Gone by Midnight

by Candice Fox

  ‘Even if you didn’t suffer an aching, unrequited desire to like me, you need me,’ Amanda continued. ‘You need my unparalleled powers of crime-solving.’

  ‘You sound like you think you’re Batman or something.’

  ‘Well, I have just as much mystique, but my exceptional powers of observation are better than his,’ Amanda said. ‘You can have all the expensive tech in the world but that doesn’t make you a genius. You’ve gotta be born with that shit.’

  ‘Your exceptional powers of observation?’ Clark drew a long breath and let it out slow.

  ‘Yeah,’ Amanda smiled. ‘Like, uh …’

  She looked around her, at the bartender and the people she could see through the doors to the street. As she was watching, Detective Ng and another officer walked in and took a booth by the windows.

  ‘Like I bet you didn’t spot that Detective Ng is on the take,’ Amanda said.

  ‘What?’ Clark snapped.

  ‘Yeah, look.’ Amanda slid closer to the chief, jutting her chin at the two officers by the window. ‘Detective Ng over there, he heads up your drug investigations, right?’

  ‘And?’ Clark sighed.

  ‘The toe of his left shoe is glued,’ Amanda said. ‘Look closely. You can see the brown glue stains. Two-part epoxy. Tough stuff.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So look at the watch.’

  ‘What about it?’ Clark squinted. Ng felt himself being studied, and Amanda and Clark turned on their chairs to face the bar.

  ‘That’s a TAG Heuer Carrera Calibre watch in grey phantom titanium,’ Amanda said. ‘He’s got it with the black titanium carbide-coated folding safety clasp.’

  Clark glanced at his own plastic sports watch, shrugged angrily. ‘Again, so what?’

  ‘What’s a guy who glues his shoes doing with an eight-thousand-dollar watch? Sounds like someone without a lot of money who splashed out suddenly for something obscenely expensive, something so expensive it’s not in keeping with the rest of his life. Sudden big purchases come from sudden big money.’

  ‘It could be a fake.’ Clark tugged his shirt uncomfortably down from his throat. ‘It could be any kind of watch. What do you know? You’re not a jeweller.’

  ‘No, but I’m a private investigator,’ Amanda said. ‘A good part of my job is spent trying to track down priceless heirlooms and obscenely expensive jewellery ripped off from rich houses in Holloways Beach that the robbery squad is too busy to chase up. I can spot a Tiffany engagement ring from a mile away. That watch stands out like dog’s balls.’

  Clark wrung his fingers, shrugged. ‘It could be a gift. He could have got a loan.’

  ‘All right, well, you go check the evidence room records and tell me whether he got a loan or not.’ Amanda sniffed, nonchalant.

  ‘You’re a good investigator,’ Clark said. ‘I never said you weren’t.’

  ‘So why don’t you just give me one more chance?’ Amanda said. ‘That’s easy enough, isn’t it? People who give second chances are good people. Sure, this is maybe more like my one hundred and twelfth chance. But it’ll be my last one. What do you think?’

  Clark said nothing. Amanda slapped the bar top.

  ‘It’s settled then,’ she said. ‘Now, while we’re basking in the warm, loving glow of our newly formed truce: I’m having a problem with one of your officers. We need to talk about it.’

  I’m walking through Cairns at night. The streets are lit but impossibly empty, bars on the main street flashing soundless football games across deserted tables, half-drunk beers going stale in the wind. It’s so hot that condensation is gathering on the glass of the traffic lights, directing no one. As I reach the front steps of the White Caps Hotel, the automatic doors open and Richie Farrow walks out.

  He looks at me, turns, and walks towards the water. I follow him across the street, through the little water park where the fountains are spraying the tiles and the air is strangely empty of children’s squeals. He keeps looking over his shoulder at me, smiling that overexcited, hyperactive smile I’d seen in the video his father took of the boy leaping from couch to couch. The face is wrong. Maniacal, in contrast with his slow-moving limbs. There’s lightning out over the ocean. I know that Richie’s heading for the dark horizon slicing through the bone-yellow sky beneath the clouds, and I want to tell him to stop. That people are looking for him. He waits for me to catch up, and puts a hand on my arm.

  The real sensation of a hand on my arm dragged me out of the nightmare, and I sat up with a gasp. Lillian was shocked by the noise and stepped back, a tiny silhouette against the boarded-up windows. There was no telling what time it was. The air smelled of rain, and as I came into full consciousness I heard it hammering on the roof like gravel being poured on the tin.

  ‘Daddy.’ She gave a hitching sob. ‘I’m scared.’

  Thunder cracked outside, giving the little shadow in the night another jolt. She had come all the way from her bedroom to mine, through the pitch-black house in her bare feet, the crashing outside punctuating the sheets of rain and the barking of the frogs. I swept back the sheet and patted the mattress beside me.

  ‘Climb up here, little mouse,’ I told her.

  Her weight wasn’t enough to dent the mattress. She had to put a foot onto the frame and haul herself up with both hands. I held her to me and felt her trembling as blue lightning stuttered through the cracks around the boarded-up windows, her impossibly soft curls brushing against my lips.

  ‘Don’t you know I’d never let anything hurt you?’ I asked. She didn’t answer, just lay against the pillow by my side as the sobs receded. I thought how selfish it was that I felt so good having her with me. My tiny child needing me, and me being there, for once.

  We both lifted our heads at the sound of scratching. I heard the screen door slap closed, Celine having sensed somehow that a barrier had been crossed. Her nails trip-trapping on the wooden floors, and then a pause before her weight landing on the end of the mattress made the bedframe shake.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ I told Lillian. ‘Celine’s here.’

  ‘Uh-oh,’ she whispered.

  Celine did a couple of exploratory circles, then crashed into a heap, giving the bed another shake. Lillian and I put our heads down.

  I listened to my child’s sniffles as they turned to even, sleeping breaths, trying to remember a time I’d been so content.

  Midnight. Amanda curled on the couch before the television set on the ground floor of her office–apartment, three cats making a warm pile on top of her bare feet, another wedged into the gap between her back and the couch. It always amazed Amanda how physically tiring a case could be. Some cases weighed so heavily on her brain she felt almost as though her hair follicles were bruised, her eyes feeling like they were protruding from her skull. It seemed a million miles, the distance from the couch to the stairs, the stairs to her bed. The light flickered against her closed eyelids.

  A thump at the front door.

  The cats did nothing, of course. But Amanda rose and stared at the closed door, waiting for the thump to come again as it had the evening before. There was thunder in the distance. She got up and walked to the door, taking the enormous Smith and Wesson Model 29 she kept on a hook behind the hat stand as she reached for the doorknob.

  Another thump. Despite herself, Amanda squealed in fright, which really annoyed her, because she was not a squealer at the best of times. She growled and flung open the door on the empty night.

  No one.

  Across the empty street, lightning flickered between the buildings, illuminating a dark shape. Amanda walked there, her tough bare feet immune to the rocky asphalt at the edges of the road.

  ‘Fischer, you arsehole,’ she called as she approached. ‘Is that you?’

  The shape was only a stack of boxes draped with a burlap sack. Amanda tapped her gun against her side. She turned back towards her house in time to see the front door slam closed. As she watched, the light in the building clicked off.


  Amanda walked back across the street, raising the gun as she went and firing through the front door.

  The shot blasted a hole in the wood the size of an apple. Amanda looked through it, seeing only blackness, hearing only the mewling of frightened cats. She opened the door and flicked on the lights.

  No one.

  Amanda went to the back door of the house, a trail of curious felines following, the more cautious of her brood having scattered and crawled under various bits of furniture. Amanda found the back door open. She looked out into the rain, only noticing the photograph pinned to the inside of the door as she tried to pull it closed.

  It was a picture of Pip Sweeney. Both her eyes had been poked through with a pin.

  He watched the press conference twice. The first time it came on he was so restless, so pained, that he barely heard the words of the mother and father as they sat at the long conference room table. He wandered his little caravan, going to the tiny bedroom and standing over the bed, wanting to collapse into it, the voices of the parents reaching him in the dark but hardly breaking through his raging thoughts.

  All the channels were punctuated by reports about the boy. His face flashed on the screen over and over, golden-skinned and stretched taut with a nervous smile.

  For so long, the man with the keys had asked the world for nothing. He’d met a lot of people in his travels who expected things, who believed the world owed them something. He’d camped on corners in the Sydney CBD with men twice his age, sleeping in piles of blankets with warm, mixed-breed dogs, listening while his temporary friends talked of the government school teachers who hadn’t understood them, the child services officers who had ignored their pleas, the Centrelink workers who had cut off their payments and demanded answers they couldn’t give on forms they couldn’t read. The man with the keys hoped for food and warmth, but didn’t spit and swear at the businessmen and women who went by without filling his cup with change, and didn’t throw bottles at the police officers who moved him on. He didn’t call his father and ask for money, hadn’t had the man’s number in years.

  Living the rough life had been a kind of aching freedom for him. The first time he’d taken off, he’d been standing outside the school gates with a friend. Instead of going in, they’d walked off. Soon he was nicking off for another day of wandering, less than a week after the first time. Over the years he would nick off from jobs, from apartments when the rent got too much to pay. He walked out of a kitchen once where he’d been cooking eggs and bacon for elderly couples in a huge, apricot-painted breakfast room. He heard the eggs popping and sizzling on the grill as he closed the door behind himself and bolted.

  He’d fled from loving relationships, criminal partnerships, financial agreements. Once he gathered together ten thousand dollars from a drug-running job and rented an apartment. Filled it with furniture. Bought a DVD player, brand-new, and a big flat-screen set. He was gone a week later with nothing but a backpack.

  Cairns had been different. It wasn’t so much that he’d built his nest here. The first twig had been added when a new mate doing a deal for some coke in the bush behind the bus station had asked him if he wouldn’t mind staying in his caravan for a couple of weeks, keeping an eye on the place. The same mate had got him a cheap van across the park, view of the water and everything. The people in the caravan park had given him things – twigs for his nest in the form of an old television set and the occasional container of leftovers from a big cook-up. Before he knew it, the nest was sizeable, with a strong base to it, the sides climbing upwards on their own. Someone had mentioned a maintenance job going at the local flashy hotel – they knew he was good with his hands because they’d seen him pottering around his caravan, putting together pot plant stands and patching the broken window on the bathroom.

  He’d never wanted a nest. But now he had one. And then a little boy had come along out of nowhere, threatening to blow all his lovingly placed twigs right out of the tree. The man reached out to the coffee table before his recliner, the boy’s parents still on the screen. He picked up the Iron Man action figure and worked its stiff plastic arms.

  Amanda woke up proud of herself.

  All her life she’d followed her instincts when trouble showed its face in her little world. Sometimes that was exactly what was needed, and sometimes it made things worse. In school, it had often been the latter. One of her earliest memories was of a small boy flicking paint at her off the end of a heavy brush at the craft tables, her hair and neck and dress becoming speckled with red like a cartoon girl with chicken pox. She’d let the teacher wipe her clean while she decided what to do about the boy who’d attacked her, and then she’d gone over to him in the yard and grabbed him from behind and shoved him to the ground. She’d pulled down her pants, sat on him, and peed. Though Amanda remembered being very satisfied with her response, it had apparently been the wrong one. The boy had run into the staff room, his clothes soaked, screaming like he’d been bitten. Amanda had been sent home.

  Amanda rolled out of her bed with a smile that morning, knowing that her response to Joanna Fischer was the right one.

  She’d approached Chief Clark, Fischer’s superior officer, and plainly and calmly explained that she was being targeted. She hadn’t reacted violently when she’d discovered her bike tipped over, though every cell in her body had been telling her to pluck Fischer’s eyes out with her bare hands. Clark had not spoken to Fischer right away – last night’s fun and games proved that. And, sure, perhaps she shouldn’t have fired on Fischer through her door. That wasn’t good. She’d lost her temper. She didn’t like being startled and made to squeal. But she hadn’t hit Joanna, so Amanda decided to ignore that little slip-up.

  Her restraint was something to be commended.

  Amanda would get the bike fixed, avoid Fischer as much as she could, and let Clark handle it. A totally normal-person response. The man had seemed willing to assist, after all – though it was possible he’d been so agreeable because he just wanted Amanda to go away.

  She stretched, and the cats that slept on her bed rose and stretched too, spreading their paws on the Batman coverlet and yawning. She led a parade of four of them down the stairs to the office and kitchen, unplugging her phone from the little side table on the way. There were sixty-one missed calls from a private number. Fischer. Amanda rolled her eyes.

  As she went into the kitchen to make her coffee, her remaining seven cats rose up from their various sleeping spots all over the lower floor, the entire collection assembling for breakfast at her bare feet. She watched them, meowing and rubbing against her calves, while the kettle boiled, Six looking like she wanted to leap up onto the counter as she usually did, her eyes fixed on the steam rising over the sink.

  A gentle knocking at the door shattered Amanda’s morning reverie. Through the bullet hole in the wood Amanda could see a woman looking unsettled, trying to discern what had caused the hole. Amanda led her parade of felines there and pulled it open, her black silk negligee, printed with gold Batman symbols, fluttering in the warm morning breeze.

  The visitor was a sour-faced, elderly woman in grey trousers and a cotton top. She was holding a clipboard, a pen poised over the information there as the door swung open.

  ‘Amanda Pharrell?’ she asked, eyeing Amanda’s negligee and bare legs.

  ‘Good guess,’ Amanda said. ‘What’s the scoop, Professor McGonagall?’

  ‘I’m from Cairns Regional Council,’ the woman said. ‘The animal protection department.’

  I was expecting Amanda when the knock at the door came. Lillian was outside, sitting among the geese, picking pieces of grass and feeding them by hand while one of the geese tore impotently at the hem of her skirt. I’d slept well, despite waking once to find her lying diagonally across the bed with her feet under my chin, and once to find Celine nestled between us, snoring deeply. The little family I’d started when I fled to Cairns was growing, and though there was a low alarm sounding in the back of my mind that I could
lose everything again at any time, I felt happy. I thought about the previous evening as I did the dishes, Val sitting barefoot on the porch step, Lillian dancing in the sunset.

  Through the screen door, I spied the police cruiser over the red-haired officer’s shoulder before I really took notice of him. Smith looked at the car guiltily, fiddling with the front of his tactical belt as I walked down the hall.

  ‘You’ve got twenty seconds to get off my property,’ I said.

  ‘It’s just me,’ he said. ‘I’m alone.’

  ‘I don’t care if you’re alone or you’ve got the Queen of England and her royal guard waiting for a private meeting with me. I’m not here. Go away.’

  ‘It’s about Amanda,’ he said. He straightened to his full height as I reached the entryway, glancing warily at my hand resting on the wooden door as though he expected the door to be slammed in his face. He was silent while I decided what I was going to do, his front teeth resting on his bottom lip like they couldn’t all fit in his mouth at the same time, a patient rabbit waiting to be eaten or set free.

  I opened the screen door and showed him in, sat at my kitchen table and didn’t invite him to join me. He took his cap off, and I saw for the first time that his head was shaved almost to the white scalp on the sides, only a fine dusting of orange hair remaining. On the top of his head a cap of curls remained; thick ringlets as round as my finger. I tried not to stare.

  ‘Amanda said your name isn’t Smith.’ I looked at his name badge. ‘What was she on about?’

  ‘Oh.’ He looked at the badge himself, breathed in and out heavily. ‘It’s a bit of a long story.’ His tone was flat, unrattled.

  ‘I’ve got time,’ I assured him.

  ‘My name is Supevich,’ he said. ‘Lawrence Supevich. On my first day at my previous station in Redlynch, our captain struggled over the pronunciation of the name and it came out in front of the entire station staff as Superfish.’