Tristan Bancks - The Fall

I hit play again and watched the two men argue on the balcony. Merrin pointed his finger into the big man’s face and then Moon Face’s hand went over Merrin’s mouth, trying to silence him. They struggled for a moment, Merrin pushing Moon Face back before the big man shoved him very hard. Merrin went over the railing and I saw the back of the larger man as he looked over the balcony for a few seconds, then he turned and walked quickly across the apartment, directly towards the camera. I could hear his footsteps in my mind, the way I’d listened to them last night. I paused again and looked at him. Silver hair, double chin, wide, waxy face like the moon. His eyes were heavy, dark, wrinkled sockets. He looked like a banker or the head of a company. I did not need to zoom in. It was him, the cop.

Harry Garner had known this would happen, had expected it. He had surveillance footage of the death of another crime reporter. But he had not been around to see it. Why had he not taken his laptop with him today? I scanned the interface of the video surveillance program. I went into Preferences and, under ‘General’, a box had been ticked: ‘Stream to Cloud’. I figured this meant that Harry could watch this footage from somewhere else. From everywhere else. ‘Stream to Cloud’ also meant that Harry had wi-fi here, which really annoyed me. I’d been going mental all this week without the web and he’d had it all along.

Who had set the cameras up for him? This was a pretty sophisticated system for a guy as tech-phobic as my dad. Unless he was the world’s greatest actor and liar and secretly he was a tech-genius, which seemed pretty unlikely to me. He had tried to help me set up my Xbox when I first arrived and he was hopeless. Someone had installed this system for him. Someone from the Herald ? The woman he met at the bakery? I wondered how they got the cameras into the other apartment. In comics and movies, surveillance experts broke into apartments all the time, but I had never thought about it happening in real life.

I had everything I needed to identify the perpetrator of this crime. My phone screen finally came alive. There were three texts from Mum and seven missed calls. Another text buzzed in as I went to my messages. She said:

What trouble? What’s

happened?

Sam?

Why won’t you answer

the phone? I’ll come

right now.

Getting in car. Please text

me back so I know you’re

okay.

There was a knock on the front door of the apartment. Only quiet, but it felt like a shotgun blast to my heart. I pocketed the phone, clicked the laptop closed and slipped it into my backpack.

‘C’mon, girl,’ I whispered. I dragged Magic up by her collar. She snorted and grunted, then sneezed. I led her to the hole in the wall. She tried to refuse but I lifted her front paws and then her wide behind in and I pushed her into the narrow cavity, down to the right. She growled as I slid her along and I felt bad but it was for the best. I would give her snacks later to make up for this. If there was a later.

I placed my backpack inside the wall to the left, pressing it into the darkness and breaking the silvery thread of a spider web that hadn’t been there earlier in the day. I put my left leg inside the wall, crouched, leaned heavily on my crutches, then eased my right leg in, keeping it as straight as I could. I rested my crutches against the wall, hoping they wouldn’t give me away. I picked up the hatch door and set it into the wall, entombing myself. Thirty-five seconds was my guess. Maybe forty. Not as fast as in practice. Should have been faster.

The knock came again, still quiet but firmer this time. And a voice with just one word: ‘Sam!’

I waited for the voice to come again. My legs and body felt jumpy. I needed to move, but I didn’t dare. Magnesium , I heard Mum say. Have you taken your magnesium?

I hadn’t.

I wanted to check my phone to make sure it was on silent but it was wedged tight into my shorts pocket, jabbing my hipbone. Something crawled across my neck and up into my hair but I didn’t move. Couldn’t. I thought of all the dead things I’d found in the wall earlier in the day and I prayed that I would not be like them soon. The city had been full of dead things for me – mice, rats, bugs, humans. The thing crawling across my scalp was not dead.

‘Sam!’

It was definitely her. I practically burst from the wall, pushing the timber hatch away and rolling out, face-planting on the cold, hard floor. I swiped and scratched madly at my hair to try to remove the spider/cockroach/very small rat that had crawled up my neck. Magic backed up and leapt out, shaking off the cobwebs and spinning in a circle, trying to bite her own tail.

‘Coming!’ I whispered hard into the dark as I pushed up, grabbed my crutches and hobbled to the door.

‘Scarlet?’ I whispered when I was close.

‘Open up!’

My fingers trembled with relief as I twisted the locks. When I saw her face I wanted to kiss it. She was still in her pink onesie and she pushed past me to get inside, out of the hallway.

‘Lock it,’ she said.

I did. Magic sniffed and licked her.

‘Sorry it’s so dark in here. I just don’t want to–’

‘Is your dad home yet?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry about before. I–’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said.

‘I couldn’t stop thinking after you left. I wanted to be sure about that apartment. My mum’s the strata manager so she knows all the tenants. She’s got a file on everyone. I took a look at 6A and I have something for you.’

She held up a small scrap of paper.

‘The Hills left the number of someone in their file, a contact for while they’re away. His name is Mick Kelly. You could ring the number.’

I nodded in the darkness. ‘Can I show you something?’ I took the laptop out of my backpack and placed it on the kitchen bench. I flipped open the lid and punched in my birthdate, which gave me that warm feeling again. I showed Scarlet the video that proved the man who had pushed John Merrin over the balcony was the man I had seen standing over the body down below and the same man I had seen in the police station.

‘This is so bad,’ she said. ‘You should come up to my place. We’ll tell my mum. But maybe we should still call the number.’

‘Really?’ I had all the evidence I needed. It seemed like a good time for us to tell Scarlet’s mum and to wait for mine to get here. I needed to text her that I was okay. ‘I can’t make calls on my stupid phone anyway.’

Scarlet pulled a phone out of a pouch in her onesie and grinned gently. She tapped the number in and handed me the phone. I held it up between us so that we could both listen. It was already ringing.

‘Can you hear that?’ I whispered.

There was a phone ringing somewhere in the building at the same time as the ringing in the earpiece. Scarlet pressed ‘end’ and the ringing in the building stopped a second later.

We looked at each other in the light of the phone.

‘That was weird,’ I said.

I grabbed the phone and pressed the green button to re-dial the number. Silence. We both listened, faces pressed close to the phone. The earpiece rang. A second later the phone rang again in the stairwell. Or was it in an apartment? It was the ‘old phone’ ringtone that I used to have on my phone, a bit like the one in the horror movie I saw. A shiver wriggled through me.

After one more ring the call was answered and the phone outside fell silent.

‘Yeah,’ said a voice.

We heard the man out on the stairs, maybe one floor down. I ended the call.

‘It’s him.’ I lowered the phone. It bumped on the handle of my crutch and clattered to the floor. So loud.