I’m twelve. My crack-head mom is burned to a crisp in the London project I grew up in. Poor little orphan Craig is shipped out to Sydney and Uncle Ben. Within a week, I go from a mildewed tenement in winter to a four-bedroomed house in Narrabeen and sunshine.
The Talbot family meet me at the airport and there’s my cousin, Mark, giving me the sort of hostile look he’s never lost. He obviously hates me straight off the bat.
Four years later, I’m alone doing my homework. Mark bursts into my room with a couple of mates. They’ve been drinking. They stink. I go to get up and Mark slams a fist in my face. One of his friends kicks me in the balls. I spit blood onto the carpet. They hear my uncle turn the key in the front door, run. I spend the next day under the covers pretending I have flu so Ben doesn’t see my face until I can come up with an excuse.
Then sweet release. I’m eighteen and go to university to study Law. In my second year I join an exchange program with UCLA, spend a year in the States. It turns out to be the best year of my life. I return home to Oz at Easter – it’s the last thing I want.
Ben picks me up at the airport. We jump in the car.
“Mark’s engaged,” he says.
I look stunned.
“Why so surprised?”
I shake my head. “Nothing … just. I didn’t know he was even seeing anyone …”
“All been a bit quick, I admit. Becky’s a babe though. There’s a party tonight.”
Mark has changed, almost friendly. Amazing what love can do, I think. Then I see Becky and I understand. Love at first sight.
I still don’t know how the fight started. I was chatting to Becky in the kitchen and Mark must have thought I was flirting with her – which maybe I was. He was drunk and abusive. He took a swing at me, and that was it. We crashed into the lounge, parting stunned guests like a knife through an engagement party cake. Would have killed each other if it hadn’t been for Ben and three other guys pulling Mark and me apart.
When I’d recovered enough to see straight, I realized Becky had slipped away unnoticed.
The next day she called Mark to call off the engagement. It was to be five years before I saw her again.
Chapter 7
DARLENE’S LAB STOOD along the corridor from where Private’s launch party had been. It was her fiefdom. In here, she felt relaxed, isolated from the troubles of the outside world. Which was a little ironic, considering what was in the case she dumped on the counter.
She had designed the lab herself and been given carte blanche to install the best equipment available. Better still, through her contacts, she had some technology no one beyond Private would see for years to come. She was very proud of that.
Police forensics had worked through the night and catalogued everything before passing on the samples to Darlene an hour ago. A courier had delivered a case of test tubes and a USB at 6 am. She’d already been at Private for an hour.
She opened the clasps of the sample box and looked inside. Each test tube was labeled and itemized by date, location and type. They contained samples of the corpse’s blood, scrapings from under his fingernails, individual hairs from his jacket. She had a collection of her own photographs and a file from the police photographer.
There was no ID on the body. The victim was male, Asian, between eighteen and twenty-one years old. Both eyes removed with a sharp instrument. Wasn’t a professional job. By the condition of the wound, it was done at least thirty-six hours before death. Sockets were infected. He was a mess, his clothes badly soiled. They stank of sweat, urine and excrement. He’d probably been in them for days, held captive some place. But the jacket he’d worn was expensive – Emporio Armani – and his hair had been well cut, maybe two weeks ago. He was obviously from a wealthy family.
So it seemed likely they were looking at kidnap, Darlene mused. Maybe the kid had escaped his captors. Maybe he’d stopped being useful. No way of knowing … yet.
She removed a selection of test tubes from the case and walked over to a row of machines on an adjacent bench, each device glistening new. She slotted the test tubes into a metal rack, pulled up a stool, switched on the machines and listened to the ascending whir of computers booting up and electron microscopes coming on-line.
The first test tube was labeled: “Nail Scraping. Left digitus secundus manus.” With the tweezers, she slid out the piece of material. It was a couple of millimeters square, a blob of blue and pink. She placed it on a slide, lowered a second rectangular piece of glass over it and positioned the arrangement in the cross-hairs of the microscope.
The image was a pitted off-white. Set to a magnification of x1000, human flesh looked like a blanched moonscape. She tracked the microscope to the right and refocused. It looked almost the same, only the details were different. She set the tracking going again, back left, past the starting position. Refocused. Paused. Sat back for a second, then peered into the eyepiece once more. “Now that is weird,” she said.