Tristan Bancks - The Fall

I had heard that sound several times during the week. The clink of a metal latch, then the screek of rusty hinges as the gate opened. It was the sound I had heard last night after I saw the man standing over the body, after he looked up at me and I pulled back from the window.

Clink-screek.

Had he hidden something in that cupboard? And what if the thing was still there?

I leaned out the window to get a better look but the caretaker just closed the gate with a screek-clink and threw a shovel and a piece of folded black plastic into the back of his ute.

I needed to go down there. This guy had to be involved in some way.

Stay inside. Don’t go anywhere. That’s what Harry had told me. I would not break the one rule my dad had set for me.

But what if I could be useful? What if breaking the rule meant that I could uncover fresh evidence? Wouldn’t that make him proud?

I crutched through the bin shed – grim, even during the day. It smelt vegetabley and organic, worse than I remembered from the night before.

I had always loved puzzles and stories but I had never had anything to investigate before. Nothing had ever happened to me. Life was dull at home. Small town. Overprotective mum. School. Friends. Girls I loved but who didn’t love me so much. Now this.

I played last night over in my mind, from the moment I woke at 2.08 am through to the man following me upstairs.

Clink-screek.

That sound.

Clink-screek.

I’d heard it just after he looked at me, before I went downstairs. That sound would lead me to the body, I was sure of it.

I looked out the bin shed door. The caretaker’s ute was gone, leaving tyre tracks just metres from where the man had fallen to the ground.

Two trains rattled noisily by, one lumbering slowly, the other with places to go, people to see. Passengers were packed in, wearing suits and smart clothes. Regular people with regular lives, tapping their phone screens and reading their Friday-morning newspapers. People who had slept more than a couple of hours, and not in a cleaning cupboard. People who had not seen a man die in the night. This crime would not be in the news. Not yet.

I looked to where the man had lain and thought I could still make out the depression in the earth that I had felt with my fingertips the night before. Maybe I was imagining it. I scanned around for the other arm of the glasses and the lenses, but could see nothing. Maybe the larger man had picked them up, taken them with him.

I could see the little gate of the caretaker’s storage cupboard set into the wall. It looked like an entrance for elves or hobbits. It was only about the height of my bellybutton.

Clink. Latch. Screek. Hinges. There was no padlock on the cupboard. Anyone could hide anything in there. The man with that round face and those dead eyes could easily have dragged the body in there. And if he did the caretaker would have seen it just now, which would mean that he was definitely involved.

I would have to break cover to get across to the gate. I would be out in the open and could easily be seen from above. I wished that snooping was not in my DNA. I looked up through the tree branches. No humans. Just windows reflecting dark grey clouds above. Another storm on the way.

I eased my way along the outside wall of the bin shed, pressing myself against the rusty corrugated iron, then edged across the three or four metres of brick wall till I was standing right next to the storage cupboard.

The body will not be in there. Even if it had been, the man would have moved it by now , I told myself. I wanted to believe it.

I reached for the gate latch and felt a tingle in my jaw. I lifted the latch. It made a quiet tinkling sound. I pinched it between my fingers for a few seconds. I dropped it and there was a distinctive clink. I pulled it open slowly, closing my eyes for the first few centimetres. The hinge screeeeeeked , long and slow. I stepped back, bent down and peeked inside, squinting into the darkness. I could see the handles of five or six garden tools and, further in, the mower handle. I pulled the gate open some more.

Screeeeeeeek .

More tools and an earthy underground smell that stuck to my nostrils. Not disgusting like the bin shed but deep, moist and soily. Like a grave. The smell sat like a large piece of fruit in my throat.

The storage space went back a long way. It was too dark to see what was in there past the mower. There was a light switch on the wall to the right, below a shelf holding paint and weedkiller and hand tools. The switch was grubby with finger marks. I flicked it and a light globe snapped to life on the ceiling about two metres in. I peered in beyond the tools and paint and mower for anything that might hide a body – a sack or more of that black plastic.

There were piles of old tiles, some bricks, a stack of dark timber with long, rusted nails sticking out of it. I willed myself to go inside and look up the back. That’s what Harry Garner would do. He was known for going the extra distance to get the story. Commandment number ten:

Show determination, patience, mindfulness. Evaluate all evidence.

Harry was brave and determined. Was I?

I leaned my crutches against the wall outside and climbed in over the lawnmower. A spear of pain jabbed me just above the knee as I twisted and knocked it against the mower’s engine. My mum would be so mad with me. I was supposed to be on bed-rest for the week.

I leaned against the wall and tools clanked together behind me. My hunched body cast a misshapen shadow on the rear wall of the low, rectangular cavern. The air was cooler and earthier the further I moved in.

I took a ton of photos, hoping that I could look back later and find a little detail, a piece of evidence that might unlock something. I took pictures of the dusty ground beneath the beat-up Adidas on my left foot. I took shots of the blade of a shovel and a pair of long-nosed garden shears. The images were blurred and grainy so I flicked on the flash. There was an explosion of white as I photographed a crumpled piece of grey clothing on the ground. Is that the colour he had been wearing? The small man? I poked it gently with my shoe, spreading it out and revealing a pair of grey overalls spattered in white paint, grease and dirt. The caretaker’s overalls, the same kind he’d been wearing earlier.

I took another photo and, again, the flash blew the image bright white. It made me think of the reporters and police forensics experts in the stack of 1950s and 1960s crime reporter comic books I had under my bed. Harry had sent them to me on my seventh birthday and I had read each one dozens of times. The comics had names like Authentic Police Cases and Crime Smashers – The Law Always Wins . The reporters used old cameras with giant round flashbulbs that exploded and had to be replaced after each use. In the front of the comic was an ad for cameras with exploding flashbulbs and, in the back, a coupon to buy a Simplex Typewriter for $2.98.

The books were from when my dad was a boy. They were the only things he had ever sent me. I wondered what had prompted that – why, for one moment, he decided to reach out and then went quiet for another six years. Mum thought they were inappropriate, which made them even more fun to read. Reading them and drawing my own comics made me feel closer to my dad – taking down bad guys, smashing crime and using lines like, ‘We’ve finally found your hideout, you crook. Now we’ll send you away for a long stretch. See?’ They always said ‘See?’ at the end of a line in those old books, so that’s the way they spoke in my Harry Garner: Crime Reporter comics, too.