Fall Girl by Toni Jordan Read Free Book Online Page B

a blind moment of fear after waking from a nightmare, I took matches from the kitchen and sat shivering for an hour in the half-light next to a pile of apple leaves I’d heaped against the side wall of the shed. I wanted to dispose of this evidence forever but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. When I told my father, he only laughed. ‘Circumstantial, my dear’, he said. ‘People collect the strangest things. Teddy bears and teaspoons and cola cans. Would never stand up in a court of law’.
    The day after I overheard Dr Eng, I found the hanging file labelled Metcalf. It was bulging with the history of the mining company and the family. Arnold and Frances Metcalf, both deceased in a car accident on the way to a skiing holiday. Two of their three children had fat files: business and fashion magazine articles and interviews on Celeste’s move to Sydney and the international success of her swimwear company; women’s and gossip magazine stories and photo spreads on Gabrielle’s marriage to a media heir and her three adorable children.
    At the back of the file was one slim folder on Daniel, the baby of the family. It held nothing but torn sheets of social pages, Daniel with his arm around one pretty girl after another. At first glance he is not quite handsome. His nose is too big and bends to one side like it’s been broken. His eyes are too deep set and his jaw is too prominent. I have met many men like him in the course of my work, wealthy and idle, and at heart they are all the same. The folder contained only one page of words, ripped from a weekend newspaper. It was one of those ‘Sixty seconds with…’ pieces, the kind that became popular when editors realised they could fill a page by printing verbatim answers received by email instead of despatching a journalist to spend an entire day interviewing a subject.
    There was no clue as to why this piece was written. Daniel had no book coming out, no show that needed tickets sold. Among the lame questions, like ‘My best trait is…’ and ‘I am happiest when…’, and the witty replies was one that caught my eye. ‘The strangest thing that has ever happened to me was…’
    Daniel’s answer was: ‘The time I saw a Tasmanian tiger in Wilsons Promontory National Park when I was eight years old.’

That was just the beginning. It took some time, still, for the two ideas to gel in my mind. To find the details of the trust by looking through the university archive, to speak to past winners and entice them to say more than they should. To devise an application he would find impossible to resist. At the beginning I thought it impossible. Ridiculous. Then slowly I became intrigued, and that’s always a good sign. If I can intrigue myself, it’s also possible to intrigue a mark.
    Tasmanian tigers are remnants of a bygone age. They were marsupials: related to kangaroos and koalas rather than tabby cats, although they did have stripes on their lower back, hind legs and tail, and they did hunt smaller, weaker animals. And, as every Australian school child knows, in 1936 the Tasmanian tiger went the way of the passenger pigeon and the dodo. There is a grainy black and white film of the last of them in Hobart zoo, pacing in her small wire enclosure as if she knows the end is near. The film was taken in 1933 and in 1936 she died and that was that. Her species had been hunted to extinction and her home destroyed. The Tasmanian government had, at one time, paid £1 for each head brought in.
    In a stunning example of efficiency, the government declared the tiger a protected species a full fifty-nine days before the last one died in captivity, of neglect. Her full name was Thylacine, or Thylacinus cynocephalus . Although she lived in Tasmania until the 1930s, she had been extinct in the rest of the country for perhaps two thousand years.
    At the beginning of my planning I almost gave up on the