her at least three trips. He'd left her reluctantly, but she'd known he'd bail when she told him she wasn't interested in lunch. It took a lot of food to keep Scotty going.
She pushed the boxes inside with her good foot, and dumped her bag next to the others inside the front door. She scowled at their intrusion in her otherwise uncluttered apartment. Grabbing a remote from the dining table, she buzzed open the motorised blinds, and walked straight onto the balcony, slipping through before the blinds were fully open. She tasted the smell of the sea.
Her niece, Lily, last time she'd visited, had said the white-capped waves looked like cream on blue jelly.
Maroubra beach was a carnival today. Spring rendered Sydneysiders a little manic, the warm breezes blowing in some kind of magic – promises of holidays, Christmas, pool parties, heat. It seemed there were babies everywhere, and in every park, pairs of ducks hovered around ducklings struggling through the grass.
However, with the rise in the temperature came a corresponding increase in violence. The new season's energy triggered hysteria in some. Sunshine on the weekend was as good an excuse as any to crack a beer at ten a.m., instead of waiting until four. In homes without air-conditioning, tempers were tinder, the heat combustible, alcohol fuel. The flames ignited when the residents realised that the promises whispered on the winds of spring would not be kept.
At least they've given me a couple of days before starting the new job, Jill thought, moving back into the unit, her eyes blinking, adjusting from the sun on the balcony. Time to try to get used to everything. She didn't think she'd ever even been to Liverpool, although she'd seen the signs off the motorway when travelling out to her parents' home in Camden. Liverpool was fifty minutes' drive southwest from Maroubra, Scotty reckoned. For the first time, a departmental vehicle was parked in the small garage under her unit block. She'd had to sell her old gym-set to get it in.
Jill squatted down with the boxes on the floor. Where did all this stuff come from? Newspaper cuttings, personal files, downloaded articles related to past cases: these could all go, she decided. None of this information had been important enough to leave with the departmental files. She sat cross-legged with the paperwork, creating a pile she could take back down to the garage, to drop off later at her parents' home to be burned. She stopped when she came across a framed photograph. Jerome Sanders and his family smiled up at her. Jerome's mum had sent this, with two dozen roses, last May after Jill had rescued him from the same man who'd abducted her two decades earlier. She moved the photo over to a small pile of things she would keep. With a sigh, she flipped onto the same pile the clippings related to the current Sydney home invasion spree. In its clear, sealed folder, this morning's newspaper article landed face up. Police Establish Home Invasion Taskforce Doctors at Liverpool Hospital advise that the latest victim of the crime gang terrorising residents of the western suburbs remains in a serious, but stable, condition. The 52-year-old Green Valley man suffered massive injuries to both his legs during the vicious knife attack yesterday evening. His family remains at his bedside.
Local Area Commander Lawrence Last this morning announced the establishment of a taskforce to capture the gang believed responsible for at least five brutal home invasions over the past two months.
'The violence is escalating,' commented Superintendent Last, 'and our priority is to catch these offenders as quickly as possible.'
Superintendent Last admitted that police have few leads as to the identity of the crime gang, who clothe themselves completely in black, wearing full-face balaclavas.
For the residents of Sydney's west, the decision to dedicate an investigations team to the invasions is welcome, but overdue.
'We can't sleep at night,' commented Kay, a Bonnyrigg resident, who did not wish to be further identified. 'I bet they'd have caught these people by now if this was happening on the North Shore.'
Jill realised she could barely see the newsprint in the gathering afternoon gloom. She snapped on a light and stretched her neck. Too tight. How long had it been since she'd last worked out? No more than a couple of days, surely?
Until five months ago, she had hardly missed a day's training since she was fifteen. When she'd taken her holiday, however, she'd given herself a break from her punishing weights and kickboxing routine. Trouble was, when she'd come home, she'd found it surprisingly difficult to start up her routine again. She really should get back into it right now. But she was hungry, she realised, and she needed a shower. She rubbed her hands, grubby from the clean-up, across her stomach, then stripped off her tee-shirt and walked into her bedroom.
When she dropped her boardshorts to the floor, the butterfly pendant dropped from the pocket and skidded across the granite floor tiles; it hid somewhere under her bed. She frowned in its direction, tempted to leave it there. Eventually, she bent to retrieve it, suddenly worried for the glass and stones. She held it up to the light, where it spun in her hand. Perfect. Nothing like her. Where would she ever wear this? She rarely wore jewellery, lived in tee-shirts and jeans whenever possible.
She held it to her throat in the mirror, scowled at the dainty prisms juxtaposed against the scales-of-justice tattoo on her shoulder, and the scars on her nipples, inflicted before she'd even developed breasts. She'd give it to Lily.
She knew she wouldn't.
She mentally relived Scotty watching her accept the pendant, his whole body a question. Already, she regretted her brusque acceptance of his gift. She wished she could explain to him that kindness from others felt like a threat. She'd like to have told him that her fleeting feelings of warmth towards him were blasted ice-solid before she could even identify them. Although she was beginning to realise that these defence reactions might now be unnecessary in her life, she could no more control them than articulate them. It only made it harder that Scotty seemed to know these things without her having to say anything.
Jill tucked the pendant into her underwear drawer, nestled it in. She shook her head and walked naked into her bathroom.
2
JOSS SLICED THE last crust from Charlie's Vegemite sandwich and wrapped it carefully in cling film until the bread could no longer be seen through the swathes of plastic. It occurred to him that his little girl might never be able to get her lunch out of the wrapping. He smiled, warmth spreading in his chest as he imagined her conscientiously trying.
'Someone will help her at preschool,' he told the sandwich, as he tucked it with a mandarin into her yellow lunchbox. He snapped the box closed, and as he'd been privately doing since she started school, asked the smiling sun on the front to keep his little girl safe. He smoothed the tape upon which her name was printed in Isobel's neat writing. Charlie Rymill. Her mother's surname. Good.
Joss had always hated his name. Throughout his thirty-four years, his first and last names had jockeyed for the position of most despised. For the first thirteen years of his life, his first name had held a slight degree of street cred, associated in some way with hashish, but he kept his double-barrelled shocker of a last name to himself whenever possible. No one was going to run in fear from Joss Preston-Jones for godsakes.
At thirteen, when the voices had told his mother to throw herself in front of a car, Joss's grandparents had put him in a private school. There, 'Preston-Jones' was completely unremarkable, but 'Joss' had earned him more than one bashing. After school, he'd joined the infantry corps. Within a couple of months, his peers had learned not to exploit the many opportunities to ridicule either name. He had a reputation for never knowing when to stop in a fight.
Since the home invasion at Andy Wu's, Joss had never been more thankful that Isobel had retained her own surname when they'd married, and that they'd given it to Charlie. Those psychos had never learned her full name – Isobel tossing her handbag into the boot of the car before heading into Andy's place for dinner had meant that the offenders had no ID for either of them.
Well, nothing formal.
The worry tape in his mind took up where it had left off before he fell asleep the night before.
Then his girls walked into the kitchen.
Shiny was the first word that came to mind. Charlie's golden hair shone, her four-year-old skin was
