘His name is Tobias Murphy,’ Marian said.

‘Where are they holding him, do we know?’

‘He’s in juvey.’

Mak was surprised. ‘Really? He’s underage?’ That might blow her theory on the victim having an affair with the murder suspect. Maybe.

‘It seems so. The boy has some priors, according to the client. That’s what the police told him, anyway.’

Getting records of any convictions on a juvenile was tricky.

‘I don’t want to ask too many stupid questions here but if the police already have a suspect in custody, why does the client want it all investigated? Did he say?’ Mak asked.

Marian’s sharp hazel eyes opened. ‘It’s not our job to wonder why we have been hired. The client is happy to pay your rate for at least a week, possibly more. It’s legit work. That’s all we need to know. He is particularly paranoid about confidentiality, are you clear? So you didn’t get his details from me.’

‘Yeah.’

‘
Particularly paranoid
,’ Marian repeated, as if she had read Mak’s thoughts.

‘If he didn’t want me to know who he was, then why did you tell me?’

Marian smiled slyly. ‘Because I knew the first thing you would do was waste his paying time figuring out who hired you.’

Mak laughed. Marian was right.

‘So now you know. Go do your job.’

‘One last thing…’

‘Yes?’

‘You said the victim left the client “a message that worried him”. What was the message?’ Makedde asked.

‘Yesterday Meaghan called his private line to apologise to him that she wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t come in to work. She said that someone
at the party had drugged her, and she also said she had something important she wanted to tell him.’

Something important…

‘She never got the chance to tell him. Groobelaar wasn’t at work—he missed the day and only heard the message when he got to work this morning, right before learning of her murder.’

Mak narrowed her eyes.
And it didn’t take him long to decide to look up a private investigation agency.

‘Okay. I’m on it,’ Mak said, her mind brimming with unanswered questions. She needed to find out everything she could about Tobias Murphy and Meaghan Wallace, and her first stop would be the simple, unglamorous basics: the local telephone directory and the wonders of the internet.

Maybe she liked the water. She just wanted to touch it.

Tobias Murphy felt boneless and anaemic, his flesh trembling uncontrollably in a way that made his teeth chatter. He could not sleep. He held his arms close to try to stop the shaking, shaking, shaking—but the shaking wouldn’t stop.

Why won’t it stop?

‘
Krista!
’

Memories leaped forwards into the space where Tobias’s thoughts should have been. Instead of the white room he was trapped in, he saw scenes of his childhood in washed-out colours and grainy shapes, like an old colourised movie, scratched and decaying. Fading. The voices sounded tinny. He heard his mother calling out for her two-year-old niece, Krista. ‘
Krista?
’ He saw the linoleum of the kitchen floor, and he saw the cupboard handles that came up to his chest. Crawling, he hid under a kitchen chair and wrapped his arms around the wooden crossbars, his chubby legs sticking out straight. He saw a scab, poking out under a curling sticking plaster
on his shin, and he picked at it. His mother came back into the kitchen, still looking, still searching. ‘
Krista?
’ He crawled over and tugged on her long skirt, but she didn’t say anything. He clung to the fabric, his small white fingers disappearing into the colourful pattern of flowers.

‘Krista, sweetheart? Where are you?’ his mother called out. She stood for a moment, and he clung, his face resting on her knee.

‘
Krista!
’

Her voice changed when she saw the backyard swimming pool. She flinched, covered her mouth, then tore away from him. Tobias’s little fingertips lost their grip on her. In a whirl of linen flowers she was out the back door and running down the path towards the swimming pool. Tobias walked out after his mum in time to see her poised at the edge, her face drained of all colour.

And then she dived in.

Tobias had fought long and hard to keep those recollections away, but he was weak now, the shaking wouldn’t stop and he couldn’t fight it. Krista was somewhere near the bottom—not moving, not breathing—and that was bad, so very bad. Tobias didn’t understand what it meant but it was a bad, bad, bad thing that had happened, and nothing would ever be the same.

Stop!

The cold, wet hands of Krista Garrison were on his shaking ankles—still two years old, cadaverous and caught in her tiny youth.

Stop!

Tobias opened his stinging eyes in a panic. Of course she wasn’t there. He was met instead with a vision of institutional white: starched white sheets, white walls, white floors scrubbed clean with disinfectant, and a white door with a small murky window, lined with cell bars.

Tobias’s body was slick with a heavy sweat, fighting against an unseen force, the shaking and perspiring said to be his body’s way of flushing the enemy out of his system. But the enemy was still there, omnipresent and omnipotent—in the room, in the walls, filling every sweating pore, inhabiting every tiny cell and playing these tricks on his mind. Making the shaking, shaking, shaking, and making him remember.

What did they know?
WHAT DID THEY KNOW?

All this was doing was bringing Krista back, and his mother, who wouldn’t get out of bed any more, wouldn’t feed him in the morning, wouldn’t help him dress. His mother who was there but not. Shaking, shaking, shaking. She was gone to him. It was bad, so bad, and things were never the same.

What did they know about what was best for him?

WHAT DID THEY KNOW?

Things were never going to be the same.

At one-forty on Friday afternoon Simon Aston stood nervously at the street corner of the Ravesi bar and hotel at Bondi Beach, still hoping that Warwick O’Connor would show up to see him. He’d been waiting around for nearly an hour, growing increasingly tense. Warwick, the small-time thug Simon had falsely believed would be easy to control, was now nowhere to be found; and, worse, he was not answering Simon’s calls.

Simon was panicking.

Come on, you prick, pick up your goddamned phone.

In Simon’s briefcase was $20 000 and change. All in cash. He’d already stashed away the $15 000 extra. If Warwick showed, that twenty grand would be all his, and hopefully it would sway him from taking any steps towards making Simon further regret having ever hired him.

Simon paced back and forth along the pavement. He dialled Warwick again.

Pick up, pick up.

‘Hello.’

‘Warwick, you’re there,’ he said, relieved. ‘It’s me, Simon.’

‘Do you have it?’

Simon smiled, and made his voice as friendly as he could. ‘I have a lot of cash right here waiting for you, pal. I’m at the Ravesi, like I said I would be. Come on down and we’ll have a chat.’

‘You have the full mill?’

Simon hesitated.

‘You and I have nothing to chat about if you don’t have the money,’ Warwick said.

Simon’s throat tightened. He licked his lips. ‘Man, just come on down. I got a heap of cash for you. We’ll work something out.’

There was a pause.

‘I know what this is worth. If you can’t get what I want, I will have to go to the big man…’

‘No, don’t, don’t,’ Simon pleaded, becoming desperate.

Oh fuck…he wouldn’t really, would he?

‘No, man, don’t do that. Just come on down and we’ll chat—’

The phone went dead.

Makedde strode up the moving escalator of the massive, upscale Bondi Junction shopping centre, her backpack and leather jacket slung over one shoulder and a folder of information in her hand. At least here in the mall the looks she got in her motorbike gear were more of curiosity or admiration than suspicion. One teenage boy with studs through his face gave her a nod of approval. Like her, he was wearing leather trousers. She winked at him playfully as she moved past him on the escalator, nudging his ribcage with her helmet.

Mak was a couple of minutes early for her customary late lunch with Loulou. The food court that she and her girlfriend frequented was on the top floor of the complex. It did not offer the usual subterranean, greasy fast-food stuff that Mak could only tolerate if she was hungover. Instead this was a stylish new space, with an open plan, lots of windows, mountains of fresh food and a good sushi bar—something like the healthy places that she used to frequent near her university in Vancouver,
the ones with organic tags all over everything. On the flip side, there was the drawcard of a certain warm chocolate fountain they were both addicted to. Like something out of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, the fountain was made of pure melted chocolate, flowing luxuriously in wait for the next chocoholic to take a cupful. Mak resisted the pull to the chocolate fountain until her friend arrived. She found a spot at one of the sleek tables, where she could pore over the info she was compiling for her investigation. Mak had trolled the directory databases and tracked down the addresses and telephone numbers for Noelene and Ralph Wallace—the parents of the victim, the deceased Meaghan Wallace—and the very alive Simon Aston. There had been no listings for the suspect, Tobias Murphy, probably because he was far too young to have anything listed in his own name. Mak had not yet had time to do a full internet or newspaper archive search on any of them—she would get to that after her lunch break with Loulou.

While Mak had been running checks through the directory, finding things that any Jo Blo could look up if they really wanted to and knew how, Marian had pulled valuable statistical info for her with awe-inspiring ease, thanks to informants in various government departments whom she had nurtured relationships with over her many years of investigations. And in what must have been two or three phone calls she’d got a pretty good
run-down on the suspect’s criminal record as well, even though he was a juvenile—all without Mak needing to lean on any of her precious police contacts. Mak felt slightly embarrassed about her little outburst earlier. She had a lot to learn, and she knew it.

Mak opened the file, and began with the young murder suspect:
Tobias Alexander Murphy.

Tobias was only sixteen years old. Born in Sydney. His mother was recently deceased, his father long since remarried. Mak dared not ask how Marian had found the next bit of information, which was protected for those under-eighteens who’d had a brush or two with the law, so that their earlier mistakes didn’t hinder their entire adult lives. The police had been straight with Mak’s client, Mr Groobelaar, about the suspect. The young Tobias had a list of priors, all right: minor thefts, drug possession and even loitering. She noticed he didn’t have any violent offence charges to his name until now, though.

Murder is a big step up from loitering.

On paper, Tobias was the very embodiment of a lost teen. Not exactly a classic murder suspect, but he certainly qualified as a sufficiently unpredictable troubled youth. He’d been kicked out of a number of schools for disruptive behaviour, and been unsuccessfully enrolled in several youth programs. His recent history was tainted by apparent homelessness, which further explained why there was no listing for him in the
phone book. Mak suspected that he must have committed many more thefts than the handful he had been busted for over the years. How else could he possibly have survived on the streets, if that was indeed where he was living?

However, his history of lawlessness was not the only thing Mak thought her client might find of interest. Tobias had been put in his first foster home at only four years of age, and between the ages of four and fourteen he had stayed in not one but nine different foster homes.
Nine.
That was about one a year. Both of his biological parents had been alive until his mother’s death two years ago. Why had no family members stepped in to take care of him? Why was Tobias shuffled around so relentlessly, or what was it that he hated so much about his carers that he was constantly running away?

Then, incredibly, for nearly two years there was nothing on him at all. No contact with the law. No contact with support services, teachers, foster carers. No record of address. No contact with his living father. Had he slipped through the cracks at the tender age of fourteen? How could that have happened? How could someone that young just disappear in a developed country like Australia?

Where did you go? How did you survive for that long, Tobias?

And now that he had been found again, it was as a suspect for murder.

Mak didn’t get much more of a chance to ponder the facts in greater depth before a flash of colour diverted her attention away from her reading. A young woman with bleached blonde mohawk-like hair—every strand gelled to a cockatoo peak in the centre—was bounding towards the food court wearing a tartan miniskirt, chunky purple fishnets and a cropped jacket with enormous bell sleeves. She was a veritable moving lecture in Björk dressing.

Loulou.

Mak was still relatively new to Sydney, and as anyone who has relocated abroad knows, finding trustworthy friends in a new city is not a quick task. Thankfully, Mak had met Loulou years before when she was modelling, and bit by bit Loulou had turned into a great girlfriend. When Loulou wasn’t painting the faces of the beautiful or the famous for photo shoots or rock videos, she was waiting for her artists’ agency to call her for her next booking—and there had been a lot of waiting by the phone lately, from what Mak could tell. That was a predicament they both had in common for the moment. Work for Loulou was usually dead slow in January and February each year, so she had developed the habit of taking the bus into Bondi Junction to peruse the shops at the sprawling shopping centre, passing the time by looking at style magazines in the shops or staring lustfully at the designer displays for Bettina Liano, Morrissey and Versace, unable to afford the clothes
—a kind of retail therapy without the actual retail transaction. And the shopping centre was just a few blocks from Marian’s office, so Mak and Loulou’s lunch dates at the food court were long and frequent, as was the ritualistic cup dip into that deliciously naughty chocolate fountain. A few more weeks of this and Mak was convinced that she wouldn’t be able to fit into her leathers any more.

‘Over here, Loulou,’ Mak said, waving her arms.

‘Sweetie!’ Loulou cried out, and then embraced Makedde enthusiastically, her mohawk vibrating. They might have appeared like long-lost, albeit slightly mismatched, sisters reunited after decades apart. No one would have guessed that they had seen each other in the same food court barely a week earlier.

‘How are you?’ Mak asked, extracting herself from Loulou’s paws.

‘I am
fabulous
!’ The mohawk shook again.

I’ll have whatever she’s having,
Mak thought.
How can she always be so full of energy?

Loulou was a wild young woman with a heart as big as the Australian sky, and she was someone Mak had grown close to during some fairly recent trying times. Anyone who would stay up until four in the morning to hold Mak’s hair back, as she vomited from an excess of cocktails and nerves the night before she was to be a witness in the Stiletto Murder trial, was a true
friend. In fact, that was probably the turning point for them. Loulou had graduated from crazy friend to confidante and saviour that night.

‘Fabulous?’ Mak said. ‘That sounds pretty good. Where do you get a dose of fabulous these days?’ A bit of that Loulou enthusiasm would be good for the spirit.

‘Awww, are you worried about Andy leaving tomorrow?’

‘Nah, it’s fine,’ Mak said, not entirely truthfully.

‘I have great news!’ Loulou exclaimed. She was simply bursting, as was so often the case. Mak hoped the news was in relation to a great new job, or a sudden windfall that would help cover Loulou’s rent. When it came to financial difficulties, Mak’s concerns about opening her practice paled in comparison to Loulou’s woes. Loulou had a credit card debt of over forty grand, and she hadn’t paid off her humble ‘dag-mobile’ car either. She could use every bit of good luck she could find.

Loulou gripped Mak’s hands across the tabletop. ‘I met someone!’ she cried, practically before her bottom had hit the chair.

Mak took her seat. ‘Oh, well that’s good,’ she responded cautiously. She’d heard this before, too many times to count. Sadly, previous exclamations of this kind from Loulou had always ended in tears.

‘He’s the frontman in a band called ‘Electric Possum’. He’s soooo cute,’ Loulou gushed enthusiastically. Her idea of cute was usually a
greasy young man covered in tattoos, holding a microphone and smoking a joint.

‘What’s his name?’ Mak dared to ask.

‘Drayson,’ Loulou purred.

‘Jason. That’s nice.’

‘No, Drayson,’ Loulou corrected her.

‘His first name?’ Mak asked.

‘Is Drayson, yeah. We’re moving in together.’

‘What!’

Where did this guy suddenly come from?

Mak had seen Loulou last week and there was no cute singer in the picture then.

‘He’s really nice,’ her friend continued, apparently unaware that she had slipped into lust-induced romantic insanity. Mak wondered fleetingly if this guy was even aware that they were moving in together.

‘Hang on, hang on. Walk me through this. When did you meet this guy?’ Mak pressed, trying to put the brakes on just a bit, in her friend’s best interests.

‘At that 16DD gig at the Annandale Hotel.’ The Annandale was one of Loulou’s usual rock hangouts. ‘It went off!’

‘Wasn’t that gig on last weekend?’ Mak asked, confused.

‘Yeah.’

Right.
‘So…you’re talking about moving in with a guy you met a few days ago?’ she said, just to clarify.

‘A week ago, yeah,’ Loulou corrected her.

‘Six days,’ Mak corrected in return.

‘He needs a room-mate and I do, too,’ Loulou said, as if the logic was obvious.

Mak nodded slowly. ‘Okay. A room-mate would be great, but how about you put an ad up somewhere? You’re close to the university. I’m sure lots of students would respond. You’d have a roomie in a week. Or one of your friends might need a place. Have you asked around?’

‘Drayson
is
a friend.’

‘How about someone who is
just
a friend?’

Loulou just went on smiling and ignored Mak’s logical suggestion.

‘Do you want me to step in here?’ Mak persisted, starting to feel like a stick-in-the-mud. ‘I don’t mean to dampen your mood, but didn’t you tell me that you were going to ban yourself from musicians for a while? Wasn’t that your New Year’s resolution?’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘I think you said something like, “Just stop me if I start showing interest in another muso…”’

It was February and it seemed like a lot of resolutions had already been forgotten—like Mak’s vow to stop analysing her friend and her relationships. So much for that.

‘Yeah. I think I did make that resolution,’ Loulou admitted.

Good. Mak was not imagining the conversation. ‘We had that chat not all that long ago,’ she pointed out. ‘Two months ago, maybe.’

‘But Drayson is not just “some musician”. He’s special. Trust me.’

Mak did trust Loulou—she trusted her with her life, in fact. But she didn’t trust Loulou with her
own
life.

‘Okay, tell me all about Mr Special while we grab some sushi,’ Mak said, relenting. ‘I’m starving.’

Loulou threw her coat over the chair and got up. Her shirt was emblazoned with the words
YES
,
BUT NOT WITH YOU
. The two of them made a beeline for the sushi bar and loaded up on California rolls and sashimi.

Their miso soups were being prepared when Loulou said, ‘Apparently he has this
fabulous
pad in Melbourne that he shares with an artist friend. So I’ll move down and—’

‘
Melbourne!
Did you say he lives in
Melbourne?
’

Loulou nodded.

Melbourne was about a thousand kilometres from Sydney, but it could have been 100 000 kilometres given the way most Sydneysiders talked about it. Mak had been reliably informed that it was a place where people wore black and clutched umbrellas in the heaving rain, trapped in a bleak and eternal winter with no nightlife and no respite.

Mak decided to deal with the situation logically. She leaned against the counter with her tray, and spoke slowly. ‘But, Loulou, you live in
Sydney.
Why would you want to move to a
whole different state six days after meeting a man who happens to be a musician, which happens to be exactly the kind of guy you vowed to give up not two months ago? You haven’t seen the place. You don’t even know this guy. He could be some kind of psycho.’

‘I know, I know,’ Loulou said, grabbing her miso soup and toddling back to the table. ‘But he
is
really cute.’

There was no way to fight Loulou Logic.

Mak took some solace in the fact that this boy could quite possibly be forgotten by nightfall, and Mak would never hear about him—or her much-needed best friend moving to Melbourne—ever again. She couldn’t lose Andy to Quantico
and
Loulou to Melbourne. That would be a disaster.

They took their seats and started sipping at their soups. Loulou fished around in hers for a mouthful of seaweed and tofu. ‘I’m going down tomorrow.’

‘You’re going tomorrow! Great.’

‘I won’t have time to pack all my stuff so I will just spend the weekend down there. We can’t stand to be apart.’

‘Well, you seemed to survive apart just fine before six days ago,’ Mak muttered.
Thank God she hasn’t given notice on her apartment right away
, she thought.