Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(61)

‘Mary Skinner,’ the mother said, smiling. ‘You two, get back in here.’

The kids giggled and ran into the cool, dark hall. I followed Mary past a wall of framed photographs, backpacks hanging on hooks, a wooden rack inadequately small for the dozens of dusty shoes piled onto it. We went to the kitchen and she didn’t offer us coffee. She was uncomfortable. Picking at fingernails split from nibbling.

‘You probably know why I’m here,’ I said.

‘The bombings.’ She glanced towards the door as something crashed in one of the bedrooms. ‘It’s terrifying. Have you got a suspect yet?’

‘We’ve got some leads,’ I said. ‘But I think maybe you could lengthen them for me. I don’t know if you remember what you said to me two nights ago when I was out there on your porch.’

Mary had tucked one arm into her ribs, the other tight against her chest. She opened the fridge to give herself somewhere to look.

‘I don’t remember anything much except the blast,’ she said. ‘I was watching out the window when it happened. I saw you fall. Are you OK? I mean,’ – she examined my broken arm – ‘nothing permanent?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘You told me that it was “all gonna come out”. You said, “It’s all coming to an end.”’

Mary looked horrified. Kash was sitting on a stool by the kitchen bench quite near her, measuring the response on her face. She took a bottle of water from the fridge and set it on the counter, turned away from us both.

‘I didn’t say that,’ she said quietly.

‘Yes, you did.’

‘Look, I’m alone here.’ She threw me a hard look, on the edge of snapping. ‘I lost a child. I lost a husband. I say weird things sometimes that I don’t necessarily mean.’

The silence that fell was heavy. I could hear the children whispering beyond the door. I looked at them and they squealed and ran away.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘My husband left. He’s up north. Cairns.’

‘I mean to your child,’ I said. ‘You said you –’

‘Brandon overdosed.’ Mary’s gaze was locked on me. ‘It was an accident. He and his friends had been messing around with stuff brought in by the truckers. He was seventeen, child of my first marriage.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘I don’t have anything else for you.’ Mary shut the fridge door hard, made jars rattle inside it. ‘That’s it. Now, I’ve got things to do here.’

She let us walk ourselves out. The sun seemed somehow closer, more foreboding. I felt I’d disturbed something, shifted a rock off an insect I didn’t recognise, something dangerous. Something better left alone.





Chapter 92


ALL HIS LIFE, Regan had enjoyed ruining beautiful things. It was a strange sort of instinct, an impulse, the same kind of impulse that drove people to fix pictures hanging crookedly on walls or scrub single greasy fingerprints off of otherwise blessedly clean windowpanes. When new toys came into the youth care facility playroom, he’d break them. Shiny and glossy and smelling of plastic, with their bubbly eyes and stupidly grinning mouths, they seemed painfully perfect. He’d pull out a teddy’s eye. Snap off a robot’s arm. Cut a doll’s hair so that it stuck out of the bulbous rubber scalp in ugly tufts. The broken, dirtied things gave him joy. Maybe he felt they were more like him when they were torn and crooked. He was only small. He couldn’t know.

Then he turned his attention to the other boys and girls. It had begun with pretty little Claudia, with her big eyes and golden curls. Claudia would be adopted in a snap. The carers were already talking about it. She was a doll, they said. Regan had snuck in to the kitchen and found a packet of matches. She wasn’t so perfect when he was done with her.

Regan became ‘difficult’. The word was mentioned around him in a lot of different ways between foster families and care workers. He listened to them chattering above him like he wasn’t there. There had been ‘difficulties’ at his last home. He was ‘difficult’ to place because of his ‘difficult’ behaviour. There were other words. Oppositional. Aggressive. Introverted.

Regan was sixteen when he met Sam. He’d been standing by the cake table at one of those pathetic Christmas events the Department of Children’s Services ran every year at the town hall. Sam had been a lanky, pale kid, his limp black hair constantly hanging in his eyes. He was the only other teen at the stupid party. Regan had watched him for a long while, bored, until he saw Sam observing the gorgeous Christmas cake someone had baked for the occasion. Perfect edges. Immaculate red and green icing. Sam had reached out when no one was looking and pushed one of the lollies on the top of the cake until it sank into the soft, spongey interior, leaving a gaping hole in the design. Regan had smiled. Sam had seen it.

Regan had found him. His perfect match.

But as always, it wasn’t long before that perfection was ruined. Soon there would be blood, and screaming. The adult Regan remembered now as he walked down the empty, dark street, his head low, the baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. Everything was so messy now. So dark, so torn. A beautiful and terrifying time, the very streets seemed awash with new life. Regan came around a corner and a group of young women swirled and ebbed around him. Perfume. He felt the muscles of his shoulders knot, the bones grinding in his neck. Marissa. Elle. Rosetta. His girls. His sacrifices to Sam. The women on the street passed him, a glittering flock of birds. There wasn’t time for that now. That part of his life was over.