Gone by Midnight

by Candice Fox

  When I looked up she was watching Lillian at the door, her eyes big and trembling with tears.

  ‘Don’t look at my daughter like that,’ I said.

  Laney turned her gaze on me and her eyes were somehow instantly dry, and she walked off towards the driver’s door.

  I marched back to the house. Lillian didn’t move aside as I walked in, and I had to brush her out of the way. She bashed on the door as Laney pulled out of the drive.

  ‘Mamey Bass!’

  ‘Lillian,’ I called as I walked down the hall, ‘stop bashing the door.’

  ‘Mamey Ba–’

  ‘Lillian, stop bashing the door!’ I roared. I spun on my heel in time to see my words shock the small girl’s body like a punch to the guts. She dissolved into those howling, open-mouthed tears. I jogged back to her and swept her into my arms.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ I lifted her, tried to crush the memory of what I’d done out of her tiny frame. ‘Oh, Jesus, Lill. I’m so sorry, baby.’

  I held her in the kitchen until she stopped crying, kissing her warm head, making her empty promises that everything was all right.

  When Lillian had calmed down enough, I set her on my hip and grabbed my keys from the kitchen table.

  ‘Fuck this,’ I said. ‘We’re out of here.’

  They turned Amanda away at the front of the hotel. The officers saw her marching towards the automatic doors in the afternoon heat haze, right through the middle of the shrine to Richie Farrow that had amassed on the concrete steps. Her passage over the colourful chalk messages written on the steps by local children, between piles of flowers and sagging teddy bears and candles that had burned all night, sent the journalists and gawkers standing reverently at the edge of the shrine tittering and sighing. The two patrol officers were guarding the doors, and Amanda was trying to walk between them when they snapped together, shoulder to shoulder, like armoured knights before a cartoon castle.

  ‘I want access to the roof,’ Amanda said, pushing her sunglasses up onto her head. ‘I’ll be a few minutes. That’s all.’

  ‘You look tired, Amanda,’ one of them said, ignoring her words and smiling at her bloodshot eyes. ‘Interesting night, was it?’

  It had indeed been an interesting night. It wasn’t an easy task for paramedics from Cairns Hospital to get their helicopter safely grounded on the grey beach on the edge of the swamp, the tide rising almost all the way to the palm trees lining the camp. Even when they managed it, they arrived in the camp to find five badly beaten, elderly men who refused medical treatment, one of them coughing up blood as he spoke, another struggling to maintain consciousness. The paramedics and the helicopter pilot had looked around at the guns, beer bottles, wild, scraggly dogs and hotted-up motorcycles and despaired. Among the gathering was Amanda Pharrell, the area’s most notorious killer, looking decidedly regretful that she had called for their assistance in the first place.

  Amanda gave up on the men at the door of the White Caps and walked around the back of the hotel, past the car park guard station, to the east wall. The lowest windows were five metres off the ground. If she was fast enough, she knew anyone watching the cameras on the east side of the hotel might miss her movements. She shrugged off the backpack she had been carrying and stood judging the distance from the nearest palm tree to the edge of the building, rolling her shoulders and cracking her knuckles.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ someone said. She turned and saw Superfish walking along the side of the building towards her, his long hands bunched inside his trouser pockets and his eyes on the ground. He stood by Amanda and looked up at the window and the palm tree.

  ‘You’ll break your neck,’ he said, returning his gaze to his shoes.

  ‘I’ll break your neck if you don’t clear out.’ Amanda spat on her palms and rubbed them together. ‘I’m trying to find a body. Mind your own business.’

  ‘You think it’s still here?’ Superfish asked. ‘I’d like to know how you figure that. They conducted another search this morning, in case Hogan was purposefully leaving something out. Didn’t find anything.’

  ‘Men don’t look for things properly,’ Amanda said. ‘They’re too goal-focused.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means find me a way inside, boost me up this palm tree, or rack the fuck off.’

  Superfish gave a resigned nod, and turned on his heel. Amanda followed, then waited by a back door to the hotel while he made sure the coast was clear.

  In the elevator, she watched the bulges in his pockets, his oversized fingers wriggling restlessly, barely constrained by the space inside the fabric. She wondered how he ever kept anything in there, the hand reaching in to retrieve change or keys immediately taking up all the available space.

  ‘You really are a weird-looking person, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You’re all orange and oddly proportioned.’

  ‘I don’t disagree,’ he said. ‘But … you know.’ He rubbed his nose too hard, glanced at her. ‘Glass houses.’

  ‘Your partner is obsessed with me,’ Amanda said. She waited for a response, but none came. ‘She’s been in my house. She had all my cats abducted by evil government cyborgs and she’s turned the entire police force against me.’

  ‘Well, they weren’t exactly big fans of yours in the first place.’ Superfish watched the numbers on the wall blinking to life and fading as they ascended.

  ‘I didn’t hit Joanna Fischer,’ Amanda said. ‘Trust me, if I was going to lay into her I’d have given her more than a black eye.’

  ‘Violence is never the answer,’ Superfish said.

  They arrived on the eighth floor. Amanda and Superfish stood in the empty, carpeted hall.

  ‘Last night, a bunch of cops came and bashed my friends,’ Amanda said. ‘Joanna Fischer is bringing as many people into this as she can.’

  ‘Have you told Conkaffey this?’

  ‘Why would I tell him?’

  ‘He’s your partner.’ Superfish shrugged.

  ‘I’m giving him the silent treatment. Three more hours. He called me crazy. Nobody calls me crazy, or a freak. I smacked him. But if I didn’t like him so much I’d have slammed his nuts in a sandwich press,’ Amanda said. ‘Plus, he worries.’

  ‘Why are you telling me, then?’ Superfish said. ‘You don’t think I worry?’

  ‘You should worry.’ Amanda poked him in his hard chest. ‘She’s your partner. You better put a leash on that bitch before she gets bitten.’

  ‘I think that’s what she wants,’ Superfish said. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Some people like conflict,’ Superfish said. ‘A war between the bikies and the police might be exactly what she wants. All its casualties will be your fault, and you’ll never get any police cooperation in this town again.’

  They walked up the small concrete staircase to the roof, Superfish swiping through the locked doors with a white plastic card. The afternoon heat hit them like a wall as they stepped out onto the dusty space. Amanda marched to the nearest elevator, the wide rectangular concrete structure that capped the shaft, and set her backpack on the ground. Superfish watched as she dragged out a pink toolbox and opened it, digging to the bottom for an enormous wrench. The sunlight was bouncing off the new, shiny iron panel that stretched along one side of the concrete structure, taking up approximately a third of the surface of the elevator roof.

  ‘I’m waiting for you to ask me to explain my genius,’ Amanda said as she fitted the wrench to the bolts on top of the iron panel. ‘Surely you’re not just going to stand there and wait for it to unfold.’

  ‘Oh.’ Superfish cleared his throat. ‘Well, yes. I just assumed it would become clear in time.’

  ‘It’s far more exciting when I explain it.’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘Well,’ Amanda sighed, working the bolts. ‘I woke up this morning thinking about Hogan. How could I not? He was all over the news. Those journalists have really done their
digging, the happy little moles. There were lots of pictures of Hogan provided by friends he’s had over the years: in different houses, at parties, here at the hotel. In every picture, I noticed the neatness. The organisation. Sure, he was always dirty. He was pictured in homeless camps, crack houses, halfway houses. But his belongings and his clothes and his hair were always neat. Neatness, organisation, it was Hogan’s way of maintaining control. I kept thinking about those pictures all morning.’

  Amanda unscrewed the bolts from the edges of the panels, lining them up one after the other like soldiers on the top of the elevator shaft.

  ‘Before Ted and I got banned from the case,’ Amanda said, ‘the Crimson Lake cops sent us photographs of the contents of Hogan’s maintenance logbook, as we requested. I had a look. Same thing; very orderly. Hogan wrote down the tasks he wanted to complete each day, and listed job numbers and receipts for purchases and completion dates for all his work. He forecast everything into the diary. Every day he emptied the pool filter. Every two weeks he cleaned all the exterior hotel windows. Every month he set rat traps in the basements. Every three months he conducted a sweep of all the rooms for aesthetic damage.’

  Superfish helped her loosen a particularly difficult bolt, the muscles of his forearms visible as they flexed beneath his white skin.

  ‘The day before Richie went missing,’ Amanda continued, ‘Hogan was supposed to replace a rusted iron panel on top of one of the elevators with a new one he had ordered a month earlier. I believe it was this panel he was replacing.’

  She rapped on the iron cover with her knuckles, making the metal sing.

  ‘But we checked the elevator shafts,’ Superfish said. ‘We must have checked them fifty times. From the bottom and the top.’

  ‘Wrong!’ Amanda smiled as they lifted the panel onto the ground. ‘Dead wrong.’

  They leaned over and peered into the space beneath the panel. Superfish tried to stand back, but Amanda clamped a hand on the back of his neck.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Look. Really look.’

  As his eyes adjusted, clearing of the red and green sunspots that had clouded them, he saw what she meant for him to see. Beneath them stretched a seemingly eternal tunnel, emerging slowly into his vision. There was no elevator in the narrow, featureless shaft.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Superfish gripped the edge, looking down into the darkness. The shaft they peered down was as wide as the elevator shaft on one side, but not on the other. It was about a third of the size of the elevator. The police officer stared into the blackness, his mouth hanging open.

  ‘You’ve seen the elevator shafts,’ Amanda said. ‘You’ve seen them a dozen times. But what you haven’t seen is this – a secondary shaft at the back of each elevator. Don’t feel like an idiot. I didn’t see it either. I stood underneath the elevator carriages and touched the walls of the shaft on all three sides.’

  ‘So what is this then?’ Superfish asked. ‘What’s this empty space at the back of the shaft for?’

  ‘The counterweight.’ Amanda smiled. ‘The old elevators had a counterweight that would slide up as the elevator went down, and down as the elevator went up. But when the hotel put new elevators in, they didn’t choose the big ole counterweight-style ones again. These ones work with hydraulics. Three poles on the interior walls of the shaft on which the elevator carriage slides up and down.’

  Superfish leaned over again and looked into the space.

  ‘When they put the new elevator in, it was smaller than the old ones,’ Amanda said. ‘The shaft was too big. So they split it. They erected a wall behind the elevator carriage and fitted the hydraulic pole to it. This space back here?’ She pointed into the darkness. ‘This became blank, empty space. They walled it off, and capped it at the top.’

  ‘Why didn’t we see this?’ Superfish asked.

  ‘Because Hogan took the lid off all the elevators and showed you the shafts with the carriage in them, so you could see that Richie hadn’t fallen in and landed on top of the carriage. But he didn’t tell us about this second shaft, and he didn’t open the lid that covered it. He just hoped that if he seemed to be cooperating fully, with the sun making it hard to see into the shaft clearly, no one would ask a question about the square shape of the elevator carriage and the rectangular shape of the concrete structures on top.’

  Superfish pinched the bridge of his nose, took a deep breath.

  ‘We had an architect come and examine the whole hotel this morning,’ Superfish said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Amanda agreed. ‘And he probably fell for the same trick you all did. Without knowing the elevators had been replaced, he had all the same information as you.’

  ‘Do you actually know he’s down there?’ Superfish said. ‘Or are you just guessing? Okay, you’ve identified an unsearched space in the hotel. But are you sure it means anything?’

  Amanda sat on the ground and rummaged through her toolbox. She took out two elastic bands and then extracted her mobile phone from her pocket.

  ‘Hogan said to Ted and me in the bush that there had been an accident,’ Amanda said. ‘He told me, two days ago, that he didn’t only like this job – he needed it.’

  ‘Okay.’ Superfish watched her fitting the elastic bands tightly around either end of her mobile phone.

  ‘He bought far too much rope to tie up a kid,’ Amanda said. ‘He bought a hook. There’s no evidence that Richie Farrow was ever at Hogan’s place of residence. What does that tell you?’

  ‘Well, the Iron Man toy was there,’ Superfish said. ‘We’ve confirmed that it’s Richie’s.’

  ‘Right,’ Amanda said. ‘So imagine this. Meticulous, orderly, teetering on the tightrope above oblivion, the runner’s life; Dylan Hogan goes to work one day and sees in his diary that he’s got to replace a rusted iron panel from the top of one of the blank spaces behind the elevator shafts. He goes up to the roof, swipes open the door to the stairs and the door to the roof. He wedges them open, because he knows he’s going to have to carry down a big rusty iron panel and he doesn’t want to have to open both doors again while his hands are full.’

  Amanda pulled a roll of twine from her backpack and started unwinding handfuls of it. She looped the twine through the two elastic bands secured at the ends of her phone.

  ‘Hogan carries the new panel up to the roof,’ she continued. ‘He sets it on the ground. He unbolts the old, rusty panel. Then he gets distracted. The manager calls him on his radio. There’s some problem inside the hotel. Sink blocked, microwave won’t work, I don’t know. He goes back downstairs. Completely forgets about the panel.’

  Superfish was watching Amanda, his pale scalp roasting in the sun.

  ‘He goes home that night. At four o’clock in the morning he bolts upright in bed. Fuck! The stairway door. The roof door. The secondary elevator shaft gaping open at the night sky. We know what Hogan was like. Organised. Disciplined. He’s horrified. He immediately takes his bike and rides back to the hotel at top speed. The CCTV inside the Clattering Clam catches him going past. When he comes up to the roof he finds both doors still open and the panels on the ground where he left them. He finds a kid’s toy on the roof, and –’

  ‘And all the hotel staff in a panic over a missing kid,’ Superfish said. He was gripping his belly with one hand as though he felt sick. ‘Police on the way.’

  ‘He puts two and two together,’ Amanda said. ‘He fits the new panel and discards the old one. He doesn’t know for sure that the child has fallen in the hole but it’s the only thing that makes sense. He knows the kids were on the roof. He knows the hole was uncovered.’

  ‘He said he needed this job,’ Superfish said. ‘He told you that. It was probably the only thing keeping him grounded. Keeping him from wandering off again into the dark life.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Amanda said. ‘He feels sick about what’s happened. Physically sick. He tells the people who see him that he’s hungover. But really he’s formulating his plan.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’
Superfish sighed.

  ‘Hogan must have known Richie would be dead,’ Amanda said, climbing onto the concrete ledge above the shaft. ‘Eight storeys. No, ten – the shafts go right down to the basement. No kid would survive that. And there was no point putting his hand up and saying it was his fault. He knew there was no saving Richie. So why not save himself, if he could? He told no one about the secondary shafts. He went out and bought supplies. A hundred metres of rope was enough to send a hook down, try to catch the body and bring it up. If he was careful, he might have figured he could get the body out of the hotel without anyone knowing what he’d done. Sure, he didn’t feel great about it. But he would do what he needed to in order to survive. To maintain control.’

  Amanda beckoned for Superfish’s phone. He gave it without understanding why she wanted it, simply watching her plan unfold as she spoke. Soon the screen of his phone showed a wobbling camera image, the same as the image displayed on Amanda’s phone. She picked up her phone and turned on the torch at the back.

  ‘The kids said they’d been on the roof,’ Superfish said. ‘But they didn’t say Richie had fallen down a hole.’

  ‘The kids said they saw a fucking alien spaceship.’ Amanda rolled her eyes. ‘It’s possible they just didn’t know what happened to Richie. A bunch of them go to the edge of the building to look at the water. Richie climbs up on the concrete ledge. He falls, hardly making a sound. When they turn around, their friend is gone, and they can’t ask anyone where he went because they’re not even supposed to be out of the room. They probably assumed he ran off to play hide and seek, or went downstairs to the restaurant to see the parents.’

  Amanda hung her phone over the hole before her, letting it settle as it swung on the end of the twine. With the elastic bands acting as horizontal braces, and the twine between them making a knot at the front of the phone, the phone’s camera and torch pointed straight downwards into the gaping shaft. She handed Superfish back his phone.