Gone by Midnight

by Candice Fox

  I found Clark by the hotel doors, handing out the evening run sheet while he talked on a phone sandwiched between his ear and shoulder. When he’d finished his call I stood with him, cops walking between us, grabbing papers on the run.

  ‘What’s next?’ I asked him. ‘If you give me some locations, Amanda and I will pick one of the canvasses and join in.’

  I knew that all over Cairns and the surrounds there would be officers knocking on doors, showing Richie’s picture and interviewing residents. In the fields and swamps there would be State Emergency Service volunteers assisting with the land search, looking for clues in line-by-line formations. I couldn’t go home and not participate, not when I knew Richie’s clock was still ticking. Clark seemed to sense my hunger.

  ‘You’re not going to like this –’ he held a hand up, placating ‘– but I don’t want either of you in the line-by-lines.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t have my officers distracted by the two of you during the physical searches. You know the effect you both have on a group of police officers. Everybody gets upset. Everybody stares. I want my teams scouring for the tiniest sign of the kid, and you – and particularly Amanda – will disrupt that.’

  ‘That’s bullshit, Clark. Let me join and Amanda can go home.’

  ‘Conkaffey, I want you to rest up. This might be a sprint, but it might be a marathon. I don’t want to –’

  ‘Clark –’

  ‘– to burn everybody out on day one.’ Clark raised his voice. ‘You’ve got your assignments. Go home.’

  I drove home begrudgingly at five o’clock, slowing along the bridges where roadblocks were searching cars, while men in orange uniforms poked and prodded the muddy riverbanks. A speedboat cut laps through the water with a rifleman keeping an eye for crocs, whipping the reeds along the banks with brown foam. I knew that the council croc hunters who dispatched nuisance animals throughout the region would be bracing for a catch that seemed a little too heavy over the next few days, no one wanting to find Richie in the belly of a beast. Val and her colleagues were probably doing the same; waiting with dread for the phone call that said a child’s body was being brought in for an autopsy.

  I found Lillian and Val on the porch, sitting together and watching the sheet lightning over the mountains on the other side of the lake. Squishbird, one of my more tame geese, was sitting at Lillian’s side, enjoying gentle strokes down her feathered neck and the firm, flat feathers of her wings. I stood at the edge of the porch for a while and watched the scene, which could have been shared between a grandmother and grandchild. When they turned and discovered my presence, I saw that Lillian’s hair was prickled with sweat.

  ‘You hot, Boo-love?’ I asked when she came into my arms.

  ‘She’s a Sydney girl all right.’ Val glanced at the mountains, plucking at her cotton shirt. ‘We need this weather to break and give us some relief.’

  I peeled off Lillian’s dress and shoes and lifted her down from the porch, ducking under the house where I kept a hose and multi-stream sprinkler. Lillian grinned as she recognised my purpose and went to the middle of the yard, giggling and dancing around before I’d even got the water running. I sat with Val and watched her prancing in her underwear, the geese rising and waddling excitedly into the spray with her, their wings flapping. Even Celine, who doesn’t like a bath at the best of times, followed Lillian around, snapping her jaws at the water when it rotated towards her.

  Squishbird stayed with Val and me. I patted the bird, a heavy sense of dread in the pit of my stomach over the missing member of their party, Peeper. I had not heard anything from Dr Laney Bass throughout the day, but had never lost the worry over the bird from the moment I dropped her off that morning.

  ‘Long day, huh?’ Val said.

  ‘We didn’t find the kid.’ I rubbed my eyes. ‘We’re running out of time. The mother’s acting weird. The father arrives tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning?’ Val looked at me. ‘If it was my kid I’d be here now. He could have been here on a plane in a few hours!’

  ‘He told investigators he had to get a few things organised.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘I don’t know. You never know with these sorts of things. People go into denial. Get paralysed by fear. I don’t know what the relationship between him and the kid is. I’ll interview him tomorrow and meet with Sara again, and then I’ve got a list of people of interest to go see.’

  We watched the lightning. The storm was so far off, no sound of thunder reached us.

  ‘It’s going to absolutely smash down tonight,’ Val said, pulling a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her shirt. ‘I hope that boy isn’t out there somewhere in it.’

  We watched my daughter laughing and twirling in the sprinkler spray, queen of a menagerie of wet animals, her arms thrust out and a head of dripping hair hung back with glee. I took no comfort in knowing there was one child in the world that was safe and happy.

  Amanda wasn’t welcome at the bikie camp in the swamps. The men who frequented the spot made that very clear from the first time she arrived, seemingly without any purpose, climbing cheerfully from the airboat she had parked on the small, grey strip of beach. She’d visited before with Ted Conkaffey, looking for leads on a missing author, and that was fair enough. But then she started coming and just hanging around. The first time, the bearded, pot-bellied, greying ex-gangsters had shouted and sworn at her until she left. She’d been back a few days later, standing at the edge of the gathering around a fire pit, laughing along to one of their drunken stories.

  Their boss, Llewellyn Bruce, had taken her aside once, let her follow him into the forest where they kept their garbage disposal unit. The tall, tattooed, bald-headed thug and the small, tattooed, twitchy investigator had stood and watched the occasional bubble rising from the stinking creek, the only indicators of the three-seater-couch-sized crocodile hidden just below the surface. No one wanted Amanda there, Bruce said. Her constant blathering was annoying, and she wasn’t even interesting to look at, having a teenage boy’s body and the scrappy hair of an unwashed dog. No tits, an arse like two eggs in a hanky. He had nothing against her, but she needed to rack off. The woman seemed to be listening, nodding occasionally while she poked at crabholes in the clay with a stick.

  She hadn’t, in fact, been listening. She kept coming. Over time the hurtful shouting and snarling when Amanda appeared settled to a low simmer, rising to comedic peaks only now and then. Amanda was like herpes, someone exclaimed one day. Every time you think she’s gone for good, there she is again.

  The bikies had almost forgotten all about her when one day, as a few of them were lined up pissing in the creek, she suddenly perked up, her voice foreign and arresting, like birdsong on a construction site.

  ‘What’s that?’ she’d asked, pointing into the creek.

  The men had looked. The creek was lower than usual, and out of its surface poked one sludge-covered handlebar they all recognised. The standard practice was to ignore Amanda’s questions, hoping sustained silence might one day drive her off. But, for some reason, someone had answered her.

  ‘It’s a German World War Two bike,’ Rocko said.

  ‘A BMW R75?’ Amanda had asked. The men glanced at each other. ‘What’s it doing in there?’

  The bike had gone into the creek with its owner, a prison snitch dispatched to the reptilian garbage disposal about a year earlier.

  ‘I want it,’ was all she’d said.

  She’d hopped off the rock she had been sitting on and waded into the water.

  There was no hesitation. No consensus made. The men who hated Amanda, who told her so daily, ran into the water after her, shouting and waving their arms. Someone, Poundy maybe, sprinted back to the camp, yelling for help. The men had grabbed Amanda just as she reached the bike, their faces twisted with terror, looking out all the time for the giant beast they knew was in the water somewhere with them. It had taken three of them to pe
el the wet, struggling woman from the bike. She’d got it maybe a couple of centimetres up, the edge of the cracked side mirror showing briefly above the muddy surface before they carried her out of the creek.

  In the end, there was no convincing her that the bike was irretrievable. That a sludge-covered, submerged heap of scrap metal was not worth risking their lives for. Every time they let Amanda go, she headed back into the creek.

  They’d winched the mud- and reed-covered bike out of the water, six men hauling it up with ropes thrown over a tree limb while a team of four others distracted the croc well down the creek with raw chicken parts thrown into the shallows. The bike had maintained its shape, but the exposed mechanical innards were twisted with reeds and roots, and the tyres were heavy with water.

  The first day, she’d simply sat in the dirt by the ruined bike and looked at it, like a kid on Christmas morning sitting under the tree and marvelling at the brightly wrapped presents. She’d turned up the next day with a small flamingo-pink toolbox, from which she extracted a folding knife. She’d begun cutting away the roots and reeds from the bike, piling them methodically at her side. The men had watched from the corners of their eyes, surly and muttering over the rims of their beer bottles. The bike wouldn’t go, even if she cleaned it up. She’d get down into the depths of the engine and find the gears rusted and the oil tank full of clay. The whole electrical system would have to be replaced, and that’s if she ever got the thing apart. The men had started betting on when the tattooed woman would give up her ridiculous mission.

  The days passed, and Amanda carried on and on, her bare, colourful shoulders working in the sun. After a few weeks, the men started to notice the shape of the bike changing. She’d dragged a plastic tub from behind one of the sheds, and was slowly filling it with removed parts. Sometimes they looked over and found her sitting in the shadows beyond the fireplace, scraping rust from some part or another with a wire brush.

  She got stuck when she couldn’t separate the fuel tank from the body of the bike. And then suddenly, without explanation, she’d done it. Accusations worked their way around the camp. Someone had helped Amanda with the bike. An unspoken line had been breached, and everyone wanted to know who had aligned themselves with the camp interloper. The culprit didn’t identify himself. Amanda had nothing to say about it.

  Someone helped Amanda separate the unsalvageable parts of the bike from those that could be repaired. Somehow she knew she needed new spark plugs, and that the muffler needed to be patched. Now and then a man would go over to Amanda, backing discreetly away from the gathering as though to take a stroll along the shore. They would point to parts of the bike with their boot or murmur things out of the side of their mouth to her as she worked, their eyes locked on the distant horizon and face half-hidden behind their beer bottle. But no one admitted to helping Amanda. To do so would have been treason.

  Only Amanda herself knew exactly who had helped, and how much. She’d listened silently to Chooko’s whispered recommendations about electrics and ordering the right tyres for the bike, and she’d caught Poundy fixing a strut she’d put on backwards while all the other men were down at the creek. It had been Rocko who’d taken her out into the depths of the rainforest early one morning while most of the crew were sleeping, patiently teaching her how to kick off on an old, muddy dirt bike.

  Richie Farrow had been missing twenty-one hours when Amanda arrived at the camp that night. She hefted her backpack onto her shoulder, her thoughts full of dark wonderings about the boy, and followed the sound of men’s laughter up from the beach towards the camp. The fire was burning high, Jimbo feeding wood into the battered washing machine barrel while bright embers swirled around his weathered face. She nodded at him as she went to the table, where the men were gathered around Llewellyn Bruce. The boss was leaning back in his plastic lawn chair, his huge boots on the table. He blew a smoke ring and rubbed his round belly when he saw Amanda.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he complained. ‘The bitch is back.’

  ‘You again!’ Kidneys wailed. ‘What are you doing here? I thought I told you to go fuck yourself.’

  Amanda had been about to launch into her request when she noticed that her bike, which usually sat on its blocks at the back of the half-erected shed the men lounged in, had disappeared.

  ‘Where’s my bike?’ she asked.

  ‘We threw it back in the creek.’ Bruce pointed with his beer bottle towards the tree line. ‘I ordered a whole-camp clean-up. I’ve tripped over that hunk of junk too many times. Nearly took my toenail off, it did.’

  ‘You didn’t throw it in the creek.’ Amanda put her hands on her hips, rolled her eyes. ‘You’re a pack of arseholes, but you’re not that bad.’

  ‘Serious. We did.’

  ‘God’s honest truth. I hurled it in myself.’

  ‘We took it apart first,’ Grimsy laughed. ‘Just to be pricks.’

  Amanda huffed and went down to the creek.

  The bike was standing off to the side of the bare earth patch where the men usually stood to piss, leaning against a tree. Amanda didn’t recognise the machine at first, impossibly higher and somehow stronger looking now that it had tyres. The men had not only added the tyres she’d ordered, but they’d fully assembled the parts she hadn’t got to yet, wired the electrics and replaced the cracked side mirrors. She ran her hands over the newly polished chrome parts, her shaking fingers rising up over the glossy black crocodile-hide seat. She almost couldn’t look at the fuel tank, which had been airbrushed with a scaly design. The gloss finish squeaked as she traced the immaculate reptilian scales, the searing white and yellow lettering that seemed to glow from the side of the metal.

  ‘Swamp Monster,’ she read, her voice a quivering whisper.

  When she rolled the bike up the path towards the camp, leading a pack of excited dogs, the men at the table hardly looked at her. Rocko was telling his story about finding his ex-wife in their bed with another man, his hands gripped around the bottom of an imaginary two-by-four.

  ‘I can’t believe you did this,’ Amanda said. The men glanced at her, practised boredom, then at the bike in her hands.

  ‘The fuck are you talking about? We didn’t do that.’

  ‘I’ve never seen that bike in me life.’

  She swung a leg over it and started the bike, revving the engine and grinning as the sound of it echoed around the trees.

  ‘Sounds like shit.’ Llewellyn Bruce locked eyes with Amanda as she revved the bike, a silent understanding passing between the two. She took the battered helmet someone tossed to her, the smile never leaving her face as she pulled it on.

  I didn’t end up needing to dive into the depths of the internet for precious nuggets of parental wisdom on getting my child to sleep. We ate the spaghetti bolognaise Val had left in the fridge for us, and then we spent the evening in her room. I lay on the rug with a pillow under my head and watched as she pulled out three drawers of neatly folded clothes and proceeded to try every single item on, twisting and dancing in the mirror, singing songs I didn’t recognise, hurling the clothes in a pile when she was done with them. She came over occasionally to show me patterns or bows on the garments like I hadn’t seen them before, and each time I nodded and joined in her enthusiastic exclamations. She kept thrusting her arms up and asking ‘Whaddaya think?’, which sounded like something she’d picked up from an American cartoon, and now and then she judged her own image as the prettiest or bestest ‘in all the town’.

  In time she went to the bed wearing a tutu and sequined top and started going through the books, making stacks around herself, and before I’d got back from fixing myself a drink she was asleep. It was 7 pm.

  Kelly texted later that night, wanting her first phone call with Lillian, but I texted back a picture of our sleeping child. When she didn’t answer, I called.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ she said. I could hear lorikeets in the background of her call, a glassy tinkling in the
falling night.

  ‘I’m looking at Lill’s bag,’ I whispered, walking from the girl’s darkened bedroom with the bag in my hand. ‘It says Lillian Hill.’

  Kelly sighed. ‘I meant to talk to you about that. But it was so chaotic there, and with Jett hanging around, I didn’t want to embarrass you.’ She took a deep breath, paused like an actor trying to remember her lines. ‘I want to change Lillian’s name back to my maiden name.’

  I stopped in the hallway. I’d known this was coming when I saw the name on the tiny backpack. But it still hit me like a hand around my throat, arresting my words.

  ‘It’s safer for her,’ Kelly said. ‘Conkaffey is a very unusual name.’

  ‘We picked Lillian because it went with Conkaffey,’ I said, knowing it was useless. ‘Lillian doesn’t go with Hill. The kids will call her Lillian Hillian.’

  ‘That’s … not a major concern for me, Ted, I’ve got to be honest.’

  ‘Do me a favour, will you?’ I said. ‘Leave her middle name as Emma, for my mother. Don’t change it to Gillian or anything.’

  ‘Now you’re just being juvenile.’

  ‘I know I am.’

  ‘I’ll send you the paperwork,’ Kelly said, and hung up, a style of disconnection she’d performed many times with me. I went into the kitchen and poured myself another drink.