Gone by Midnight

by Candice Fox

  ‘I told your offsider,’ Clark seethed, ‘that I didn’t want to see your fucking face during this investigation. The mother requested Conkaffey, not you.’

  ‘Well, that’s just too bad, Clarkles, because we’re a two-for-one deal.’ Amanda slapped my chest, somehow knowing without looking at me that I was standing behind her. ‘I know you’re upset about Pip, but –’

  ‘I’m not upset about Detective Sweeney.’ Clark managed to keep his voice under control to get the words out. ‘I’ve mourned the bright, brilliant, dedicated officer you recklessly endangered by leaping into a lethal situation with your head in the clouds, the way you do everywhere you go. My concern now is that you’re going to put another of my officers in jeopardy, or prevent one of them from finding the missing child with your mindless, selfish … twittery!’

  Clark spat the last word after grasping around for it, running out of breath, his face the colour of an overripe peach. Amanda’s eyes slid to me, full of humour, and I gave her the darkest look I could. She took a resigned breath.

  ‘Clark, I’m not leaving.’ She threw her hands up. ‘And you’re not arresting me, either. You’ve already falsely arrested one guy this morning.’ She slapped me again. ‘And the press would only need to catch a whiff of that for you to have a lawsuit on your hands. Ted has proven how skilled he is at the old litigation-ruination situation. You don’t want me to try my hand at it too. Now give me the run sheet.’

  The chief slid a sheet from his paperwork and handed it to me. He didn’t look at Amanda as he walked away. I felt numb and guilty, like a kid leaving the principal’s office after a good roasting.

  ‘Can you maybe leave my pending legal situation out of further discussions we have with people in this hotel?’ I asked. ‘Everyone hates us enough.’

  A few months ago I had agreed to do an interview with the country’s leading current affairs program, and instead of helping me clear my name the producers had hit me with a second, unfounded accusation that was retracted at the last minute. I was suing, and my detractors were not impressed.

  ‘Ted.’ Amanda turned to me. ‘The next man who tells me what to do around here is going to get his nads kicked so hard he’s going to taste them at the back of his throat.’ She tapped me gently on the shoulder with her index finger. ‘Don’t let that be you.’

  We found Sara Farrow standing by the windows inside one of the first-floor suites, her hands clasped around the back of her neck. The room had been given to Sara that morning while her original room was searched, fingerprinted and photographed. She was exactly as I’d seen her pictured in the happy snaps from the day before; round-cheeked and sandy-haired, the curls she’d passed on to her missing son pulled up on the top of her head. She had indeed been badly sunburned yesterday, hit worst on the chest and the back of her hands, where people forget to apply sunscreen. She turned towards us and smiled at me like she’d been waiting a long time and felt relief at my appearance.

  The truth was I didn’t want to be sat in a room where Richie Farrow clearly wasn’t, interviewing his mother, standing still while the rest of the world searched for the boy. There was a painful hunger in my chest to search the hotel myself, to go room to room looking under beds and in cupboards, calling his name. I wanted to walk or drive the streets, go shop to shop and hotel to hotel until I found him. He must surely be nearby. But I couldn’t follow that instinct. Other people were doing it, or had done it already, and the investigation needed planning and patience rather than instinct and bravado right now.

  I noticed immediately that Sarah Farrow hadn’t been crying. In fact, she’d applied mascara that morning and it was still in place, and her clothes looked fresh.

  ‘Ms Farrow, I’m so sorry that Richie is missing,’ I said after the initial introductions. ‘I’m sure he’s going to turn up and that he’s going to be fine. He seems like a clever little guy.’

  ‘He is clever,’ she said, sitting on the end of the bed, wringing her hands. ‘He’s funny, too. I’ve never laughed as hard as I have the past couple of days hanging out with him. His father and I are in talks about custody at the moment. He spent the first weeks of the school holidays with him in Melbourne.’

  Amanda had wandered into the little kitchenette of the hotel suite and pried open the minibar fridge. She was rustling through the snacks, clattering tiny liquor bottles together, but I knew she was listening. Her eyebrows had jumped at the mention of a custody battle.

  ‘I’m really glad you’re here,’ Sara said as I sat down in an armchair near her. ‘I know all about you. I’m a big fan of the podcast. I know you’re innocent, Ted.’

  Innocent Ted was a globally successful podcast about my case, run by a journalist I’d met just after my release from prison. The podcast had presented evidence of my innocence, and had a following of millions. It was still weird to hear someone talk about being a ‘fan’ of the story of the worst years of my life.

  ‘I know I’m going to be accused of this,’ Sara said.

  Amanda straightened abruptly, almost hitting her head on the kitchenette counter. She had a mouth full of Snickers, the half-eaten bar in her hand.

  ‘Well that was a weird thing to say!’ she laughed.

  ‘That …’ I struggled, looking out the windows at the day beyond. ‘That actually was rather a weird thing to say, Ms Farrow. Why do you feel like you’re going to be accused of your son’s disappearance?’

  ‘Because I was the last one to see him. My ex-husband and I are fighting over him. He’s gone. He’s gone.’ She leaned forward, fixed her eyes on mine. ‘I must have been questioned by twenty different police officers this morning, and every time a new one comes to speak to me they get more and more cranky.’

  ‘There’s nothing to suggest your son has met with foul play,’ I said. ‘They’re still conducting searches of the hotel. Richie could be hiding somewhere. He could be stuck in … in a forgotten room, or …’

  ‘This is not him.’ Sara shook her head, clasped her hands on her neck again like she was trying to wring tension from the muscles. ‘He doesn’t do this. He’s a sensible kid. Something’s happened, and I know that you know what it’s like to have everyone turning and looking at you for answers, Ted.’

  I let her words linger in the air for some time, hoping, perhaps, for help from Amanda. But I’ve always known Amanda to be happy to let people dig their own graves with their words, my partner totally immune to the discomfort of long silences. I glanced at the air conditioner, knowing it was probably not operating with the door to the hall open.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Sara said. She drew a long breath. ‘This isn’t the first time I’ve had dealings with the police about my kids.’

  She told me her story. Eleven years earlier, Sara and her husband Henry had become the parents of a little girl, Anya, born three years before Richie. Their marriage had been thriving, and they’d just purchased their first home in Meredith, a featureless redbrick place with a bare-dirt yard west of Melbourne. Four months after the baby was born, tragedy struck. Sara had gone to check on the infant after she hadn’t woken as usual in the early hours, and found the child turned on her side, blue in the face, lifeless. When paramedics arrived the parents were absolutely beside themselves; Sara hugging herself and rocking on the back porch, Henry pacing and weeping in the front yard.

  ‘It looked like sudden infant death syndrome,’ she said. ‘But the medical examiner found pillow fibres in Anya’s lungs.’

  A hot, heavy urge to leave the room had been gradually pressing on my body since Sara had begun speaking. The door was open, uniformed and plain-clothes officers walking by now and then, talking about ventilation ducts and utility rooms. I went to the door and took a few breaths, but the air was no fresher there.

  ‘Did the police charge you with anything?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ Sara sighed. ‘But they questioned us. I mean they really leaned hard, and it wasn’t just them doing it. Our friends and families … People look a
t you differently. Or maybe they don’t and you just think they do. I don’t know.’

  Sara lifted her eyes to me.

  ‘That’s why I wanted you,’ she said. ‘You understand what it’s like. And if the police come after me, that’s fine. I get it. But while they’re wasting time, I need someone out there looking for my child. You can tell me what the police are doing, if they’re taking this seriously or not. You can keep me informed if there are any leads.’

  I pulled at the collar of my shirt. The discomfort infecting my being was coming from Sara, from the logical, cold way she was detailing her reasons for calling me in. I glanced at Amanda, and she gave a little bow and put her hand out like an usher showing the way to a theatre seat. After you, she was saying. We were both thinking the same thing, but she was letting me lead. I closed the door to the room.

  ‘Sara,’ I said. ‘I want you to listen to me very carefully.’

  ‘Okay.’ She straightened, a kid on the first day of class.

  ‘You are going to fall under suspicion of whatever has occurred here because you’re doing everything you can to make that happen.’

  She looked at Amanda, who was picking at the seal of a piccolo bottle of champagne. Amanda nodded her agreement, made a rueful click sound with her teeth.

  ‘You’re not crying enough,’ I told Sara. ‘You’re thinking five steps ahead of the investigation, and you’re not telling the police everything. You’re covering your arse. It’s going to be the little things that undo you. You’ve had enough presence of mind in the nine hours since your child had been missing to apply make-up and change your clothes. You’ve put your watch on your wrist. Do you have an appointment you need to get to?’

  Sara glanced down at her watch, guiltily began undoing the band.

  ‘I think you should tell the police about Anya,’ I said. ‘Right now. Before they find out themselves.’

  ‘But it’s not relevant,’ she protested, looking to Amanda for help. ‘It’s not –’

  ‘Full disclosure,’ I said. ‘It’ll … help.’

  As I spoke, my words faltered. Full disclosure hadn’t helped me at all in my case. The police had dug deep into my life, and I’d hidden nothing. Full disclosure, an all-access pass to my intimate self, had left me burning under the gaze of the public as my porn DVDs were examined in the courtroom. They hadn’t been at all relevant. I decided to stop pressuring Sara about her past.

  ‘I’m not trying to be cruel,’ I offered.

  ‘He’s not a cruel guy,’ Amanda confirmed, popping her champagne. ‘He has geese.’

  ‘Just think about telling the police about Anya. And while you’re doing that, focus now on how you’re presenting yourself. You brought me in because I know what it’s like to be falsely accused,’ I said. ‘Well, I know from experience that those twenty cops you spoke to this morning have all been analysing your behaviour. And, quite frankly, you’re not distressed enough.’

  ‘You think I’m not distressed?’ Sara’s eyebrows knitted. She looked at the horizon through the window for a long time, a rich blue streak beyond the crowded promenade. ‘I’m numb. I can barely feel my body. I’m … I’m doing everything I can think of!’

  ‘I mean you’re not classically distressed,’ I said. ‘You’re not exhibiting behaviour people associate with distress. You should be hysterical. People expect you to be hysterical. I expected you to be hysterical.’

  Sara nodded, looking at her hands. What I was saying hurt. I understood that. But the truth was that she was giving off all the signs of someone who didn’t care that her son was missing. I didn’t want the police to go after Sara because of her behaviour. If they wrongly developed tunnel vision on her, and Richie had indeed been kidnapped, it might make finding his abductor impossible. It was the same thing that had happened in my case. While I’d been locked up, Claire’s attacker had been out there, free to reoffend, free perhaps to do what he had tried to do to Claire, and take a young life.

  When I had been arrested, the analysis of my behaviour had begun. I had, initially, been hysterical. I’d been locked up in my own police station and given no information about why I’d fallen under suspicion and what I could do to counteract the evidence against me. I’d not been allowed to call my wife, to be the one to break it to Kelly that our lives had now changed forever. Twelve hours in, I had succeeded in getting the attention of an officer passing by the interrogation room I was in and I had asked him to bring me something to eat.

  The officer had walked off, disgusted.

  I was innocent. Terrified, confused, barely able to keep my wits about me. But I was also hungry. The classic notion is that food is the last thing on a person’s mind in their darkest hour, but it wasn’t my darkest hour. It was my twelfth darkest hour, and counting. The ‘he asked for food’ story had popped up a few times over the course of my incarceration, trial and release. People wanted to know – had I really asked for food after my accusation? How could I eat at a time like that? Was I that fucking callous?

  ‘You said in your initial interviews that you dropped him at the room with the other boys and everything seemed fine. That was room …’ I shuffled the pages of the run sheet. ‘Room 608.’

  ‘The Sampsons’ room.’ Sara nodded. ‘Same as the night before. The boys were sitting on the floor in front of the laptop playing a marshmallow game. I told them not to be so gross. They were laughing and coughing up the marshmallows. Richie jumped right in. He didn’t even say goodbye. I suppose he thought he didn’t need to.’

  Sara put her face in her hands and sat there, unmoving, her nails gripping the curls at her hairline. I wanted to press further, to hear for myself the answers to the standard questions asked in a kidnap situation. Had Richie said anything weird that day, or the two other times she saw him that night? Had Sara seen anyone odd hanging around the room, the hall, the restaurant? Had she received any phone calls or messages that might suggest someone was going to take Richie? From her ex-husband, perhaps? But I felt like I had already pushed Sara Farrow too hard by telling her she was digging her own grave with her behaviour.

  Amanda and I made our excuses, and left the missing child’s mother alone in her room.

  The man with the keys needed to get back there. Really make sure there was nothing he could do to fix things. Every cell in his body knew that there wasn’t, that the catalyst for his collapse had happened and was over and there’d be no going back now. Still, he had to try. If the boy couldn’t be saved, perhaps he could. All his life, he’d let circumstances dictate his actions. All those years blowing like a leaf in the wind, following whatever voices invited him, from one town to the next. Highway by highway and truck stop by truck stop, he’d been a slave to fate. The winding, effortless path had taken him to some terrible places, darkness seeming to pull him ever onward.

  Once, he’d awakened at dawn in a crack house outside Perth to find himself the only person there still alive. A bad batch at a party he’d slept through completely, men and women flopped on couches and mattresses on the floor like they’d fallen from the sky. He’d taken his backpack and left them there, calling the police from a payphone on the highway. He’d wondered for years if he’d checked every pulse. Every room.

  He’d got tangled up with some standover men in Sydney and had stood in the corner of a caravan, his fist in his mouth, while his men clipped the toes off a gambler with a pair of pruning shears.

  He’d spent his life tumbling from one pit to the next, never building a foundation, never believing he deserved one.

  But things had changed.

  He didn’t know how completely until now. He was looking at the cracks. He couldn’t lose it all now. Please, God, he thought, don’t let it happen again. Don’t let me lose it all again.

  He stood outside the White Caps Hotel staff meeting, playing with the keys on his belt, watching the circus parade of worried-looking workers exit the conference room. There were animals of every species here; chefs in their chequered trousers
and sauce-splattered hats, housekeeping staff in their black dresses, highly groomed receptionists in their red blazers, all of their faces mournful, worried. He met eyes with as many of them as he could as they passed, wanting them to remember him standing there. Yes, he had attended the meeting, blended in with everyone else. Like the rest of the hotel staff, he didn’t know anything. He was just as hopeful as they were that the boy would be found safe.

  He went to the elevators now, pulling his cap low, and tugged his swipe card from the tether on his belt. He entered the lift, two officers in patrol uniform getting in with him, both of them on their phones. The lift only went up one floor before the doors opened. The two cops got out, and one blocked the door before it could close.

  ‘Whoa,’ the cop said. ‘Where are you going, maintenance man?’

  ‘Oh, I …’ The man with the keys tried to swallow, coughed instead. ‘I’ve got to do my rounds. I was just –’

  ‘Nope.’ The cop shook his head. ‘All hotel staff are to be processed through the lobby, and then you’re out of here. The building is in lockdown until further notice. Police and approved persons only. We don’t know where’s a crime scene and where’s not.’

  The cop got back into the lift with him. The maintenance man played with his belt, his mind racing, and squeezed the ragged edges of the keys so hard they dug into his fingertips.

  ‘Don’t suppose you saw the boy, did you?’ the officer asked suddenly as the doors opened again on the foyer. The maintenance man thought about saying something then. He could feel the words rising up through his chest, spiky at their edges, cutting, the way they had when he’d called the police about the crack house full of bodies. The words stung behind his lips the way they had when he’d walked out on his father the last time, when he’d walked into the hotel for the first time, holding his résumé against his chest so they wouldn’t see his hands were shaking.