Hades Read online

  The decision to keep the children never really happened. In the beginning he’d put off the heavy, painful question of what was best for them—and for him—until he knew whether the boy would survive, and then he put it off again until he was sure the boy was going to keep on surviving. Before he knew it three weeks had passed and he was taking the children into account when he ordered his shopping. Whenever thoughts crept into his day about how he would raise them and where he would keep them and just how fucking ridiculous the entire idea of running his nighttime business alongside being their father was, Hades simply banished the thoughts and did something else. It was easy to do. The children were always there. Hanging about under his feet or cuddling into his chair with him or trying to tell him stories in their wandering, illogical, wide-eyed ways. A month flew by and a routine fell into place.

  The children revealed themselves to be different almost from the very beginning. Eden was a quiet and mysterious child. She kept secrets that he could find no sense in keeping—like where she had been for hours at a time, even if she was only down at the sorting center helping to fold clothes or over at the gate watching the morning crew arrive. She sang quietly to herself. She did anything Eric asked of her, dropping whatever she was doing to follow him out into the mountains of trash. But she had agency of her own, despite her obedience to her brother. When Hades went to his shed she would be there trailing behind him, strangely frightened that she was unwelcome in his workshop. She would watch him for hours as he sketched and built and experimented with his sculptures.

  One morning he found her alone there, copying one of his design sketches. He had snuck up behind her and watched with fascination as her surprisingly skilled hand took in the shape of the iron dragon, never faltering, never needing to be erased. When she had followed his design as far as it went, she began to add things, change things, stripping away the bulkiness and clumsiness of Hades’ original plan, adding details he hadn’t considered. When she had discovered him watching she burst into tears, figuring somehow that she was in trouble.

  Rarely she let him put his arms around her. When he held her that day she confessed miserably that she had always wanted to help him build the trash animals. When he asked her why she hadn’t told him before, she couldn’t answer.

  If the murder of her parents had made Eden a reserved and damaged child, it had awakened something wild in Eric. He was exactly the opposite of the girl. Eric wandered in the garbage from sun-up to sundown, playing imaginary games, talking aloud to himself, engaging in one-man wars with the workers. He made elaborate plans to harass the staff—spying and keeping surveillance records, organizing booby traps, playing them off against each other until fistfights erupted that he’d watch with glee. He collected treasures from the garbage and buried them in secret locations, tinker boxes of machinery parts, jewelry, notebooks and maps. He was outgoing and curious. He questioned everything. He would return to the house as the sun was setting, ragged-haired and feral-eyed, starving and short with his words. But when Hades played the radio in the kitchen in the morning Eric would play air guitar and sing aloud, displaying an impressive memory for lyrics.

  At night Hades read to the children in the tiny living room, sunk into the couch with one on either side, a scotch resting in his lap. He couldn’t think of another way to educate them. He read to them from Dickens and Wordsworth, James and Haggard. When Eric showed interest, he read them Patrick Suskind’s Perfume and the dark tales of Poe. He indulged Eden with Shakespeare, which Eric hated.

  Whenever Hades was confronted by a decision about the raising of the children—how to answer their questions about the world, explain away their fears, how to direct them towards making the right decisions in their simple black-and-white lives—he found himself working more through experiment and chance rather than personal experience. All he remembered of his own mother and father was the glow of the house fire that consumed them, being so young when they disappeared from his still-expanding world with their tenderness and unconditional love in tow. After them had been the street, for how long he didn’t know, where he’d lived like an animal without a use for things like fairness and respect. The only way Hades had got off the street was through demonstrating his natural talent for brutality. A man had died to earn him his place in the care of some of Sydney’s most evil men. No, there was nothing in Hades’ past that he could use as a model for a healthy childhood. He’d learned about respect by beating it into people, and fairness was something he’d rarely witnessed—it was like the blur of a beautiful creature retreating from him into the dark. He was sure a couple of people had loved him over the years, but never in a parental way and never with the vulnerability of a child. He wasn’t even sure he could spot love in someone else, let alone demonstrate it himself. Uncertainty itched at the man’s insides. There seemed to be no rules and Hades didn’t like that.

  The first time the children killed they were eight and ten.

  Eden and Eric had settled into a life at the dump that seemed to Hades to be uncomplicated and comfortable, the kind of life that children who had been broken needed to repair their hearts. He gave them free rein to explore and play and dream and run wild during the day. At night he schooled them, following Eden’s interests into classic literature and European history and Eric’s passion for science and war. Hades didn’t risk sending them to school. Though he had commissioned the forged birth certificates and medical papers and other things he would need to prove their legitimacy, some part of him feared that one day someone would recognize them from the newspaper reports and television clips and missing posters that had followed the slaying of their parents. Some part of him feared that one day they would be gone from his life as abruptly as they had come. Though villains of every nature still arrived at his door seeking his help, the little ones gave him a reason to believe that not all of his life was dedicated to evil.

  Hades had watched the news religiously in the beginning to try to understand how such a colossal fuckup could have occurred, though he could only do this when the children were in bed and he was sure they were asleep.

  From what he could gather, their father had been a lanky, quiet guy who made some discovery about isolating a gene that encouraged skin cancer and the scientific community had gone nuts about it. The mother was some kind of well-recognized creative type, a jill-of-all-artistic-trades who every now and then wrote snappy feminist columns for the newspapers. She was a dark, glamorous woman who was pictured with paintbrushes holding up her shimmery black hair or clay dust drying on her long, slender fingers, a woman who was always laughing and talking and touching people’s shoulders when she talked.

  There was plenty of news footage of the huge house on the lake, the shattered windows and the white-clad forensics officers tiptoeing through the chaos taking photographs. There were pictures of a set of gates with flowers and teddies and angry scrawled messages of vengeance towards the killers. The news reports likened the Tenor children to the three Beaumont kids who’d disappeared from a beach near Adelaide in the ’60s, and within days the assumption seemed to be that they were dead. Newspaper opinion pieces called for the kidnappers to burn in hell and other rather uncomfortable punishments. Much of the initial rage and hurt at the missing children made Hades stir in his bed with guilt. But not a single relative was mentioned in the media during the hunt for the Tenor family killers and interest in the case died, however slowly. He consoled himself by standing in the doorway to the children’s bedroom and watching them sleep, oblivious to the angry ripple they had caused in the world.

  Now and then the children romped and wrestled in the little room he had built at the back of the house that served as their bedroom, but it was minor stuff, nothing like the night he discovered their secret. Hades had ignored the sound of them jumping from bed to bed as he sat reading a newspaper at the kitchen table. When Eden started screaming Hades looked up from the printed words. Taking off his reading glasses, he stood and moved silently down the hall.
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  “Don’t, Eric, don’t! I don’t like it! Don’t, don’t, don’t!”

  Hades opened the door. Eden was midair, flying from one bed to the other away from Eric. She landed on the pillow and saw him standing there. Her smile disappeared. There was instant silence in the room. Eric’s hands slid under his backside and his eyes scrutinized Hades’ face with the cold calculation of a predator.

  “What’s going on in here?”

  “Nothing.” Eric grinned. “Nothing. We’re sorry. We were just having a bit of fun. We’re sorry, aren’t we, Eden?”

  “Yes.” She nodded.

  Eric took a long breath and let it out quickly. Hades let his eyes travel cautiously to Eden. Her cheeks were red. Hades looked back at Eric.

  “What are you hiding?”

  “What? Nothing.” Eric shook his head. “I’m not hiding anything.”

  “What have you got there?” Hades frowned, pointing at Eric’s hands. The boy shifted awkwardly and brought his hands out from under his backside, waving them around innocently. Eden’s eyes were wild.

  Hades felt a twinge in his heart. There was anger there and yet there was hurt. The children knew what evil he hid under the layers of trash out there in the dump. Eric had been curious enough to work out the science of it, the way the acidic leachate, built up from years of rotting garbage—fed and synthesized and collected as it was by Hades’ unique system of layers and channels—dissolved the bodies buried beneath it. The children knew that this had been meant for them. They knew that Hades was flawed. So there was no reason they should hide things from him. Hadn’t he shown them they could trust him?

  “I don’t want you to hide things from me, Eric,” Hades sighed. “I don’t want either of you to hide things from me. I’m asking you to show me what you’ve got. If you’ve got something you shouldn’t have, then I’ll punish you. But if you keep lying to me you’ll lose my trust. Show me what you’ve got, boy.”

  Eric considered this silently. He looked at Eden for confirmation. Hades bit his tongue. He didn’t feel that there was anything to consider. It seemed for a moment as though Eric was weighing the loss of Hades’ trust against the punishment, judging the worth of each.

  Eventually the boy pulled an object from under him and set it in Hades’ palm. Hades studied the object in his fingers. It seemed to be an animal tail.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s a cat’s tail. I was trying to touch Eden with it. That’s why she was screaming.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I’m sorry, Hades.” Eric tried to compose his face into what he thought was remorse but all he achieved was a quizzical frown. “We’re both sorry.”

  That word again. Sorry. It was a learned thing. They thought they could say it and make things better, but they had no conception of what it meant. Eric scratched his brow, shadowing his stony eyes.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “I found it.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  Eric knotted his fingers together, looking at Eden for support. She remained silent. There was an icy tension in the room.

  “Eden and I found a duckling,” Eric said resignedly. “It’d been attacked by one of the cats. It was dying. The duckling’s parents were there, and they were making a noise like . . . like they were screaming. Eden was upset. There are just so many cats out there because of all the meat in the garbage. They’re all feral, and they’re all unwanted. I just . . .” He cleared his throat. “Eden was so upset, you know, so I just . . .”

  Hades waited. There was no more.

  “Why did you take this?” he asked, weighing the tail in his hand.

  Eric chewed his fingernails.

  “It didn’t suffer,” Eden piped up.

  “Shut up, Eden,” Hades snapped. She jolted. Eric’s eyes searched the carpet, as though the answers were hidden there.

  “Is this the only time you’ve done this?” Hades asked the boy. Eric was still. Hades went to the bed and shoved him aside, reaching under the bed to where he knew Eric kept one of his treasure boxes. He pulled it out and tore off the lid. The children watched as he heaped the ball of cats’ tails out onto the floor, watching them uncurl like furry worms of every conceivable color—black and burned orange and chestnut and white. There were eighteen in all.

  Eden started to cry.

  8

  According to the missing persons report filed by her parents, eleven-year-old Courtney Turner had disappeared on the short walk home from a sleepover at her friend’s house. Courtney had left the Oberon Street house at seven o’clock in the morning, crossed the Randwick cemetery on Malabar Road and gone missing somewhere between Elphinstone Road and her house on Jacaranda Place. Nobody saw a thing. I knew that area. It was quiet and leafy and narrow back there behind the cemetery—rolling hills and shadowy lanes and plenty of housing commission flats. Endeavour House was near there, full of navy and army boys.

  At eight o’clock the morning she went missing, Courtney’s parents had phoned her friend’s house. At half past, they’d gone for a drive. At ten o’clock they’d arrived at the Maroubra police station and sat in the waiting room among the families of drug addicts and drunk teenagers for an hour. They were turned away. It was too early to file a report, they were told. At midnight they’d sat down with an apologetic Constable Alan Marickson to make a full report. Courtney was long gone by this time and everybody knew it. Gone, baby, gone.

  It had been two weeks since Courtney disappeared when Eden and I turned up on the doorstep of the Turner house. Until now, the case had been handled by the missing persons department. From my discussions with them that morning it seemed they’d tried to hand the case over to homicide after a week and had been knocked back due to lack of evidence. And the big bosses were reluctant to cause a stir in the press by hinting that a child killer might be lurking around its pretty beachside suburbs. Lately, it seemed like missing persons had been whining a lot about a steep caseload and no one had taken them seriously. The discovery of the Watsons Bay bodies seemed to justify their concern about an upsurge in their work.

  Courtney’s mother clearly recognized Eden from the news reports about the bodies in the boxes. Her knees went and I caught her before she hit the deck. I heard her husband calling from the kitchen.

  Soon the screaming stopped and the numbness set in. The four of us sat around the glass-top table in the Turners’ stylish dining room, burning in the silence. Courtney’s mother, puffy-eyed, sat beside Eden, staring at her reflection in the microwave. The father chewed his knuckles.

  I’d been in this situation a number of times and this was usually how it went. They howled and denied and threw things around. They sobbed and moaned and blamed each other. After a while the awkward presence of the cops was noted and everyone was invited to sit down. Then the parents closed up.

  Eden was making notes quietly in her notepad. It looked like she was plotting a novel. I glanced around the kitchen, counting the purple tiles on the splashback above the sink.

  Courtney’s mother was a small, thin blond woman. Her husband, by contrast, was huge and red-haired, like a caricature Viking. Agony was thick in the air. There were framed photographs of the girl everywhere. On the kitchen counter sat a stack of posters with her face. I couldn’t draw a correlation between the smiling preteen beauty in the “missing” posters and the sunken-eyed corpse I’d seen in the morgue only hours before.

  I lost track of the conversation thinking about Courtney. Eden was cracking her knuckles. She made a few pages of notes from the barely whispered words of the mother.

  “Who’s Monica?” Eden asked softly. Eliza Turner bit her lips. She took a breath and sighed. The gold bracelet found in the box with Courtney’s body was in the center of the table, still in its evidence bag.

  “We have another daughter, two years older than Court,” Eliza whispered, glancing at her husband. “Derek and I have been fighting ever since . . . ever since that night. We sent
Monica to stay with Derek’s mother. In Richmond. So she. You know. So she . . .”

  “So she would be protected,” Eden said.

  “Monica and Court sometimes swap bracelets. They have a matching pair. I don’t know why they do it,” Eliza sniffed. “They’ve always done it.”

  I noted the mother’s use of the present tense. It made me want to chew my fingernails. I looked around and took a closer look at the photographs I’d been avoiding and noticed that, yes, there were two daughters. They looked so alike that on first impression it seemed an extensive collection of school portraits and dance troupe action shots and grinning Christmas pictures of one girl. Courtney and Monica—two peas in a pod. There were only a couple of them together and they seemed like twins.

  “None of our other victims were found with jewelry,” Eden said carefully. “We’re missing wedding rings and earrings and piercings. Can you think why Courtney might still have had this with her when we found her?”

  Eliza and Derek looked at each other. He shrugged.

  “The girls were very protective of these bracelets. Court was almost paranoid. Maybe she . . . hid it from him. I don’t know.”

  “Seems to suggest she knew what was going on. That she felt threatened,” I said.

  “Jesus.” Derek rubbed his eyes.

  “So, Derek, you’re the girls’ stepfather?” Eden asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s their biological father?”

  “He died. In 1998,” Eliza chipped in. “Heart attack. Monica was four when Derek and I married. Courtney was two.”

  Eden continued writing.

  “Ever had any problems with the two girls, Derek?” I asked.

  “Why is that relevant?”