40

Eddie was an elaborate texter. His messages were long; he used full words, no shortcuts, and explained everything in detail. He had a lot of recognisable names in his contacts, but Darwin’s name was no longer listed. Toby’s was: he called him Mr Weiss, and Eddie had messaged him that afternoon, telling him that Alice and Teddy were at his house, and under no circumstances should he go inside.

Teddy and Alice were back at Teddy’s apartment, both showered and changed. Alice texted Jun and told him she would be late, but that she loved them both very much.

Teddy composed the message on Eddie’s phone while Alice dried her hair with a towel. Mr Weiss, I have had another encounter with those two women who have been following you and need to discuss. They took a punt: Should we meet at Mister Porcupine?

They kept the disguises light; they just needed to be not identifiable at first glance. Alice found a cropped black pixie cut wig, and Teddy went to put on a long blonde one before realising she hadn’t cleaned up the blood from the last time. She left it soaking in the kitchen sink and stood over the pink water before letting out a sob.

‘I just realised,’ she said. ‘Remember how Heidi said Cole stole her jacket?’

Alice was leaning on the bench, holding a baby carrot she hadn’t been able to eat. ‘The one that looked like Art’s?’

‘I think that’s why Cole stole it,’ Teddy said, rubbing her hands, like she was erasing the thought of it. ‘He took his mother’s jacket to look more like Art.’

‘Because he admired him,’ Alice whispered.

Teddy rubbed her hands harder. Alice came over and put a hand on Teddy’s arm, and said, ‘I hope he felt great when he wore it.’

‘I should have known,’ Teddy said, and her voice was strangled.

‘None of us did. I mean it. Not even Choker, and he’s been doing this for longer than any of us.’

‘I’m so angry at him. I don’t know if I’m madder that he killed Cole or that he didn’t tell me about it. Or if it’s because he’s not here for me to scold about it.’ She looked up at Alice. ‘I’ve never killed anyone.’

‘Neither have I,’ Alice said. ‘But that whole ride from Nina’s all I could think about was all the times I could have.’

‘I don’t know how to feel about him,’ Teddy said plaintively. ‘I’m furious with him, and still so, so sad. Where do I put all of my feelings?’

‘I’ve put mine in a box,’ Alice said. ‘If it helps, there’s space for your feelings too. We can open it again later.’

‘Or never,’ Teddy said.

‘That,’ Alice said, ‘is a terrible idea.’

While Teddy pinned herself into a brown wig, Darwin finally texted back.

Ten o’clock. Make sure they don’t follow you.

~

They parked a block from Mister Porcupine, down a suburban street, out of sight. Teddy looked up through the windscreen at the clouds in the night sky lit up by the city lights and said, ‘Looks like rain.’

Alice reached into the back seat and handed over an umbrella.

‘This weapon sucks,’ Teddy said.

‘Mary Poppins says you’re being a pussy,’ Alice said. ‘I’ll see you there.’

Darwin wasn’t anywhere to be seen when Alice arrived. She went around the back, crouched between two skips in the stink of old food, and waited.

It was just past ten when a sleek electric MG – the same one she had seen driving away from her at Toby’s house – pulled into the driveway behind the restaurant and Darwin got out of the passenger seat, wearing a paper face mask as an easy disguise. Alice sent a text to Teddy: not alone.

Darwin looked around, but missed Alice in the dark. He walked up to the back door of Mister Porcupine, and knocked on the window.

The chauffeur got out: a man with a neat little driver’s cap on who looked old, hollow and mean. He didn’t have a weapon in his hand, but he might have one concealed. Darwin could too. Alice took a long, slow breath.

‘Someone’s across the road,’ the driver said, his voice as gravelly as the ground underneath Alice’s feet.

‘Who?’ Darwin didn’t leave the back of the cafe; he was out of sight.

‘Some broad.’

‘What does she look like?’

‘Dunno. Twenties. Carrying something … an umbrella, maybe. Brown hair.’

‘A wig?’

‘Mr Weiss, I’m old and she’s far away and I’m trying not to be obvious. No, I can’t tell if it’s a wig. How would I know?’

‘Twenties,’ Darwin said. ‘I bet you it’s one of them.’

‘One of those girls? I told you, we didn’t have a tail.’

‘But Eddie might.’

‘Maybe, but he doesn’t appear to be here yet.’

It was too quiet and suburban for Alice to shoot anyone unless she really had to. She had knives, but she didn’t want to throw them.

‘I think that broad’s coming over here.’

‘Go stop her!’

The driver cracked his knuckles. Alice had already palmed a substantial rock, and as he walked towards Teddy, she stepped forward and threw it.

It connected with the side of his head. He cried out, and hunkered down for a moment, his hand on his ear. Alice hadn’t wanted to kill him – or anyone – and was glad he hadn’t fallen stone dead, but now he was searching around, looking for who hit him.

‘Get in the car!’ the driver yelled. ‘We’re compromised!’

Teddy was sprinting towards them; Alice could hear her shoes on the ground. Darwin bolted for the car, but Teddy got there first, hands out in front of her, silver glinting in her palm.

Alice took the driver: she ran while he fumbled through his pockets, and then tackled him square to the ground. He let out a huff as he landed, and Alice fell over him, her knees burning from the impact. Something metal skittered off into the night.

Alice palmed her weapon. ‘I’ve got a gun,’ she said, ‘and I don’t want to fucking use it, all right?’

He struggled anyway, until he saw the weapon for himself. He held up his hands, looking tired, or concussed, or both. It was late, after all.

‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘Not far.’

She helped him along the ground to the skip – partly assisting, partly dragging his sorry ass along – and handcuffed him to one of the hinges.

‘We’re not here to hurt your boss over there,’ she told the driver as she frisked him. ‘We just want to talk.’

He spat at her and missed. She held her gun against his teeth, took his phone out of his pocket and threw it into the far end of the skip.

When Teddy had slammed into the side of the car door he was trying to open, Darwin didn’t flinch; he ran. He bolted behind the cafe, and he was fast – faster than Teddy – but Teddy threw the umbrella at his feet in a spin. He tripped a little, then regained his feet, but that was all Teddy needed to hip-and-shoulder him: years of football with Rusty had paid off in this moment.

Darwin went down hard. He fumbled on the ground, trying to pick himself up, and Teddy got out her second-favourite knife and held it to his throat. He fought back, strong – stronger than her – and she let his neck catch on the blade. He stopped, and took a juddering breath.

‘How about we have a chat,’ she suggested.

He sagged under her hands.

‘Where’s Eddie?’ he asked.

‘Fuck knows. And I don’t care,’ Teddy said.

‘I don’t like him,’ Alice said, joining them. ‘He doesn’t seem to fit in with your general vibe.’

He looked up at her. ‘Alice,’ he said, and he wasn’t the man from that late-night phone call months ago now, asking for her to drive him anywhere she wanted; he wasn’t the man she defended on the top of a mountain. He was a man who ran, who slashed her tyres, who wasn’t dead, who roped her into all this, and who had another man in a coffin with his name on it.

‘I didn’t know it was you,’ she said, ‘when you were Toby.’

‘I was taught by the very best,’ he said, and smirked.

They were out of sight of the road. Teddy said, ‘Alice, my arm is getting tired. Can you take over?’

‘No problem,’ Alice said, and she pointed her gun at Darwin’s head and pulled the mask off his face.

‘I’m just not sure if he can afford the insurance if the kickback on the gun hurt my shoulder again,’ Teddy said. ‘Since he’s already dead, and all. Must be hard to keep gainful employment that way.’

‘I don’t like her, either,’ Darwin said, nodding at Teddy.

‘Good,’ Teddy said.

‘Don’t talk about her,’ Alice told him. ‘We are only here to listen to you talk about two things: what the fuck is going on, and why you’re not dead.’

‘Why should I tell you anything?’ said Darwin, very cautiously raising himself up into a sitting position.

‘Well,’ Teddy said, ‘if everybody already thinks you’re dead, like word is online, and we kill you now, it’s not going to make much difference, is it? Nobody’s going to suspect us of murdering someone who’s been dead for a month.’

‘It’s true,’ Alice said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had such an easy excuse to shoot someone.’

‘Or,’ Teddy went on, ‘you can just fucking explain what’s happening, and maybe we can work something out.’

Darwin sat in the quiet. They gave him a moment.

‘What kind of money are we talking for you to drop it after our discussion?’ he said.

They hadn’t really considerd an outcome like this. Teddy said anyway, ‘It really depends on the story. I like a good story.’

There was a longer silence. Eventually, he sighed.

‘I can fuck you up if this gets out,’ he said.

‘Has it gotten out so far?’ Alice said, still standing with the gun pointed at him.

‘No,’ he conceded. ‘It has not.’

‘Well, then.’ Teddy sat down on the ground, legs crossed, an eager student. ‘Time to talk.’

~

Darwin was done.

When you’re rich – that rich – there’s no real way to live a life privately. He did all he could: keeping off social media so people wouldn’t pore over everything he said, buttering up the media to keep them onside, doing a lot for charity so people thought of that before they thought of him as an asshole. Still, he couldn’t do normal things, like take up archery and be bad at it (‘HE’S NO DAR-WINNER’, one headline said), wear a t-shirt without realising there is sauce on it in public, have a girlfriend, accidentally not see someone who is trying to shake your hand. People found out, put it online, and remembered these things forever.

He was sick of putting it on, being Business Darwin: smiling, performing. Tired of having to be a Good Boy to keep the shareholders happy and his reputation intact.

He imagined disappearing from the world – from the problems, from all the eyes on him – but he didn’t want to die. He just wanted to be reborn.

And then a couple of things fell into place.

Eddie was the guy who did the less savoury things that needed to be done. There weren’t a lot of these things – he wasn’t that type of billionaire, he said, and Teddy snorted – but there were some. He needed Eddie to fire people who refused to be fired, or to cover up potentially damaging things that were nobody’s fault. Like the time a miner died onsite – an accident, truly, but it would hurt the company and its employees if that got out, and Darwin was already trying to keep ownership of it on the down-low anyway – and Eddie made it so that everyone thought she’d just vanished. That kind of thing. One day he and Eddie were talking to a guy called Dutch (here, Teddy sighed) who helped them with their manpower sometimes – if Eddie needed backup, or if something was happening in another state – and Darwin was lamenting about how he’d like to vanish, and Dutch said, ‘You know we can help you with that, right?’

The other thing that fell into place was meeting Alice. She told him about how she and her colleague Teddy sometimes wore disguises, and she showed him pictures, and he couldn’t believe he was looking at an image of her. He listened to what she said, and started watching cosplay videos like she had, and practising at home – widening his nose, taping his skin behind his ears, lace-front wigs. He went out into the world a few times, anonymous. Nobody stopped to talk to him. Nobody thanked him or told him to fuck off. He went to the supermarket and bought some strawberries and a packet of salt and vinegar chips and nobody even took a picture of him, not one.

He paid Dutch a lot of money and was put on a waiting list. It works this way, he said. We need to dispose of a body of our own. We put that body in your casket. Darwin Weiss is buried, and then nobody sees him again. Toby Weiss is free to exist, briefly, only to people who need to know he exists, until he knows everything has worked; then Toby can disappear too. Darwin can dye his hair, visit a plastic surgeon in Amsterdam – the world’s best, and he’d already paid the deposit – and then he can go live his life wherever he wants, however he wants, with an enormous amount of money.

There had been only one stipulation with the deal. Darwin wasn’t a bad person. He’d told the guy very clearly that he didn’t want some nice person buried in his grave. It’d have to be some shithead, someone who deserved to die. Then one day, he was told: we have him, your boy. A real low-life, drug-dealing, unloved kind of shithead, they said. Dead, and needing to be disposed of. The surprise element worked in Darwin’s favour; he’d given nobody any hint he was going to disappear, and then, one day, he was gone.

Eddie had been the one who spread the word that Darwin was ‘indisposed’, that he wasn’t well, that everyone had to keep it under wraps. It was all fine, and under control, and he was almost definitely dead and buried. And then a few things fell out of place.

One of them was Alice.

And the other one was Art.

~

‘In my fucking defence,’ Alice said, ‘I didn’t want to look in your casket, but people kept following me.’

‘This is good,’ Darwin said. ‘I have some unanswered questions as well. Tell me what happened.’

Alice did. About Nick, and Eddie, and a little about the man who stabbed her in the hand at Chetna’s, and Nick again, the prick.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘here’s what I can tell you. Nick – he got the story from that funeral home girl, right? And he’s not saying anything now because his journalistic integrity only goes so far when someone offers him a lot of money to shut the hell up. Not hard when he had minimal integrity in the first place.’

‘You’re not going to do anything about Sally, right?’ Teddy asked. ‘Even though she told Nick?’

‘In my line of business – that is, every line of business – it’s prudent to have a lot of favours owed in a lot of different places. And so now I have one in the funeral business – a big one. I know she told you about it. You hold that gun to a lot of people’s heads, Alice?’

‘Makes a lot of people talk,’ she said, shrugging. ‘I prefer not to use it.’

He turned to Teddy. ‘And you? You like using yours?’

Teddy went cold.

‘I thought for a while you were the one who tried to shoot me in my hotel room,’ Alice said.

‘Why would I do that? I didn’t need you taken down. The whole point was to keep everything safe, give you enough time to avoid any problems, and see if you and my grandmother – and by extension, whoever you both told about it – could buy what had happened. I sent you to Chetna because she’s one of the few people I trust enough to make sure you hadn’t opened my coffin.’ He snorted. ‘Which you hadn’t, at that point, at least.’

‘She couldn’t get into the car,’ Alice said. ‘I had the only key.’

Darwin looked at her with patronising sympathy. ‘I know you think you’re the only ones here with any skills, but I’m sorry to tell you that she didn’t need your key. It’s why we changed the accommodation to hers. She might not know I’m alive, but I’m the only reason she’s close to being able to cut loose of that dive anytime soon. She owes me. But I didn’t need her to hurt you – if anything, I’m surprised she didn’t defend you.’

‘I didn’t tell her,’ Alice said. ‘I didn’t know if I could trust her.’

‘And so where is my coffin right now?’

‘We don’t know,’ Teddy said. ‘I wish I did. I too have unanswered questions, about Cole. But anybody who knows will never tell us.’

‘Your boss,’ Darwin said. ‘He keeps his secrets, doesn’t he?’

‘That’s an understatement,’ Alice said.

‘Does he sell them?’

‘Not ever,’ Teddy said. ‘Then nobody would give them to him, would they?’

‘That’s a shame,’ Darwin said. He shifted on the ground, and both women tensed.

‘How did you find out about Cole – about who he was close to? It was you paying off all of his family members, right?’

‘I have a lot of friends in a lot of places,’ he said. ‘Including our honest and true police force. All the people you spoke to, the police also spoke to, right?’

‘They definitely hadn’t at the time.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘they hadn’t. But once they had, I knew what would pay everyone off so they were happy. Enough for new furniture for his empty void of a mother; to pay back his father the money he probably stole; give his cheating girlfriend enough money to move out of home; send some promotional wine to his workplace.’

‘Why did you do all that?’ Alice asked.

‘I’m not a bad person,’ he said.

‘The more you say it, the worse it sounds,’ Teddy said. ‘I was involved. Why didn’t you pay me off?’

‘Two reasons,’ Darwin said. ‘One, I look up everybody – or my people do. I knew that you and Alice were friends. I know who your boss is. What was money going to do but rile you up more?’

‘Fair,’ Teddy said. ‘What was the other reason?’

Darwin ignored her. Turning to Alice, he said, ‘It was you who made me realise what was going on. When you told me – Toby – about Cole, the person Teddy was looking for. I’m sure nobody expected him to arrive on my radar, but then – there he was. All because I’d hired you, Alice, to drive my hearse.’

Alice said nothing.

‘It was the picture, you know,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know his name. It wasn’t part of the deal to care. But Eddie had shown me his picture. And it was him. But you were telling quite a different story to what I’d heard.’

‘Criminals,’ Teddy said, making light of what was heavy in her mind. ‘You can’t trust ’em.’

Darwin was quiet for a moment. The air started to smell like rain. Something scurried in the distance. The driver called out in a weak voice, ‘You all right, Mr Weiss?’

‘I’m all right,’ Darwin called back.

The night was ticking on. There was no reason for anybody to come back here, but the more time that passed, the more someone might just come anyway.

‘Just get to the point,’ Alice said.

He looked up at her. ‘Weren’t we friends? Or more?’

Teddy looked at Alice; she ignored it. ‘I don’t get paid by my friends,’ Alice said. ‘I was your employee. And now I’m the fucking boss, all right? So you figured out that Cole wasn’t the deadbeat asshole you were hoping for. So what?’

‘So I found out the truth,’ Darwin said. ‘I had some questions that needed answering face to face. This was a spanner in the works – if he wasn’t the man I thought he was, then what else in this plan had I been lied to about? I wasn’t going to be officially declared dead until I knew all my ducks were in a row. And you know, that drive to Melbourne from Warlington, it’s a long one.’

Yes. They did know.

‘So I drove. And while I was driving, I called some people. And I got the truth. The actual circumstances of Cole’s death – well, they were harder to find. But it turned out I knew the very people who had solved the problem, and I heard the truth from the people who helped him. That boy in my coffin,’ Darwin went on, sadly, ‘he wasn’t so bad. But the guy who killed him? He was bad.’

Teddy sat up.

‘You seen his criminal record? Assault. Selling drugs to minors. He’s a real shithead. You know he detached some guy’s retina?’

Yes. They did know.

‘And some kid who’s done like three deals dies and his body’s never found? That seem fucking fair to you?’

Something had changed in the air. Teddy slowly got off the ground, and Alice checked her stance.

‘And that guy – Art – he’s a colleague of yours, right? A fucking criminal? And he just gets to walk around the place, no punishment, no nothing? Nobody even knows, and this kid – just discarded?’

‘I mean,’ Alice said, ‘you remember that story about your grandmother’s roses?’

He laughed, and it was bitter and unpleasant.

‘It’s justice,’ he said. ‘It’s fair.’

‘You sell drugs out of your restaurants,’ Teddy said. ‘You dodged a punishment you deserved for letting a worker die on your site. I don’t think you’re the kind of person that should be getting up in arms about other people’s criminal records.’

‘Why the fuck would I sell drugs out of my restaurants? It would mess with my reputation, and it’s not like I needed the money. I didn’t even know Eddie’s whole trafficking bullshit existed until after all that happened – the shooting, everything – and I had time to piece it together, with the help of our friend Mr Dutch.’

‘Don’t use an honorific for that shithead,’ Teddy said.

‘When I had a chance to speak about it with Eddie, he reminded me very politely that actually he still retained a lot of information about the miner I mentioned earlier, and that maybe I didn’t want my name soured after I had died if I decided to do anything about this lucrative side hustle he had. A side hustle that became this big fucking problem and stalled all of my plans.’ He paused. ‘I know you know where Eddie is. Tell me.’

‘He was still walking, last we saw him,’ Alice said.

There was a beat. Teddy said, suddenly, ‘What was the second reason you didn’t pay me anything?’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well. That’s because I thought it best we don’t have anything that could ever tie us together. Because you were there when he died, and so was I.’

Teddy covered her mouth.

‘Your coworker,’ he said. ‘Art. And you. That was me.’