Siren

by Tara Moss

  He nodded barely perceptibly at this acknowledgement of his huge loss.

  ‘I’m really glad things are going well for you now, Tobias. Really glad.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Mak felt strangely touched by the conversation. She had touched a life. His life. All those silly private investigations with rotten cheating spouses and rip-off artists trying to pretend they had whiplash, and here she had really done something. She had changed a life in a tangible, positive way.

  ‘I’m not actually here to talk to you about all that stuff. I’m trying to find out about Adam Hart from down the street. You two are friends?’

  ‘A bit.’

  A bit? ‘You know each other a little?’ she suggested.

  He nodded, which could mean anything from close friendship to a single conversation.

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘A while ago.’

  ‘A week ago?’ she pressed.

  ‘Longer.’

  Mak felt fresh disappointment weigh on her. ‘How recently?’ she said, still trying.

  He shrugged his shoulders again.

  ‘Was he in any trouble at home?’

  He stuck his lip out and shook his head.

  ‘Are there any people you can think of who don’t like Adam? Enemies?’

  He shrugged again.

  ‘Can you think of any reason why Adam would want to leave home, Tobias?’ She leaned in slightly, and watched his face carefully.

  ‘Again?’ Tobias asked, and Mak straightened up.

  ‘Yes. Again.’ Again? ‘When was the last time?’

  ‘With his girlfriend,’ he said, as if it were obvious.

  Her heart sped up. ‘Oh, you mean…’ Makedde trailed off, and waited for him to fill in the blanks. After a few seconds of silence, he did exactly what she had hoped.

  ‘Patricia,’ Tobias said.

  ‘Yes, Patricia,’ she agreed, wondering who Patricia was and when she could speak to her. ‘What is her last name again?’

  He looked blank. Perhaps he had never been told Patricia’s last name. She didn’t want to lose him on that point. Adam’s mother would certainly know who she was, but why hadn’t she told Mak about her, and that her son had left home before? Was it because she thought everyone would assume he had done the same thing again? That was, in fact, exactly what Mak was doing.

  ‘How long ago was that? It was only…’ She trailed off again, expectantly.

  ‘Ages ago.’

  Perhaps yesterday was ages ago. It was hard to tell.

  ‘Since you moved here?’

  He nodded. So less than a year ago.

  ‘And Adam told you about it?’

  A nod.

  ‘Do you remember what he said?’

  He shook his head, perhaps deciding he’d said too much.

  ‘Tobias, I noticed you’re on Facebook.’ She had done some internet searches. ‘You and Adam are friends on Facebook, aren’t you? Do you think you could hook him and me up? I wouldn’t get him in any trouble, I just want to chat with him. You know, he is nineteen, and if he doesn’t want to come home he doesn’t have to. I just want to chat.’

  Tobias appeared to think about this for a while. ‘Sure, I can hook you two up. If he’s checking his messages and stuff.’

  ‘Oh, that would be very helpful. Thank you, Tobias.’

  He perked up a little, and even offered a very small version of a smile. ‘What’s your handle?’

  Mak blinked. Handle? ‘I’ll, uh, send you a message tomorrow, and we’ll do it that way. I’ll just go by my name.’ It was best to deal with these two honestly from step one. Anything else could be seen as disingenuous. She had to gain Adam’s trust.

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mak thought. Very cool.

  CHAPTER 18

  There is another man.

  Andy Flynn sat at Jimmy’s kitchen table, resting heavily on his elbows. His face felt puffy and he thought his eyes might close up again at any moment. He had made an ill-advised stop at a pub in Surry Hills after Mak threw him out of her apartment, and when he had returned to her door he had seen another man arrive.

  Him.

  Andy did not know the man’s name, but he was familiar. He was some kind of rocker. Andy needed only to observe him approaching the apartment block at three in the morning to know that Mak was with him—that he was there for her.

  He is the other man. That’s him. There had to be someone else, he had reasoned.

  Andy was not a man who cried, but driving back to Jimmy’s he had pulled the car over suddenly, and wept like a madman against the steering wheel on the side of the road. The experience had unnerved him, and no less now as he looked back on it after a few hours of broken sleep. He wondered if he had finally gone over the edge.

  Cassandra, and now Makedde—the women you love—they leave you. They always leave you. You are cursed. You are poison…

  ‘You look like shit,’ Jimmy said. His mate was smiling at him as he spoke, but Andy spotted the look of genuine concern in his eyes.

  ‘Thanks. I’m sorry if I woke anyone. I got in pretty late.’

  ‘No, mate. Everyone in this house sleeps like the dead, except me,’ Jimmy told him. ‘I’ve never been much of a sleeper.’

  Few cops were. The odd hours and the focus of the job gave a person plenty of reasons not to sleep well at night.

  ‘So what’s the deal? You bang her, or what?’

  An image of Makedde’s arched back sprang to mind. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work already?’ Andy retorted.

  ‘You are the job,’ Jimmy said, in long-drawn-out syllables and a voice much deeper than his own natural tone. He pointed at his mate with an extended index finger, then pulled the ‘trigger’.‘Bang!’ He slapped his chubby hands together.

  ‘Yeah, some hitman you’d make,’ Andy murmured humourlessly.

  ‘I been already to headquarters and come back, mate.’

  ‘Jesus. I did wake late.’ He looked at the digital clock on the microwave and saw it was nearly nine.

  ‘Some of us have real jobs,’ Jimmy quipped, Andy’s job being of much higher rank, status and pay than his own.

  ‘Look, I gotta say, that cunt Hunt really jerks me off. He is very bloody interested in your Makedde.’

  She’s not my Makedde now. If she ever was.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Andy asked.

  Jimmy walked to a cupboard and pulled out a tin with a lock on it. ‘I mean he knows she’s back in town,’ Jimmy continued. ‘And he seems a little too interested.’

  ‘What do you mean by a little too interested? Like he wants to stalk her? Ask her out?’

  ‘Probably both.’ Jimmy pulled a ring of keys off his belt and opened the lock. He pulled a Mars bar out.

  Andy could not believe what he was seeing. ‘You are joking. You actually lock away your Mars bars?’

  ‘You don’t have kids. You wouldn’t understand.’ Jimmy unwrapped a corner and took a bite. ‘What Hunt said was that she “better not start stirring shit up again” or something to that effect.’ He was speaking with his mouth full. ‘He meant the Cavanaghs.’ Jimmy sat and the chair creaked under his weight.

  ‘Can we not talk about her right now?’

  Jimmy frowned. There was an awkward pause.

  ‘I had a beauty come through this morning. You know that burglary down in Macleay Street?’

  ‘No,’ Andy answered flatly.

  ‘Well, some rich prick got his fancy house robbed on the weekend, and apparently there was hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewels and shit there. “Woe is me, I only have five million dollars left,” and all that. Hunt was all over it, pushing everyone to make the guy who did the place. And guess who gets to look a genius this week?’ He grinned proudly and raised his hand.

  ‘Um, you.’

  ‘I found a pair of leather gloves in the yard, discarded. And yup, they found the index finger and thumb on the right glove matched prints in the
house, and inside the gloves were a couple of full handprints, with perfectly usable fingerprints. What a moron for tossing the gloves at the crime scene. And for using hand cream before he put his gloves on. Skata. He must’ve been some kind of metrosexual robber.’

  ‘They just don’t make criminals like they used to,’ Andy said darkly. He felt bad about it, but he was not in the mood for Jimmy’s humour, and he was no good at pretending.

  Jimmy was silent for a while. Andy wished he could have been more enthusiastic for him. His mate really did need a professional break like that. How many robbers use hand cream? Prints had been lifted from inside gloves before, but it was still fairly rare. It had never worked in any of his cases.

  ‘Anyway, I just came for coffee and to see how you doin’.’

  ‘Thanks, Jimmy.’

  Nearly fifteen minutes passed, with Jimmy staring at the newspaper and Andy staring into the bottom of a second bad cup of instant coffee.

  ‘So,’ Jimmy finally said. ‘You bang her, or what?’

  Andy gave him a look that froze him.

  ‘No, mate,’ Andy finally said, pushing his cup away. ‘It looks like she’s banging someone else already.’

  CHAPTER 19

  The grounds of the Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park Crematorium were hot and still. At eleven o’clock the February morning sun was already vicious, casting crisp shadows and bright rays across the pale Art Deco chapel in which a small service was underway.

  Three people occupied the little chapel, one of them in a coffin.

  At a modest podium, a pastor read a passage from Psalm 23. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies…’

  The pews were empty save for a solitary hulking figure, hunched at the shoulders. The killer Luther Hand sat alone in a dark suit, his hat held in his scarred hands. His head was bowed, his eyes closed. He was not sure if he had ever in his life cried, and as such he was slightly perplexed by the moisture collecting in the corners of his eyes. Tears? His tears? His eyes had seen violence; violence committed by his own hands, and by others; violence done to tear at and scar his own face, his head, his oversized body, which lived on like a battered monolith. But tears? His eyes had not been blurred by tears.

  ‘We say goodbye to Cathy Davis today, knowing that she is in a better place…’

  Luther’s grief at losing his parent and only living relative was compounded by the enforced distance he had kept from her in the decade before her death. He had long ago made a professional decision that kept him from having her—or anyone else—intimately involved in his life, and as he prospered in his lethal trade, he had disappeared from her completely. She had believed him dead, and from a distance he had watched her grieve for him. At first he had felt it a small sacrifice, but he had soon grown to be tormented by it. With the nature of Luther’s work, it had been safest that Cathy Davis knew nothing of him, and that they had no ties. He would never have forgiven himself if something had happened to her because of him.

  Sooner or later, the loved ones of killers met a horrible end. Luther knew that.

  And there was one other reason he had disappeared from her life. Perhaps it was even the real reason. Cathy Davis would know, in one glance, what her son had become.

  The phone in his pocket bore a message from one of his main agents, Madame Q.

  PRAGUE. DOUBLE. 24 HOURS.

  It was another contract. He had accepted it not minutes after arriving in Sydney.

  Killer.

  Luther had become a killer, and his mother would have known it, just looking at him—the fine weave of his suit, his watch, his car, his scarred face, his hands. His eyes. He spent much of his life in transit, a global citizen with no real country, no loyalties, no ties. The men and women he killed trailed behind him like ghosts.

  His mother would have seen them.

  The pastor continued with Ecclesiastes. ‘…A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one’s birth…’

  The day of death.

  Luther’s mother had not been religious, and he was not raised to be familiar with the Bible. For all his close proximity to death he had never heard such a sentiment before. Certainly he had been there at the end of many people’s lives, but none of them had seemed desirous of their end. The pastor’s words meant little to him. They offered no comfort. They did not reflect any reality he knew. He had lost the one woman who loved him, the only person who loved him, the only woman who knew his name. What help could words be?

  Australia now seemed to encapsulate not only his humble beginnings, but all of his failures. With his mother now gone, there was no reason for him to return.

  The music rose to a crescendo, and with only the pastor—a stranger—and Luther to watch, the curtains were closed on the alcove at the front of the room, and the coffin was rolled into a cremation chamber that would burn his mother at over 750 degrees, reducing to a few kilos of bone fragment and ash the body that had borne Luther Hand thirty-seven years before.

  CHAPTER 20

  ‘Loulou, I was practically naked,’ Makedde Vanderwall explained, her phone in one hand and a bag of takeaway Thai food in the other. ‘I was naked!’ Her voice echoed through the hallway of Loulou’s apartment building.

  ‘Darling, that doesn’t sound like it was all bad. I thought you liked Bogey.’

  ‘Are you stoned or something? Come on, Loulou,’ Makedde said, exasperated and fumbling with the keys. ‘I knew you’d try something like this. He’s a nice guy, yes, but you should have told me. You should have told him.’ Loulou was notoriously fun-loving and vague, but Mak was amazed that she could not win this simple point. ‘What if I had beaned him with a frying pan before realising who he was? You know what I’m like. It could have been a disaster. We could have both spent the night in emergency.’

  Mak put the keys in the door. ‘Anyway, it’s fine now. I think he’s just going to sleep on the couch till he leaves for Melbourne. Look, I should go. He could be home. And I’ve got Karen coming over for a quick lunch catch-up. I’ll say hi to her for you. Just keep enjoying Byron, and remind me to kill you when you get back…’

  ‘Love you, sweetheart!’

  ‘Ugh. You too.’ She hung up and shook her head.

  Loulou.

  Mak let herself into the apartment and the door clicked shut behind her. It was the middle of the day, and the apartment was light with sunbeams. The garden looked green and overgrown beyond the windows. It was quiet.

  ‘Bogey?’

  There was no answer.

  The couch was tidy, the cushions neat, and there was no sign of the doona or Bogey’s things. For a moment her chest tightened with the thought he had gone back to Melbourne already, or found another place to stay. She had bought a bit of extra Thai in case he was home. It had been nice of him to cook her breakfast. Their meeting had embarrassed her, but she didn’t want him to leave.

  Ten minutes later there was a buzzing at the door panel, and soon Mak heard her friend make her way down the echoing hallway to Loulou’s door. Mak opened it with a smile.

  ‘Karen, it’s so great to see you.’

  The women embraced.

  Karen looked, and felt, thin. She was a detective constable working homicide, and Mak had first met her at the gruesome crime scene of her friend Catherine Gerber’s murder years ago, when she’d first arrived in Australia—the same crime scene where she’d met Andy, whom Karen had been working with. It looked liked work had been tough for the curly-haired redhead lately.

  ‘I have to say a big congratulations to you again on your promotion to detective. That’s really brilliant,’ Mak told her.

  ‘Thanks.’ Karen had worked hard to earn it, particularly being one of the younger officers in the department.

  ‘Come in, come in. I got us some Thai.’

  Twenty mi
nutes later, Loulou’s small living room was strewn with dirty dishes, napkins, flimsy wooden chopsticks, and plastic tubs reddened in splatters with remnants of sweet chilli sauce. Karen and Mak were curled up in opposite corners of the comfortable furry sofa, finishing the last of their lunch.

  ‘I’ve checked with the morgues,’ Mak said, continuing the brainstorming over her missing nineteen-year-old. She was more familiar with such places than most. Her detective inspector father had first taken her to a morgue for father-daughter bonding when she was twelve. ‘No one of his description is listed at the hospitals either. I don’t know where he is, but I doubt he’s lying under a stiff white sheet anywhere. It seems to me that he shimmied down that drainpipe and ran away, but I guess I can’t be sure. It would be pretty awful for his mum. I don’t think she has anyone else.’

  Makedde pushed a lonely prawn around a cooling bed of flat noodles, feeling the weight of her own loneliness, despite the company of her friend. ‘And if he’s not okay, I don’t want to be the one to tell Mrs Hart that her son dropped the wrong acid and has turned up as a John Doe somewhere,’ she continued. ‘God knows that happens enough.’

  ‘I thought he didn’t do drugs?’ Karen piped up.

  ‘Exactly.’

  She took a sip of cold water. It moved down nearly to the base of her belly. She had not eaten enough. She would have to be careful not to lose too much weight on what Loulou called the ‘Divorce Diet’. Perhaps this was the reason for Karen’s weight loss?

  ‘Any men on the scene, Karen?’

  ‘Like romance? No.’

  They continued eating.

  ‘Sorry about the shop talk, but…you know the case I did last time in Sydney? And the homicide scene you attended?’

  ‘How could I forget?’ Karen replied, flashing her customary wry smile. ‘It was front-page news there for a while…’

  ‘Well, remember that poor street kid, Tobias Murphy, wrongly arrested for the stabbing? Guess what? Tobias is living down the street from my new client. Tobias’s dad recommended me.’