34

On her own that night, Teddy ate takeaway Indian cross-legged on her balcony while the wind howled and the rain stormed and her food went cold too fast. She had ordered garlic naan, chana dhal, saffron rice, and a samosa that didn’t arrive. She tipped the driver anyway and sat staring into the night.

God, her head hurt. She’d already taken her prescription painkillers and a couple more Nurofen and a little something unprescribed to help. Still the weight of grief and confusion pressed down on her.

There was another gun in her home. She knew Lucky kept one hidden, one she had never bothered to find before, because she had her own. In a place this sparse, there were only so many places it would be.

It took her ten minutes to find it, taped with a box of ammo to the wall behind the basin in the kitchen. She loaded it and then sat with it on the kitchen floor and said to herself: It’s just a gun, it wasn’t your fault. Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.

If she hadn’t brought the gun, Art would be alive. Alive to answer all her fucking questions about why he knew Cole and didn’t say anything, why he lied about Hank.

Teddy could accept that Art lied about Hank to move the case forward. Visualising the process – Art calling him up, explaining the whole thing, probably doing some roleplay over a beer – made it not only likely but true. She could see it all.

She could accept that he spoofed Cole’s number and messaged Hank’s phone with it. Surely they knew somebody who could do that. They knew people who could do fucking anything. Unless he had only said he was spoofing it but hadn’t needed to. Because he had Cole’s phone.

The gun was cold in her hand. She wondered about its history, just like she wondered about Art’s. All this unknown in her life and this steel and death in her hand couldn’t solve any of her problems; it could only make them worse.

She taped the gun back under the sink without unloading it, hoping her father hadn’t seen her do it. That gun could stay there. The one she owned hadn’t killed anyone until she let it fall into the hands of that fucker who killed Art.

The only way to help her forgive herself for killing Art – because it was her fault, she knew – was finding out who pulled the trigger that day on that calm suburban street. She wasn’t clear on what Art and his killer had been saying when she got to the car – not just because it was a fuzzy, post-injury memory, but because she didn’t understand it in the first place – though she was certain that Art had known the man who had killed him.

She wondered about Art’s friends, the ones Choker’s other people had been speaking to. Who did he know that she could find? He never spoke to them about specific acquaintances – it was only ever ‘the boys’ or ‘my crew’ or something equally useless that had never mattered before. The only thread she could think of to pull at was Dan, even though his alibi checked out. It was what he had said when she called him to check out his alibi – we’re friends – a comment she thought back then meant Dan and her, but now, she realised, could mean that Dan was friends with Art.

It was unlikely he’d kill him, and therefore lose one of his numerous sources of money. But she hadn’t really considered what had brought Dan and Art to each other in the first place.

She picked up her phone and sent a text: Free for coffee around 10 tomorrow?

She had a long shower and felt no clearer when she got out. Dan had replied: Want to eat out?

Teddy noted the ambiguous nature of his reply, got dressed and started a list. This one had all the restaurants they had gone to with Art; it required more thinking than her current medication allowed. She remembered names sometimes, and otherwise trawled maps online, trying to remember which side of the road they had been on, and what situations they’d just come from. At the end, she couldn’t even remember why she’d started the list; just that it felt like something she needed to do, like a connection her brain couldn’t make.

Between Teddy in the east and Dan in the north, there was a restaurant called the Shortstone. It overlooked the Yarra River in a building more than a hundred years old that had belonged to a local mayor, who, Art had told her when they were there, had also been a local murderer on the side. The knife he’d used in the murders, so they said, still hung over the kitchen door.

She called up to reserve a table. They were booked out, unfortunately. For most weekends.

Teddy texted Dan back: Have you been to the Shortstone?

She went out onto the balcony and swept her crumbs over the side onto the grass below. By the time she went back in, Dan had replied: We have a table at ten o’clock tomorrow. Bring that ass. Teddy already regretted it.

~

Teddy dressed up a little for Dan in the morning. He was quite a beautiful man, with black hair that curled under his chin and mournful dark eyes that made him look more maudlin than he was. He had modelled once for Bonds, and for a full month he was in crisp white underwear on the bus stop near her house, looking pensively at the Centrelink across the road.

Today he was wearing dark woollen pants and a white linen shirt half-tucked in when Teddy arrived at Shortstone. After the downpour overnight it was sunny and bright but cold, and the waiter took her jacket away to hang it up.

Dan stood and kissed her on the mouth, then said he had already ordered for both of them. She said he was an asshole for doing that, and he reached out and held her hands.

‘I’ll pay,’ he said earnestly. ‘And if you hate anything I ordered, I’ll throw myself off the balcony.’

‘Good,’ she said, and sat down. She knew he would distract her soon, so before he could say something else that annoyed her, she asked, ‘How did you meet Art?’

‘I’m well, thank you,’ he said, smiling.

She stared at him stonily.

‘Oh, come on. I thought this was a date.’

‘It sure as fuck is not.’

‘I’ll change your mind. Anyway, let’s just say we had mutual friends.’

‘Do you think I want a cryptic answer here?’

He spread out his hands. ‘What do you want me to say?’

‘The truth?’

‘The truth is we did have mutual friends. One day we were all at the same bar and got to talking.’

‘Why are you being cagey about who they are?’ Teddy asked.

A waiter came, poured them some still mountain water, and left.

‘Why do you think?’ Dan asked.

‘Because they’re all criminals?’

‘Uh, aren’t your friends criminals too?’

She ignored that. ‘Any of them killers?’

He shrugged. ‘Any of yours?’

She leaned in very close over the bread basket, and he leaned back.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘none of them would have killed him, and all of them knew he owed me money I still wanted. And I told you it wasn’t me.’

‘I already knew it anyway,’ she said. ‘I was there when it happened. If it was you, I would have figured it out, and you’d already be dead.’

He laughed and picked up a slice of bread, pulling it apart with his fingers. ‘You couldn’t kill me.’

‘It would be easy,’ she said, keeping her voice neutral. ‘You’ve told me so much about yourself. I know you like to go to the gym overnight, when it’s quiet. I know which gym, and I know it has underground parking. I would stab you in the heart at two in the morning, and you would never know what happened until I already had my knife in your artery.’

He put down the bread. ‘Jesus, Teddy.’

The starters arrived; bite-sized brioche French toast pieces in a wattleseed syrup, dotted with tiny chocolate leaves.

Dan looked at Teddy with his big sad eyes and said, ‘You’re angry because you’re sad.’

Teddy didn’t want to talk about that. The food was glorious and sweet, and she needed not to think about her sadness. ‘Considering what he did to your eye,’ she said casually, ‘I guess he was your enemy.’

He laughed again, but it wasn’t mocking this time. ‘Teddy, if everyone who punched me in the face was my enemy, I wouldn’t have a goddamn friend in the world. I wouldn’t even be sitting here with you.’

‘You deserved that punch,’ she said primly.

‘Of course I did,’ he said. ‘I almost always do.’ Dan finished his toast, and said, ‘Me and Art still hung out sometimes.’

‘Really?’

He shrugged. ‘I hang out with a lot of people. And he was up for a lot of things. Good for a night out to find some’– he searched for the term – ‘new friends.’

‘Lady friends?’

‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if you thought I was being a dick about someone who’d died. But do we pretend that they were angels? I mean, I don’t think we’re in that business, Teddy.’

He had ordered matching breakfast wines. She pretended to take a sip, just so she didn’t have to answer.

‘He detached my retina, Teddy,’ Dan said, and for once, he almost looked serious. ‘I was hospitalised. I thought I might go blind.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. And I guess I’m sorry he can’t pay you what he owes you.’

‘I’m sure he could have found it somewhere, that rich bastard. He’d make me pay for my own fucking drinks at bars, you know? An absolute tight-ass. And he’d pick fights with people all the time. He’d find some girl who was there with her boyfriend and he’d just try and take her, like it was a challenge.’

This was news to Teddy. ‘And you didn’t?’

‘I’m much more subtle,’ Dan said. ‘I don’t need to kneecap anyone to steal a girlfriend. They come to me.’

‘Gross. And don’t call them girls,’ Teddy said.

Dan held up his hands in surrender. ‘Fine. Can we talk about something else? He was a jerk sometimes, then sometimes he was fun, and now he’s dead, and he’ll never become a better person.’ He reached across the table for her. ‘I’m a better person now. For losing him.’

‘You are so full of shit,’ Teddy said, keeping her arms crossed.

It was a good brunch otherwise. After their main – poached quail eggs, fennel sourdough, saltbush hollandaise, pickled samphire – their waiter asked how everything had been so far, and Teddy asked her if they had any house sarsaparilla.

‘I’ll check,’ she said.

‘The fuck you on about?’ Dan said. ‘House sarsaparilla? What are you, five?’

‘Oh, sorry, does it upset you when someone thinks for themselves when they’re out with you?’

‘Yes, it does.’

The waiter came back with two glasses of sparkling pink sarsaparilla with dehydrated lemon twisted inside, a tiny leaf-shaped candy sitting on the plate next to it.

When the waiter left, Dan said, ‘That’s fucking drugs, that is.’

‘At a restaurant?’ Teddy scoffed.

‘You’re right. No one who works at a restaurant has ever been high.’

‘I mean, as a side dish, it seems unlikely.’

‘When you ask for off-menu, you get off-menu,’ he said, and ate his leaf.

Teddy ate hers too. The sarsaparilla was good, for once: medicinal, in a sharp, sugary way.

By the time dessert came, she realised Dan was right about the leaf. They ate their Coco Pop–soaked milk souffle, and it was the best thing they had ever eaten. Dan paid up afterwards, Teddy didn’t throw him off the balcony, and then they went for a walk into the bushland until they found somewhere quiet, where they made out frantically, like desperate teenagers hiding from their parents, their hands in each other’s hair. Dan’s hair was so soft Teddy could have lived in there for months. They only stopped when a dog, running ahead of its owners, ran up to greet them.

‘The waiter asked for my number,’ Dan said, as they caught their breath.

‘You can’t make me jealous,’ Teddy said. ‘I don’t even want to be doing this.’ That was a lie, but not a full one.

‘I don’t think she wanted it for a date,’ Dan said. ‘What the fuck is this sarsaparilla thing?’

‘It’s nothing,’ Teddy lied. ‘Art just always asked for it when we went out.’

Dan walked a sobering Teddy to her car. ‘I’m sorry about Art,’ he said. ‘It’s hard losing a friend. I hope you find out who did it. I promise I don’t know.’

‘Have you asked?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Do you think I would tell you if I found out?’

‘Probably not,’ she said. ‘Can you ask anyway?’

‘For you,’ he said, ‘anything.’

~

When Rusty called early in the afternoon, Alice was at Teddy’s apartment, unpacking her things into Lucky’s old room while Teddy sobered up on the icy balcony in her underwear, holding a coffee between her palms. Alice came outside, and Teddy put him on speakerphone.

‘I found something out for you,’ Rusty said. ‘It’s where Cole’s phone was last tracked. At a tower near Hansen.’

Alice got out her phone and found where Hansen was. They didn’t recognise it, but Alice widened the map around it until she found somewhere recognisable: Tomb Creek. Where the knife with Teddy’s name on it drew blood from somebody’s hand. They looked at each other.

Alice said, ‘So Cole’s phone was near me.’

‘Who had it?’ Teddy asked. ‘Nick? Eddie? They were on your tail.’

‘Both of them would fake a text for sure,’ Alice said, ‘but neither of them tried to attack me that night. Nick’s hands were clean when I saw him, and so were Eddie’s. So maybe they had his phone, but they weren’t that person, trying to break in, trying to … fuck.’ Alice sat on the ground. ‘And it wasn’t Cole, because he was in a goddamn coffin.’

‘I know you’re talking to each other, but I’m not done,’ Rusty said. ‘You’re getting an invoice for this work, because I had to call in some favours here.’

‘I’ll pay you in hugs,’ Teddy said.

‘You’ll pay me in cash. I figured out where Art was the weekend that Cole died, like you asked. And his sister.’

Alice said, ‘Rusty, you’re something else.’

‘Damn straight. And he did end up using a tollway, but not west to Geelong, like she said. He went down Eastlink, and took the exit for the Mornington Peninsula.’ He waited a beat, then added, ‘At eleven-thirty at night.’

‘That doesn’t seem like the sunny day trip that Nina was talking about,’ Teddy mused. ‘And she lied to us about where they went.’

‘I ran her plates too. She was on the tollway too, a little earlier than Art, and didn’t get back on it until two in the morning, while he didn’t get back on it at all. She also used the same tollway the night before Art died. Got off at the Monash around eleven o’clock. And back on it at four in the morning.’

‘What the fuck was she doing?’ Teddy asked.

‘I guess that’s your job,’ Rusty said. ‘Also, some bad news: Choker knows I’ve been helping you on this, and he’s displeased. That’s the last of anything I can tell you on Art, Cole or Darwin, okay?’ There was a beat, and then he said, ‘You go get ’em, okay?’

He hung up, and Teddy and Alice sat in silence on the balcony for a moment.

‘So what do we do?’ Teddy said. ‘To finish this?’

Alice thought. ‘You know, I haven’t thought enough about that whole stabbing at Tomb Creek. Is that strange? It seems that for some people, fighting off an intruder with a switchblade could be an important core lifetime memory.’

‘What a career path we chose,’ Teddy said.

‘I still don’t know who it was. It could just have been some hired goon.’

‘Could it have been Darwin?’

Alice took a long moment to think about it.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m almost positive.’

‘Almost?’

‘I think the person was too tall. But there was – now that I look back, there’s a kind of familiarity to them. Unless it’s been quietly festering away, building a memory that feels like it’s always been in my life.’

‘Like how I feel about the man who shot me,’ Teddy said.

‘Are they the same person?’ Alice asked.

Teddy thought. ‘I don’t think he was wearing gloves,’ she said. ‘So no, it couldn’t have been. So instead, there are two people attacking us within twenty-four hours that we might know, unless we don’t actually know either of them, and our minds are just playing tricks on us.’

‘Our minds are assholes,’ Alice said.

They sat for a while longer.

Teddy said, ‘How confident do you think our girl Sally at the funeral home was about the body not being Darwin’s?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What if it was replaced at Chetna’s? Like, it was Darwin’s, but then it was Cole’s?’

‘And you think she had something to do with it?’

‘I mean, you did get assaulted on her property.’

‘Not by her. I’m sure of it.’

‘But Valkyrie was out of your sight, right?’

‘Yes, but I’m the only one with a key to her. Unless there’s a spare, but there’s no way that spare was anywhere but in Pia’s secure cupboard back in Melbourne. I was keeping her safe from outsiders,’ Alice said plaintively. ‘Choker considered her safe.’

‘What if,’ Teddy said, ‘it was Cole who tried to kill you? And after you stabbed him in the hand, he was dispatched by Chetna and put in the coffin?’

‘That’s suitably dramatic,’ Alice said. ‘But I can’t see it. She couldn’t get into Valkyrie, but – let’s pretend she could – it would also mean turfing out the dead body of Darwin Weiss from a coffin that Sadie sealed, and burying him somewhere in Tomb Creek, which, yes, sounds incredibly apt. But I have a second reason that this doesn’t fly. Cole did not look freshly dead the next day. He looked … embalmed.’

‘Al, how do you think he died?’

‘His head was patched up. But how he got that injury, I don’t know. I wish I’d done more when I was there, but when it happened, all I could think about was getting me and that tracker far away from each other.’

‘So,’ Teddy said, ‘what are we doing tonight, and tomorrow?’

‘I think,’ Alice said, ‘we need to go for a drive.’

‘That’s always your solution,’ Teddy said affectionately.

‘We’ve stayed too close to home. Tonight, we go over our notes – keep talking, maybe something will come up – and tomorrow, we go visit the people I was speaking to all those weeks ago.’

Teddy asked, ‘You want to see Chetna?’

‘No,’ Alice said. ‘I don’t know if I trust her.’

‘So that’s a yes?’

‘Well, probably. But I think we need to go see Toby first.’

Teddy tilted her head. ‘Darwin’s cousin?’

‘I just think he’s a good starting point, and someone who might have information about his death. Sure, we could ask his grandmother instead, but I don’t know if she’d take well to it. She might shoot me instead of the roses if I ask the wrong question.’ She sighed. ‘Maybe we even need to go to where Darwin was supposed to be buried, see if his mother wants to talk.’

‘Seems unlikely,’ Teddy said. ‘So we’re doing that whole drive in one day?’

‘I’m setting our alarm for five o’clock in the morning.’

‘Get absolutely fucked.’

‘I’ll take you to that good service station on the way in.’

Teddy grimaced. ‘The one with the edamame?’

‘You know it.’

‘Well,’ Teddy said. ‘Fine.’