42

Alice had Jun’s leftover salmon, with rice, for breakfast on Monday morning. He gave her a kiss as she ate and said, ‘That was a long weekend.’

‘We were on call all night in case this super-rich, extremely secretive client or his entourage wanted late-night McDonald’s,’ Alice said. ‘I’m so sorry. But it’ll pay well, and we can take a holiday soon, try that whole beach thing again. You can go surfing in the mornings, and I can hang out with my littlest and bestest lady for a while.’

Cherry had some salmon in her cornflakes; nothing would convince her it was a bad idea, and she was staunchly eating it. ‘Are we going to see Aunty Bear?’

‘Maybe not for a few days,’ Alice said. ‘She needs a little break from me, I think.’

She waved Jun goodbye at the front door. He told her not to do too much; that she should rest. She said she would.

Alice helped Cherry get dressed in her small blue jeans and a jumper with a fawn on it. The jumper had little felt ears you could move up and down, and Cherry said solemnly, ‘I don’t get any work done with this on.’

‘You’re four,’ Alice said. ‘What work do you need to do?’

‘A lot,’ Cherry said, offended.

Alice took her daughter to kinder, then left for Teddy’s house. When Teddy opened the door, she wrapped her arms around Alice’s neck, and they held each other for a long, silent time.

~

The Monday roads were quiet around them as they drove to the treehouse.

They had been at Choker’s office all morning, explaining themselves, explaining Darwin and Art and Eddie and Nina and all of it. Choker sat with his hands clasped under his chin and listened to all of it, and when they finished he said, ‘Well, I’m not paying you any fucking overtime for figuring this all out, all right?’

‘In our language it’s pronounced “thank you”,’ Teddy said.

‘Listen,’ Choker said, ‘I told you not to fucking do this and you ignored me. Now there’s one of the richest men on this planet with both a grudge and a bullet he’ll be holding on to for a while, and a driver I have to arrange from Warlington to deliver a certain Golf with four new tyres – which, I might add, will come out of your pay, Alice – and a man you, Teddy, hit in the face with steel who is not where you last left him.’

‘I’m sure he’s fine,’ Teddy said.

‘Listen. If you go behind my back like this again, I’ll cut you loose, Lucky’s daughter or not,’ he said. ‘Besides, if I paid you now, you’d always ignore me.’

‘We would never,’ said Teddy, shocked.

Alice asked, ‘What did the people you had on Art’s case say when you told them we’d figured it out?’

‘They said, “Are they paying for the rest of our wages?”’

‘They did not,’ Teddy said.

‘And you’re lucky they didn’t. They would have figured this out with a lot less bloodshed.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Alice said, and all three of them knew she was right.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘that Art picked Cole’s case up in the first place? That he was here – right at this fucking desk – pestering me for work, and he went through my files and picked Cole’s up and said, ‘You know, Teddy would love this.’ He shook his head. ‘What a fucking snake.’

Teddy almost couldn’t bear to think about it. She pulled her chair closer to the desk. ‘Choker,’ she said, ‘what happened to Cole?’

He sighed. ‘Ted, I can’t tell you what you want to know.’

‘Can you tell me anything? At all?’

‘I only know that his body is buried somewhere in western Victoria, on acres of land owned by the same family for generations, which will still be owned by the same family for generations to come. It’s large enough in size that maybe nobody has stood on that patch of ground since it was taken from people who didn’t want to give it away more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Maybe nobody will ever stand on it again.’ He leaned in to Teddy. ‘I can never tell you where he was buried, and that’s only partly because I’ll never know myself. One person and one person only knows that, all right?’

‘Was it respectful?’ Teddy asked. ‘Did they say a few words?’

Choker said, ‘I can tell you yes if it’ll make you feel better.’

Teddy thought: Cole hadn’t deserved any of this.

Alice thought: I hand-delivered him to the person who dug his lonely grave.

‘He did say,’ Choker said, ‘that it was a nice place.’

Teddy thought: I’m glad he said that.

Alice thought: He did not say that at all.

At Hester Park, where Teddy and Art had gone with Streets all those weeks ago, the air was cool – it was winter proper now – but it thawed out where the sun angled through the trees. Alice held flowers in her hand and followed Teddy as she wandered the paths, trying to find the way Streets had shown her. At one point, she stopped and consulted the map on her phone. Alice got hers out too and, after a moment, said, ‘Christ. Apparently now I have a crypto wallet with money in it. What happened to a good old suitcase full of cash?’

She took a while to figure it out, then let out a whistle.

‘I think maybe you should check if you got one too,’ she said.

‘That’s not why we’re here,’ Teddy said, but she did anyway.

‘I got about five hundred thousand,’ Alice said, once she saw Teddy’s eyebrows raise. ‘How much did he give you?’

Teddy laughed. ‘I guess the bullet cost me,’ she said. ‘It converts to about fifty thousand.’

‘I’ll top you up the extra two twenty-five,’ Alice said. She looked at the flowers in her hand; they had chosen natives, because maybe they would last a little while longer than the bright roses on the shelf next to them. They had spent forty-five dollars because half an hour ago that had seemed like a lot of money.

‘It’s not much for Darwin, but it’s so much, Ted.’

‘I guess,’ Teddy said, ‘when you’re rich, this counts for nothing.’

‘How are you going to make that money wash with Jun?’

‘I don’t know. Dish it out into our account slowly, say that I had a few well-paying tips? Say that we got extra payment for some job I’ll make up? A bonus? Have we been getting underpaid this whole time?’

‘I mean, it’s likely.’

Teddy kept searching, and eventually found her way, walking with determination down the path, past two little kids on trikes and their jogging father, who nodded politely. When he was far enough away, she said, ‘It’s not enough, what we told Darwin to do. We sold Cole out.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said, ‘we did.’

They walked for a while in silence, in that knowledge.

Alice said slowly, ‘But what else could we do? If we told the truth of it all, to get Darwin arrested, then there’s a lot of arresting on our horizons too. Transporting bodies.’

‘Breaking and entering,’ Teddy said.

‘Cutting off fingers.’

‘I guess you could count that shooting as a little light attempted murder.’

Alice almost smiled, then said, ‘It’s shit, and we’re shit, but we aren’t the bad guys, remember. We didn’t start this.’

‘It sure feels like we’re bad guys. We got the money, and Cole just got dead.’

Teddy veered off the path and through the bushes. After a minute she stood and looked up, and Alice followed her gaze.

‘Anyone up there?’ Teddy called.

Nobody replied.

‘It’s nice,’ Alice said.

They climbed up. It was empty inside; even the rubbish was gone. Teddy found the little loose piece of wood with the compartment underneath and opened it up. There were some old wrappers and sticks she cleared away, and then Alice handed over the little bouquet and she put it back in there and closed it up, then gave the wood a soft pat, like it was a puppy.

For a while, they were both quiet in the treehouse. Teddy was thinking about Eddie; if she had killed him. She thought about his fingertip, in a paper bag in a bin outside the supermarket where she had picked up toilet paper and a loaf of bread early that morning. She thought about Art, about him trying to shoot her friend with his mother’s country rifle in a dark faraway town.

Alice thought about Elinor, confused and sad about her dearly departed grandson. She thought about Darwin, and how he got away with it all – with killing Art, with shooting her Teddy – and they’d let him. She thought about when she had arrived home the night before and there was a little bowl of salmon and rice for her in the fridge in case she was hungry.

The sun came through the slats in the treehouse walls and stripes of warmth fell on their hands. Rusty sent the two of them a text that said: First real rumours that Darwin is dead are online. The main contenders are heart attack, drugs and suicide. Somebody said ‘his heart was too big to go on’. He followed it with a vomit emoji. Teddy sent him six more in reply.

Alice asked: Heard about Nina?

He said: She’s disappeared. Eddie’s disappeared. The parents were released from their imprisonment in their own laundry room. They’re not pressing charges.

Sometime later, they heard kids down below. A voice saying, ‘Is that a real treehouse?’

A sensible adult saying: ‘It might be dangerous.’

Teddy leaned over out of the door. ‘It’s real,’ she said. ‘And it’s safe.’

~

Later, Alice dropped Teddy off at her apartment, and Teddy let her.

The apartment had always been sparse and quiet. Her father had stayed in its corners – memories, smiles, a deep voice talking her up from the floor – but now he wasn’t alone. There was somebody else in those corners, watching her throw out Art’s toothbrush from the sink and all Alice and Teddy’s case notes and erasing the past few weeks. Shaggy brown hair covering most of what had happened to his forehead. Brown leather jacket, like Art’s, loose on his shoulders.

He didn’t say anything – maybe because Teddy had never heard Cole’s voice to imagine it – but he didn’t have to.

She knew what he was saying to her all the same.

~

Driving home from Teddy’s apartment, Alice saw the car in the rear-view mirror again; an old and rusted blue Suzuki Vitara that had been parked at the end of her street that morning, and which had found her again now, on her way back home. For such an old car, its windows were very freshly tinted, strong enough so she couldn’t see through them.

Rusty had run the plates for her already. Out of circulation, he said.

But here they are, Alice had said. Then: Don’t tell Teddy.

Maybe it was a coincidence; maybe they were just out for a nice day in the same neighbourhoods Alice was. Or maybe somebody was watching her.

Maybe, now, somebody always would be.