Siren

by Tara Moss

  The two boys would be a couple of years apart by Mak’s calculation.

  ‘Have you spoken to Tobias about Adam’s disappearance?’

  ‘Not personally,’ Glenise said. ‘I’ve not seen him around lately. I spoke with Kevin about it, of course, and that was when he recommended you.’

  It was natural enough for Tobias’s father to recommend Makedde’s services. He had not been her client, but the outcome of her investigation had been good for the Murphys, and it was not as if the average person knew a lot of private investigators. Mak had thought the door knocking in this case would be depressingly ho-hum. Adam might best be located by speaking to a lot of his friends, associates and neighbours, as more often than not someone somewhere knew something, and it was only a matter of time and perseverance. But perhaps while speaking to the Murphy family she could gently find out if they knew anything she didn’t about the Cavanaghs, and where the case against the scion of one of Australia’s most powerful families had stalled…

  CHAPTER 7

  His motel room was cheap.

  The young man stood in its centre, clothed only in his underpants, and glared at the locked door with disdain. A truck drove by on the nearby road. He heard some stranger cough. He would not sleep well here. He had not slept well for days, and tonight there would be no respite: of that he felt certain. The faint smell of deodoriser and stale smoke permeated the thin walls, the carpet and the papery sheets he did not look forward to sleeping between. This was in no way a step up from the caravan outside.

  In three strides he traversed his tiny quarters to the spartan bathroom. At least the mirror was large, the corners of it fading away to a non-reflective grey. He stared himself down with a dark, unhappy gaze. There was a crease between his brows that displeased him. Even when he tried his best to relax his forehead, his frown remained like an ineradicable watermark. He leaned in until he was centimetres from the glass, staring at his reflection, obsessively tracking the undesired lines beginning to form on his fine face that once had been so smooth. He noted each new sign of age with acute anxiety: the creases that extended from the sides of his nose to the corners of his lips like the mouth of a ventriloquist’s doll; the lines that fanned out from his eyes like spider’s legs; the hairline that others denied was slowly, irreversibly receding. He cursed the fact he had not acquired a single one of the youthful genes that should have been his birthright.

  One red apple.

  One piece of rye toast. No butter.

  One tin of tomato soup.

  One pinch of salt, but only a pinch.

  Salt made him retain water. He couldn’t afford that. He studiously avoided animal products, too much sodium, cholesterol, oil.

  Twice a day he was in the habit of carefully tallying his intake. It kept him in line. It meant he did not make mistakes.

  For a moment the young man stood side-on to the mirror and studied his unclothed shape. His sinewy muscles were keeping well, the skin on his chest still taut, tanned and smooth. He sucked his stomach in until it pulled back against his ribcage, giving him the narrow waist he was praised for. He was once told it was his low body fat that made him appear older than his years. Nonsense.

  ‘Ebanatyi pidaraz,’ he cursed under his breath, words he would never say aloud in front of his family.

  Being constantly uprooted like this made him edgy. He felt unbalanced, discombobulated, alone. The travelling made him weary. He felt older than his years, that was true. He felt old.

  Bijou…Bijou…Bijou…

  She had taken another lover. Why? She was getting on in age now herself, though no one seemed to guess it. She was still beautiful, still the star attraction of the troupe, their driving force. She possessed him like no other ever could. It mattered not that he was rejected from her bed for now. She was inside him. Inside him. Inside him. And he inside her…

  And she was not going to get him out.

  Still fixated on his reflection, he reached blindly around the edge of the basin until he found what he wanted. He raised his black eyeliner pencil to his face. A little unsteadily, he drew its sharpened point across the seam of his lashes, giving him the lined eyes of a sinewy jungle cat.

  Bijou.

  This new boy might be in her bed now, but things could change. He could make things change. He would never be far away.

  And he would be watching. Waiting…

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘Hi, you’ve reached Mak. Please leave a message…’

  Andy Flynn hung up his phone without saying a word. He felt the urge to throw the thing against the wall and break it into small, useless pieces. He was back in Australia, in Sydney again, a short distance from Makedde, and still they were at an impasse. She knew he was in town and yet she was not answering his calls.

  Fuck it.

  He looked across at the neatly stacked turquoise towels at the foot of the single bed he was perched on, and suddenly felt an extreme tiredness. He had driven from Quantico, Virginia, to Washington, then flown from Washington to Los Angeles, and Los Angeles to Sydney, and Sydney to Canberra. He had arrived home to find that his live-in girlfriend had done precisely what she’d said she would. She had moved out. The house had been neat and empty. She had not left a note.

  And then he had driven here. He could be forgiven for feeling weary.

  Beyond the door, Andy could hear the chaotic, comforting sounds of family. Only the family was not his own, but that of his former police partner. The Cassimatis marriage had survived Jimmy’s long hours in squad cars, his absences, and even the unveiling of his infidelities. Andy’s own marriage had survived precisely nothing. And his wife, Cassandra, had not even survived their bitter divorce. She had been sliced up by the Stiletto Killer like some kind of sick present, as a cat would leave a dead bird at the end of the bed. It was precisely because Andy was working the case that the killer had gone for her. It was Andy’s fault that Cassandra was dead. He had not joined the police force to be the cause of murder. And after all that hell, he had really thought he could make it work with Makedde—if he could make it with anyone. She was not bothered by the morbidness of his work as a profiler of violent serial criminals. Her father was a retired cop. She understood the job, the hours. Sure, she had been a model for many years, but she wasn’t precious or self-absorbed. They really had something, but it had gone wrong yet again.

  To make it worse, they had fought over professional issues as well as personal.

  The Cavanaghs.

  They had not seen eye to eye on what had transpired in Mak’s last Sydney assignment, and she had been bitter at his lack of support.

  If only she knew his real reasons, things might have been different.

  Sorry, Mak. Sorry.

  Andy looked listlessly round Jimmy’s spare bedroom and tried to gather his thoughts. The room appeared to be used for storage of anything that didn’t fit elsewhere. There were a few cardboard boxes along one wall, a television that looked like it didn’t work, and, taking up precious space, a home gym. It was hilarious to Andy to imagine his former police partner even knowing what such a thing was. The man was perpetually out of shape and overweight, and his doctor had him on blood thinners. Still, there it was, complete with bench press and various pulleys.

  There was a knock, and the door opened.

  ‘Papa!’ a smaller Cassimatis yelled, and Jimmy slipped inside and shut the door behind him as if keeping back a wave.

  ‘Mate, never have kids. They’ll suck the life out of you!’

  Andy laughed. They had this kind of exchange from time to time. It was an unconvincing display, especially given the naked look of fatherly pride in Jimmy’s eyes. He had four children now, between the ages of fifteen and ten months. Andy was childless.

  ‘What did Bill Hicks say? That kids are naturally smarter than we are, because he’s never met a kid who was married and had children.’

  ‘Yeah!’ Jimmy declared. ‘They’ve got it worked out. Beat up kids in the schoolyard, com
e home, get fed, yell at their dad. Kids have it made.’

  Jimmy’s boys were at the age where they still idolised their father, and swelled with pride at the knowledge that their dad was a cop and carried a gun. It gave them cred at school. It was cause for boasting, for a couple more years anyway. Once the boys started going to parties, it would be different.

  ‘So, mate, you wanna find some beers tonight after dinner? Maybe hit the local? Or…’ he winked lasciviously, ‘we could check out the shows.’

  He didn’t mean the Opera House.

  ‘Uh, I’m seeing Mak tonight,’ Andy told him. ‘Maybe after.’

  ‘Okay, mate. Sure,’ Jimmy said, clearly disappointed. ‘That’s okay. I have to go in and check on some stuff at work, anyway.’

  The reality of what he had returned home to filled Andy with a mix of rage and grief. He didn’t know what he would do when he saw her; he only knew that he needed to.

  ‘Maybe we can do a work-out, too,’ he managed to joke, gesturing to the rusting equipment.

  Jimmy cracked a smile. ‘Fuck you.’

  CHAPTER 9

  Mak pocketed her phone, and held back a strange sensation of drowning. Andy’s name had come up on her caller ID and she had not answered. It was not the time or place. But already a series of unwanted memories had begun flickering below the steady surface of her professional focus.

  Dammit.

  ‘I’ll show you upstairs,’ Glenise Hart told Makedde, and the women both rose from the couches on which they’d sat and discussed the disappearance of Adam Hart for over an hour.

  Makedde was led towards a staircase at the end of the main hall, and as she ascended at the woman’s heels, they passed more framed family photographs. Lots of smiling. Lots of sunshine. Mak’s heart lurched a little at the thought of all that broken cheer.

  ‘When did you notice that Adam’s bike was gone?’ Mak asked.

  ‘Not until I spoke to the police.’

  ‘He kept it in the garage, or somewhere else?’

  ‘Sometimes along the side of the house. It’s a safe neighbourhood. I don’t know where he’d left it that night.’

  As Glenise had not been awakened by the sound of the garage door, Mak thought the bike had probably been parked beside the house the night he disappeared. She would need to take a look at the spot.

  They reached the top of the stairs. An open door revealed a tidy bathroom with a toilet and bath. Glenise moved to the next door down the hall on the right and placed her hand on the doorknob.

  Mak interrupted her. ‘If it’s okay with you, Mrs Hart, I’d prefer to have a look at Adam’s room alone, and then I might ask you to take me through a few things.’ It was better to take an objective look first, so as not to be led into the same false conclusions others might have fallen into. ‘I’ll be a while. I’ll be careful with his things, I promise.’

  ‘Okay’ Adam’s mother stepped back with something like a whimper of rejection, before padding softly down the carpeted stairs, shoulders slumped.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mak called, but she was already out of view, and there was no reply.

  Who is Adam Hart?

  Makedde Vanderwall took a breath and entered Adam Hart’s bedroom with as clear a mind as possible. She found herself in an average-sized room with off-white walls and a window with a leafy outlook. Immediately the neatness of the room struck her as odd: all perfect files and books stacked so precisely they were practically colour-coded. There was a single bed in the corner, made with an almost military precision. It brought to mind her days as a naval cadet back in Canada; from age ten to thirteen, she’d gradually gained confidence along with semaphore and Morse code skills as she rose through the ranks to chief petty officer, in charge of a parade square of kids. A tightly made bed was given strange value in cadets. ‘If I can’t bounce a quarter on it, you get fifty push-ups…’

  Mak moved first to the window. It unlocked easily and slid open far enough for a slim person to fit through. With a half-hearted jiggle the flyscreen came away. She peered out, feeling the fresh evening summer air on her face. It was a single-storey drop to the ground beside the house, but there was a wooden ledge above the kitchen window—part of the fake Tudor design—and a drainpipe within reach. She could shimmy down it if she wished. Adam could have got out this way. Or someone could have got in. She replaced the flyscreen and closed the window.

  How often did you sneak out, young man, and for whom? Do tell…

  The décor in the room was minimal. There was a single large poster over the bed, a black-and-white illustration in traditional Victorian sideshow style, advertising the Jim Rose Circus. It depicted five characters, each engaged in a different bizarre performance. The central figure was a strongman type, tied up with chains and struggling atop shattered glass. Floating to his left was a man in a suit with a tube up his nose. The tube ran down into a big syringe containing some presumably sinister substance. Below him, a traditional sword swallower posed with a smile, the handle of the weapon protruding from between gleaming teeth. On the right-hand side of the poster was an oddly proportioned clown breathing flame, and below him a male figure struggled with a heavy weight that dragged his tongue down to his waist from an overstrained piercing. The poster proclaimed enticingly:

  THE JIM ROSE CIRCUS

  SIDESHOW FREAKS!

  The images were set against a giant stage curtain, and brought to mind the dark sideshow world of Tod Browning’s subjects. Mak squinted at the poster, intrigued that Adam had chosen this over a poster of, say, a scantily clad Jessica Biel or a Suicide Girl. Perhaps his mother wouldn’t allow anything too racy in the house. Was she controlling? Mak wondered.

  She set about searching the room.

  Stacks of DVDs were set neatly against one wall, one upon the other from the carpet up: kung fu movies, foreign films, black-and-white films, fantasy. He was a Star Wars fan. There was an inexpensive-looking guitar in the corner closest to the bed, the make of which Mak did not recognise.

  He had a medium-height chest of drawers filled with the usual socks, underwear, jeans and T-shirts, all neatly folded. There was also a four-shelf bookcase filled with carefully ranged books. She read titles off the spines: English as a Legal Language, Professional Practices, A History of Accounting and Accountants.

  Riveting stuff, Mak thought.

  But there were also copies of Kerouac’s On the Road— well thumbed—Ringolevio by Emmett Grogan and Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. There was a dichotomy between the young man’s field of study and his interests, if such tales of adventure and rebellion against the system were anything to go by. There were also a lot of philosophy books, a number of which appeared to have unbroken bindings, and a thick book of Bob Dylan songs.

  Hmmm. What about drugs…

  In one smooth manoeuvre Mak dipped to the floor on one elbow and swept her eyes under the young man’s bed. A guitar case, empty. A fat dictionary.

  Nothing. Not even the swirls of fluff and dust you’d expect to find under any bed, especially a nineteen-year-old male’s.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and contemplated the space. What nineteen-year-old keeps their room this clean? She slid her hand under the mattress and searched for contraband: porn, marijuana, a flask of alcohol, a little black book, a tell-all diary…something interesting, anything. Perhaps Adam was like Andy’s old police mate Jimmy Cassimatis, harbouring a collection of trashy weekly nude magazines with their HORNBAG NEXT DOOR contests? It might not help to find Adam, but it would at least be amusing.

  Again, nothing.

  With its neatness and sterility, the room was almost a blank space. This was disappointing for Makedde’s purposes, to say the least. It was certainly not the messy jumble of unwashed gym socks and Ralph magazines she’d expected. Was this extreme tidiness the result of a strict upbringing? His mother was a schoolteacher and she did seem to like to keep things orderly and under control. Or was Adam expecting someone like me to come along? Mak wondered suspi
ciously. Either he had recently tossed a lot of belongings out and purposely tidied the place in preparation for his departure, or he routinely spent a lot of time keeping everything organised. Or—and Mak suspected this was closest to the truth—Glenise Hart had tidied her son’s room in anticipation of Makedde’s visit.

  Mak stood up and felt something hard under her foot. She rolled her boot to one side and saw she was standing on a single coin—or rather, half of one. It was an American quarter, and it looked like a bite had been taken out of it. She examined it from all angles. The edge seemed to have been crushed by something, but the rest of the coin was unscratched and unbent. She placed the quarter on the bed and frowned.

  A coin out of place. You missed that one, Glenise, she thought suspiciously.

  She pocketed it for later, then took out her digital camera, checked that it had a fresh, correctly labelled memory stick, and began to take the first photographs for her new case.

  When Makedde emerged from Adam’s room thirty minutes later, she felt only the tiniest step closer to knowing who he was.

  She moved into the hallway and looked both ways. There was some movement in the kitchen directly below, a cupboard closing, the rattling of china, the shriek of water coming to the boil again. She stepped into the bathroom. It, too, was spotless. The towels were dark. There was a mirrored cabinet above the sink. She opened it, hopeful. If it were anything like hers, the shelves would be overflowing with toiletries, vitamins, toothpaste oozing out of tubes.

  Anti-psychotic medications, party drugs, bags of condoms, what have you got for me…

  There was a small tub of hair gel. Deodorant. Toothpaste still in a box. Boring. Mak opened the cupboards under the sink and found nothing but neatly folded towels, a rubber plunger. Nothing.

  Makedde readied herself to face Adam’s distraught mother again. What had she learned? Her son was tidy. He read novels and watched DVDs. He liked Star Wars. He liked the Jim Rose Circus. And he had a strange coin. He most likely entered and exited his room through the window and down the drainpipe. But why? Mak descended the stairs wishing she’d discovered something more tangible, something to give hope that Adam would soon be returned to his mother, but of course it was far too early for results.