Fall Girl (6 page)

Yet the filing system was also my greatest worry when I was a child. It seemed so incriminating. It kept me up nights. When I couldn't sleep I would creep down to the shed at first light to test the lock, check the windows. Once, in a blind moment of fear after waking from a nightmare, I took matches from the kitchen and sat shivering for an hour in the half-light next to a pile of apple leaves I'd heaped against the side wall of the shed. I wanted to dispose of this evidence forever but I couldn't bring myself to do it. When I told my father, he only laughed. ‘Circumstantial, my dear', he said. ‘People collect the strangest things. Teddy bears and teaspoons and cola cans. Would never stand up in a court of law'.

The day after I overheard Dr Eng, I found the hanging file labelled Metcalf. It was bulging with the history of the mining company and the family. Arnold and Frances Metcalf, both deceased in a car accident on the way to a skiing holiday. Two of their three children had fat files: business and fashion magazine articles and interviews on Celeste's move to Sydney and the international success of her swimwear company; women's and gossip magazine stories and photo spreads on Gabrielle's marriage to a media heir and her three adorable children.

At the back of the file was one slim folder on Daniel, the baby of the family. It held nothing but torn sheets of social pages, Daniel with his arm around one pretty girl after another. At first glance he is not quite handsome. His nose is too big and bends to one side like it's been broken. His eyes are too deep set and his jaw is too prominent. I have met many men like him in the course of my work, wealthy and idle, and at heart they are all the same. The folder contained only one page of words, ripped from a weekend newspaper. It was one of those ‘Sixty seconds with…' pieces, the kind that became popular when editors realised they could fill a page by printing verbatim answers received by email instead of despatching a journalist to spend an entire day interviewing a subject.

There was no clue as to why this piece was written. Daniel had no book coming out, no show that needed tickets sold. Among the lame questions, like ‘My best trait is…' and ‘I am happiest when…', and the witty replies was one that caught my eye. ‘The strangest thing that has ever happened to me was…'

Daniel's answer was: ‘The time I saw a Tasmanian tiger in Wilsons Promontory National Park when I was eight years old.'

That was just the beginning. It took some time, still, for the two ideas to gel in my mind. To find the details of the trust by looking through the university archive, to speak to past winners and entice them to say more than they should. To devise an application he would find impossible to resist. At the beginning I thought it impossible. Ridiculous. Then slowly I became intrigued, and that's always a good sign. If I can intrigue myself, it's also possible to intrigue a mark.

Tasmanian tigers are remnants of a bygone age. They were marsupials: related to kangaroos and koalas rather than tabby cats, although they did have stripes on their lower back, hind legs and tail, and they did hunt smaller, weaker animals. And, as every Australian school child knows, in 1936 the Tasmanian tiger went the way of the passenger pigeon and the dodo. There is a grainy black and white film of the last of them in Hobart zoo, pacing in her small wire enclosure as if she knows the end is near. The film was taken in 1933 and in 1936 she died and that was that. Her species had been hunted to extinction and her home destroyed. The Tasmanian government had, at one time, paid £1 for each head brought in.

In a stunning example of efficiency, the government declared the tiger a protected species a full fifty-nine days before the last one died in captivity, of neglect. Her full name was Thylacine, or
Thylacinus cynocephalus
. Although she lived in Tasmania until the 1930s, she had been extinct in the rest of the country for perhaps two thousand years.

At the beginning of my planning I almost gave up on the idea. I thought it was impossible that anyone would believe something so ridiculous. Then I remembered my father's favourite quote, from H. L. Mencken. ‘The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.'

I've always suspected that Mencken was sad about this, but my father certainly wasn't. He taught me that this applies not just to Americans but to us too, and to people everywhere. It is ridiculous to claim that this animal may be alive, I thought, but I will dare.

There will be no ceremony for the awarding of the cheque. It will be handed over in a plain envelope by Carmichael alone in the room where I sat today. My bank account, in the name of a two-dollar company called the Victorian Tasmanian Tiger Research Trust, is ready. By this time on Monday I will have deposited the money. By Friday next week I will have withdrawn it and closed the account. It will be like Dr Ella Canfield never existed. I will never see Daniel Metcalf again.

The Metcalf job is the last on the agenda for discussion tonight. We have already talked over an upcoming job of Beau's involving fictitious invoices for internet advertising to be sent to large disorganised companies, and briefly, a job of my father's. This one took little planning: it is one more in the series of counterfeit emerald scams that he has run since he was a young man. This time he is selling a pair of antique earrings that are, I imagine, exquisite green tourmaline or cubic zirconia. The jewels themselves have not arrived yet but my father has a glossy photo of them, and an unscrupulous purchaser already lined up. I have never asked him where the stones come from and he would not tell me if I did.
Need to know
basis
, he would say. He might wink.
Can't have my little girl in the firing
line if it all goes pear-shaped.

After my father and Ruby and Aunt Ava and Uncle Syd retire, the six of us kids sit for a while in the drawingroom among the gilded mirrors and the ancient rugs of animal skins. These old chairs are not comfortable so Sam is lying lengthways on the couch, smoking a cigar. He dislodges the antimacassars with his feet and they crumple on the floor. Greta and Beau sprawl in front of the fire. Anders and Julius each have a tub Chesterfield, and I lie on the daybed and we sip balloon glasses of my father's cognac and talk of stings past and future and of the glory days of our childhood, those times when my father and Ruby and Ava and Syd would come home in the old Mercedes all glamour and furs and throw cash in the air for us children to collect like leaves.

Or the nights we would pile in the cars and drive to the city, to the restaurant of a friend of Uncle Syd's, and we would take a private diningroom at the back and eat oysters and lobster, even the littlest of us, and wear bibs and wipe our mouths on them and our parents would let us drink lemonade out of champagne glasses so we could toast their success.

As the night becomes colder Julius feeds the fire with dried apple wood. Now we are reminiscing about the wonderful times we had on holidays when we were children. One, my favourite, was a driving holiday along the coast with just my father and Ruby and Sam and me. We were free and the days were warm and long and my father would let us kids pick the next day's destination from a map he kept folded in the glove compartment. We spent our days picnicking from a huge wicker basket or fishing or listening to my father's stories about our family's heritage or walking along the beach. At night we slept under the stars.

Tonight we have stayed up too late with all these memories, and on the way up the stairs to our bedrooms we tiptoe drunkenly and whisper so as not to wake our sleeping parents. On the landing, Sam puts his hand on my shoulder.

‘It's a nice little return, your scientist caper,' he says. ‘Good job, Della.'

I watch Sam tumble into his room and sag on the unmade bed without closing the door or taking off his shoes, then I turn to go up another flight to my attic bedroom. The window looks west towards the city; I stand under the tilt of the roof and rest the crown of my head on the low ceiling. I close my eyes.

These are my father's words, I know. It is precisely what he said earlier tonight. For the last few years it seems that all my jobs have been small ones. Safe. Modest. I have not celebrated with champagne or lobster, not for many months. There was no needle in Sam's voice yet still I feel it. Good job, Della, on your nice little return.

In the morning I sleep in, my head fuzzy from the cognac and the late night. On waking my hair is curly and even redder. No one in my father's family has hair like this. It must come from my mother's side; it takes the serious business of the day to straighten it and calm the colour. I have missed breakfast. By the time I hobble to the kitchen, still in my dressing gown and slippers, the kippers are long finished and the eggs are poached and eaten and everything is cleared away. On the stove there is a small pot of porridge wrapped in a tea-towel. This I know is meant for me.

I have just picked up my spoon when a head peeks around the corner: wide white smile, soft blond fringe. Even from here I can see his dimple. His expression is a fraction too cheery for this time of the morning.

‘Good morning princess,' he says.

I take a deep breath. ‘Timothy. What a surprise.'

He frowns. ‘Really? I've been looking for you. I've dropped around several times, left messages with the cousins.'

‘You're right. It's not really a surprise.'

‘Are you busy? Because I've been wanting to talk to you.' Timothy pulls out a chair and sits beside me at the long pine table. He is dressed for work: short-sleeved, crisp ironed shirt, the top pocket filled with pens, navy trousers. His BlackBerry in a holster on his belt. He is bright-eyed, bushy-tailed. I am bushy-eyed and bright-nothinged. His face is solemn; his fingers drum the table. ‘It's important,' he says.

I lean across the table, rearrange the bowl and the salt and pepper grinders. I take the napkin off my lap and fold it carefully.

‘Porridge? It's still warm. I can sprinkle some brown sugar on top.'

‘No thank you, Del. No porridge.' He fumbles on the table top towards my hand.

‘Then how about some tea?' I jump to my feet, chair grating on the tiles, and pull my dressing gown tighter around me. ‘Ruby would never forgive me if I had a guest and didn't offer them any tea. Or juice? There's probably fresh juice left over from breakfast. You've been up for hours I bet. You must be ready for a break.'

For a moment his eyebrows go up, but then he shakes his head. ‘No thanks. No juice. I just want to talk to you.'

I open the fridge door and pull out a flat white plate. ‘Ooh, look. There's pancakes.'

‘No, no, I don't want anything. I've already eaten breakfast, hours ago. Deliveries come early, you know, it's not office hours, my line of work. Wait, pancakes? What kind?'

I poke them through the plastic wrap. ‘Blueberry.'

He nods, and I busy myself heating some butter in a cast iron pan, chatting aimlessly about whatever comes into my head: the last of the summer blueberries, sealed in glass jars in the pantry; my Aunt Ava, who seems to survive only on desserts and claims not to have eaten anything green since 1979; whether home-made butter tastes better than store-bought. He wants to talk to me. I've suspected this for some weeks now, ever since I woke up early one morning in his bed in the bungalow at the back of his parents' house to find him staring down at me, gooey eyed. I am just setting down the plate of pancakes when he takes my arm and guides me into a chair.

‘Della,' he says, and I hold my breath but he gestures across the room. ‘That old fridge. It's on its last legs. Let me get you a nice new one. Double-doored. Titanium. Ice dispenser. Still in the carton. Make life much easier for your father at cocktail time.'

I exhale. ‘That's it? That's what you wanted to talk to me about?'

‘Ah, no.'

‘Timothy.' I rub my fist against my temple, then pick up the tea towel and bustle around with dishes in the sink. I don't look at him when I speak. ‘We have a good arrangement. We've had a good arrangement for a while now. Fun. No strings. Don't spoil it.'

‘I'm not trying to spoil it,' he says. ‘I'm trying to make it better.'

He stands, but just then my mobile phone sounds from the pocket of my dressing gown. I mutter an apology, move back toward the sink. Before I answer, I know it's Daniel Metcalf.

It is fatal to sleep with a mark. Despite his intimations and teasing, my father knows that this is perhaps the only unbreakable rule. In our business, it's true, a certain element of the lure is essential. A heightening of tension. Some might call this a seduction but it is not. It is many things: the building of a connection between a man and a woman that forms the basis of trust; the exchange of money for intimacy, which is worth more and is rarer; and the sleight of hand that shifts the mark's focus from the mechanics of money to the hint of promise.

But to sleep with a man and vanish with his pride as well as his money is the surest path to disaster. I must live somewhere. I cannot entirely disappear, and there is the family to consider. The mark must not feel so bereft that he wants to destroy me, not so burned or so proprietorial that he will spend his (usually ample) resources on tracking me down. That line cannot be crossed.

Meeting men is not easy in my line of work. There's an entire conversation to be had when you meet someone new, about who you are and what you do. I could lie, of course. But then it would all become rather like work.

Timothy is trustworthy. He is from a reliable family, the son of my father's friend Felix the Fence. He is attractive in a boyish, earnest sort of way. We often played together as children, not usually at his house with deliveries and pallet jacks and customers coming and going but here, around the apple trees with Sam and the cousins. Our arrangement has been good for both of us, but I have an idea it is coming to an end.