The Broken Ones (55 page)

The woman went to the cage, and the tiny owls stretched their wings and landed on her finger. Oscar could see their needle-sharp talons bite into the woman’s skin, but they drew no blood.

“Come on, you lot,” she said, and the cats trailed their mistress as she walked with her own catlike grace out of sight.

Tick-tick, crack
.

Oscar looked at Jamy. The boy seemed to feel his stare and blushed, embarrassed. Oscar leaned over, kissed the boy’s cheek, and roughed his hair. Jamy grinned and batted away Oscar’s show of affection.

“Hey,” Oscar called to Megan.

She looked up from her bread. She smiled, but her cheeks were wet.

Oscar rose, dusted walnut shell off his pants, and knelt beside her. There must be words, he thought. There must be words that can express a thousand sorrows and a thousand regrets. But none came. He felt her hand on his own head, much softer than the way he had just touched Jamy.

“An accident,” Megan said softly. “That’s all.”

He looked up, and his eyes swam with tears.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

The girl wiped his cheeks with a thumb and gave him a piece of bread. “No complaints,” she insisted.

The room was becoming cooler now. In contrast, its hues grew warmer with the setting sun. Coral pinks. Ember reds.

The hallway the woman had gone down was dark. And from the direction of the door came the sudden sound of a woman’s scream.

Out in the courtyard, the children’s laughter stalled for a moment, then redoubled. Such things were drops in the ocean, sand grains in the desert. And Oscar realized that he didn’t want to stay. Not yet.

The door clicked open.

Oscar stood.

The woman was returning through the dark hallway—a black form in a gray, nestlike tunnel. It was perhaps a trick of the half-light, but the tunnel itself looked wider, higher, darker. The birds looked as large as mastiffs, and the cats as long as crocodiles … and the woman herself was tall, so much taller, filling the hallway. Her feet did not pad but clacked on the flagstones, and from her back spread not shadows but dark and powerful wings. But it was her face that trapped Oscar’s eyes. It was beautiful still, but beautiful in the way an eagle in flight is beautiful. Inhuman. Her eyes were wide and large and the color of liquid copper. Her nose was long, hard, curved over her mouth. It dripped.

Then the woman stepped into the pleasant, brass-warm glow of sunset and the owls were small and fluffed, and the cats petite and
remotely curious, the woman just a woman. But in the late light her face and skin and dress were red. Red, the color of fresh, thick blood.

Her eyes rested on Oscar for a long moment.

“You’re leaving,” she said. It was not a question.

Oscar nodded. “If I can.”

Her hands rose, and Oscar flinched. Then she touched him. And her skin was warm. She pressed herself to him, and he felt her firm flesh through thin cloth. Her breath, as she kissed both cheeks, was warm, and smelled of blood.

“I shall see you soon.”

She looked over Oscar’s shoulder and nodded. Jamy stood, brushed off his own trousers, and came to Oscar’s side. He sighed.

“Can’t he stay?” Oscar asked.

“He does stay,” the woman said, leading Oscar to the alcove he arrived through. “He is playing outside. But he goes with you, too.”

She smiled and drew aside the curtain of wood and tiny beads. As she held the strands aside, he saw that the beads were not pottery at all. They were tiny, carefully painted knuckle bones.

Then the screaming started.

Chapter
43

I
t was Zoe. She was shouting at him to come on, to come
on
, Oscar!

Jesus, but it was cold. Why had he left that warm, lovely kitchen?

Come on! Breathe!

He rocked on the ground. Her face was on his.

Cold. And beneath it, pain, awful pain, like a layer of acid bound in ice. His heart lay still in his chest, waiting for his decision.

Oscar!

Hell.

Beat, he said. Go on, and beat.

So it did.

He struggled like a fish thrown back into water, gasping and thrashing.

And with the air, rushing in through throat and nostrils, the tang of gunpowder and the salty stench of blood.

Somewhere behind the rumble of thunder, sirens wailed.

Epilogue

N
o rain today. Oscar watched the sky with a cynical gaze. The clouds were as delicate as tiny fish scales, and so high and thin that they seemed themselves a pale blue. Nearby, the small leaves of pepper trees sighed in the breeze. Closer still, a deliberate cough.

Oscar looked down from the sky.

The clergyman caught his eye and nodded at the little silver pail of soil. Oscar stepped forward to the graveside. He took a little dirt in the scoop and tossed it down onto the casket. The soil tapped on the lid like fingers on a door. Oscar gave it no mind. He knew there was no one inside. Not really.

Oscar adjusted a crutch under one arm. He hovered in the background while the other mourners drifted away; he felt conspicuous in his dress uniform, although no one had given him a second glance except Jamy, who looked amused, and Zoe, who did not.

There weren’t many people at Sandro’s funeral. Vic Pascoe was in a wheelchair, his senile eyes staring vacantly as his nephew pushed him toward the parked cars. The commissioner had been unable to come: he was on remand, and on suicide watch. But the deputy commissioner had attended, in blues so richly ornamented that he looked like a flag come to life; he’d shaken Oscar’s hand and said that they just didn’t make detectives like Sandro Mariani anymore, all the while looking Oscar up and down very cautiously and no doubt thinking, So
this
is the one.

Foley came, after confirming that there would be a wake with a bar tab, and was chatting salaciously to the deputy commissioner’s buxom aide-de-camp, whose watch needed a lot of checking. It was Foley who’d spirited to Oscar the Scenes of Crime photos from Chislehurst. They showed a large pool of blood where Oscar had lain while Zoe resuscitated him. He’d bled from the leg and the chest: the slug from Moechtar’s gun had collapsed a lung, shattered two ribs, and missed his liver by less than a centimeter. Jon’s body was photographed lumped like a wheat sack at the bottom of the stairs. Moechtar had been shot cleanly through the left temple and was slumped over Megan as if listening for a pulse. There was none: Megan had been opened up like Penny Roth. “They found her bits in that thing,” Foley had explained with disgust. “In that clay thing. Chaume, that fucking butcher bitch.”

It was Anne Chaume’s body that was most interesting, and most unpleasant to look at. There was sufficient skin left on one finger to print and match with items in her bedroom, and thus confirm that the body was hers. The corpse had been flayed: her face and breasts and the skin of her arms and legs had been ripped from her body. The gouges in the bones of her skull and anterior rib cage were, in places, a quarter inch deep. Her eyes had been plucked out, and her soft organs torn and savaged. Many chunks, Foley said, were just plain missing. He’d looked at Oscar, wanting more, but Oscar had said nothing.

In the hospital, Oscar learned that the commissioner was being charged as an accessory to murder, and had, by all accounts, gone quite mad. In his bed, Oscar had been asked a lot of questions. He’d answered them all but said nothing of his trip into the kitchen where he shelled walnuts with Jamy Brum and watched Megan smile as she turned flat-breads on a hot stone. Anthony McAuliffe could not be found, so Oscar arranged Megan’s funeral from the hospital. Hers had been yesterday, his father’s today, Neve’s tomorrow. The minister was now talking to the funeral director. The mourners were gone; time to wrap it up. Sandro’s headstone, next to Vedetta’s, looked good. Oscar had paid to add a boy’s name below his mother’s.

Oscar shifted on his crutches and started back to the parking lot alone, wincing at the pressure of the crutch pad in his armpit.

Zoe waited on the footpath, a scowling sprite. She found funerals unpleasant, she claimed, but he knew that she simply didn’t like
the look of him in uniform. Up the road, something caught Oscar’s eye. Parked under a wide Moreton Bay chestnut tree was a sleek white patrol car. Haig leaned on its hood, admiring the lawns.

Oscar looked at Zoe. “Give me another few minutes?”

“I have to work today,” she said.

He nodded and shuffled stiffly toward Haig, who was lighting a cigarillo.

“I didn’t see you at the service,” Oscar said.

“Well,” Haig said, clicking his lighter shut. “We both know you don’t notice the obvious.”

Haig gestured toward a nearby open rotunda, and Oscar nodded.

“Not a bad stick, your father.” Haig walked with his hands in his pockets. “Incorruptible. We had a fight once. An actual fight. I can’t even remember what it was over.”

“Ethics, I expect.”

Haig shrugged. “He won. I was drunk, and he fought dirty. Dirty little Italian. Just like you.”

Oscar didn’t mind the sound of that. They reached the shade of the rotunda, and Oscar sat stiffly.

“You warned me off Chislehurst,” he said. “You knew something was up.”

“Like I said,” Haig said through smoke, “I didn’t know which side you were on.”

“You knew Moechtar was crooked.”

Haig stared out across the headstones. “Not crooked,” he replied. “Guilty.” He looked at Oscar. His eyes were as bright and hard as ever. “I just didn’t know what of.”

They sat in silence. Oscar watched as the last of the mourners got into their cars. Foley saw Oscar, and took a step toward the rotunda; then he noticed Haig and stopped dead before awkwardly changing direction.

Oscar sighed and signaled for a cigarillo. Haig’s eyes narrowed, then he handed over his silver tin. Oscar took a smoke and waited for Haig to light it.

“You had Jon try to get me out of the picture. Way back when.”

Haig nodded. “I did. You really were pissing me off.” Haig rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Inexcusable, though, what he did to that boy. Damned unprofessional.”

Jamy sat a few yards away, under a tree, looking down at an ants’ nest or a twig or nothing at all.

Oscar nodded. Through the trees, he could see a little orange backhoe trundling down a path, heading toward Sandro’s grave.

“I could bring that up again,” Oscar suggested. “Implicate you.”

“Ah, yes. You could.” Haig stubbed out his cigarillo on the painted timber and looked at Oscar. “But not a lot of evidence. Besides”—he pushed himself up off the seat and stepped into the brilliant sunlight—“you’re no longer pissing me off. Sorry to hear about the Barelies. When you’re up to it, drop by.”

Oscar watched Haig walk back to his car, unsure what it all meant. He was alive. He was wearing his uniform, and no one had asked him to take it off. It was a strange world.

He looked up at the mackerel clouds skating silently high overhead.

No rain today.

Acknowledgments

I owe great debts of thanks to many people who helped this novel arrive. I’m certain I’ve missed some, and to them I apologize.

As ever, I want to express my gratitude to my tireless and inspiring agent, Selwa Anthony.

My publisher, Vanessa Radnidge, at Hachette Australia, possesses amazing insight and endless patience—her skill, ideas, and deep care for her books and her authors are treasures I value enormously.

Heartfelt thanks go to my editor at Doubleday, Robert Bloom, whose love for good storytelling is infectious, and whose abilities are priceless.

Huge thanks must go to the rest of the Hachette team and Michael Windsor, Joe Gallagher, John Jenkinson, and everyone else at Doubleday for the hard work and great faith they’ve put in this book.

Copy editors Carol Anderson and Claire de Medici helped elevate the text to a new level and made countless wise suggestions.

It’s important to both thank and congratulate Karina Machado, whose brilliant nonfiction book
Spirit Sisters
opened my mind to what ghosts might be and mean.