PART ONE: The Web - CHAPTER ONE

SOUTHERN SUBURBS OF SYDNEY
20th OCTOBER 2025

Calista slammed the car door shut. She walked towards the dark clouds that hovered above the cemetery, heavy drops smacking on her shoulders and soaking through her blouse. The east-facing marble headstones of the Greek Orthodox section sent a shudder up her spine, and she tried not to look down the leafy avenues of Catholic graves as she hurried past. Death gave her the heebie-jeebies, and she didn’t slow down until the non-denominational section where Charlie was laid to rest.

Their paths first crossed fifteen years earlier, when she was just sixteen with long blonde hair and curves that made him dizzy. It was an accidental meeting after she’d collected her little sister from netball practise. Her parents usually did the pickup, but they were busy that day, negotiating the sale of their house for a move to the country.

It was a half-hour walk from the netball courts to home, across a football field to where the Pig and Whistle Hotel sat on the other side of the main road. Calista’s house was a kilometre further on from there.

The winter sun was dropping behind the rooftops of terrace houses and shops, and the first streetlights were beginning to flicker. She waited at the busy intersection for the traffic lights to change when a white van screeched around the corner and skidded to a halt. Three men poured out as Calista gathered her sister in tight. They approached, whistling and jeering at the two girls.

One of them, a man about twenty years old with long, greasy hair, reached out and put his hand on Calista’s shoulder. ‘Come for a ride with us,’ he sneered through broken teeth as his grip firmed around her arm.

Calista threw his hand off and her sister screamed, causing the workman who were drinking at a table outside the Pig and Whistle on the other side of the street to turn around. One of them got up and grabbed a nail gun that was hanging off his work belt on the ground and dashed between cars to get across.

‘Fuck off,’ said the greasy-haired man.

The louts stepped towards him, only to stop in their tracks when he raised the nail gun, and without meaning to, fired a nail into his own forearm. His eyes nearly popped out of his head, and he shrieked like a woman in labour, staggering closer to the ringleader.

To the hoodlums, he was some kind of madman impervious to pain. There was terror in his eyes, and he was coming at them! Flight won over fight, and the louts scrambled to get back in the van. The tyres spun as they took off.

‘You girls alright?’ he asked, his face pale as though he was about to faint.

Calista’s sister was sobbing, holding on to her tightly.

‘I think so,’ mumbled Calista. ‘Is your arm alright?’

‘Yeah, all good,’ he said, gaining strength until he looked at the blood seeping down his arm. ‘Oh, Jesus!’

He dropped like a rock as two of his mates wandered across the road at a break in the traffic.

‘Come on, Charlie,’ one of them said. ‘Get up, you big sook.’

They helped him to his feet as he came to. His eyes locked in with Calista’s, and he took a deep breath. ‘Whoa, sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Happens sometimes; only once in a red moon.’

‘Blue moon, you idiot,’ said one of his mates.

Calista felt electricity shoot through her as their eyes held contact.

‘You girls right to get home?’

‘We’ll be okay,’ she said and pressed the button for the lights to change. She started walking and looked back over her shoulder. ‘Thanks.’

That afternoon marked a change in how Calista saw the world. The pretty face and shapely body that had given her a smooth ride through life, now held consequences. She’d heard of evil people and the things they did, but until then, they were all just stories like they belonged in a book or on television.

But as she walked home holding her sister’s hand, she considered the flip side of those evil people – the brave heroes like the man who just saved her.

The very next day, Calista made a point of walking the long way home after school, past the Pig and Whistle. She saw him at the same table, a bandage around his arm, and gave him a wave. He got up and walked to the footpath.

‘I see you made it home okay yesterday.’

The look in his eye told her he saw she was more than just a schoolgirl. Her heart pounded as she took in his smile. ‘Thanks to you.’

~

She looked up and down the rows of tombs and memorials; death was everywhere. Two months had passed since she saw Charlie for the first time since the Pig and Whistle. She’d taken on an investigation job to find out what he was up to behind his wife’s back. At their first orchestrated

encounter, there was an inkling she knew him from somewhere. Then one night after a meeting with his wife, Glenda, she went to bed with thoughts swirling in her head.

Her sleep was disrupted, dreams and flashbacks making her toss and turn. In that troubled hour before the dawn, memories rushed back like they’d been stored in a dam waiting for the flood gates to open. She startled herself awake with recollections as clear as a crystal vase in a Double Bay penthouse.

A cold sweat formed on her brow as it dawned on her. It was him, the man who came to her rescue all those years ago! And now she was getting paid to gather dirt on him. She had to make a decision. Would she tell Glenda and walk away from the job knowing how hard it was going to be to remain impartial, or would she hold the secret close to her chest and get on with it.

She’d already discovered what a scoundrel he’d become, possibly the worst case she’d ever worked on. That included church elders, a boy scout leader of dubious reputation, and a cross-dressing member of parliament who insisted his child’s babysitter call him Bubba while she spooned jelly into his mouth.

But holding the secret won out and in the previous weeks of the investigation, there were moments that rekindled the spark she’d felt for him when she was a teenager. Now he was dead.

She opened the paper cemetery map she held, soaking wet and tearing into pieces, and looked up to a street sign that indicated rows A – D to the left. She walked another forty metres, stopping at the first of the Sparrowford plots, that of Charles Sparrowford Senior, and read the epitaph. Embrace the moment.

The next plot belonged to Louise Sparrowford, wife of Charles and loving mother of Henry and Charles Junior. The grey sky was getting darker, and she could see headlights on cars moving along the street outside the cemetery. She took a few more steps, drips from her hair trickling down her face while she shone the light from her phone on the next headstone.

Charles Sparrowford Junior

Born 11th July 1979.

Died 13th September 2025

CHARLIE - (Slang) (noun) A promiscuous adult male. Eg: ‘Errol Flynn was a real Charlie.’

Calista closed her eyes and shook her head. Oh Glenda, really? She looked over one shoulder and then the other. Alone now in the twilight, she lifted her dress past her knees and pulled down her panties, standing on one leg and then the other to remove them. She bent down to the headstone, kissed two fingers and touched them onto Charlie’s name before laying her panties on the plot.

She shivered as the rain soaked through to her skin and she stood to walk back to the car, her steps getting quicker until she broke into a trot. There was more to this job, she decided, and it would take time.

to be continued…