One Boy Missing

by Stephen Orr

  One Boy Missing

  Stephen Orr is the author of several published works of fiction and non-fiction. His novel Time’s Long Ruin was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2011. He lives in Adelaide.

  STEPHEN ORR

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © 2013 by Stephen Orr

  The moral right of Stephen Orr to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in 2014 by The Text Publishing Company

  A different form of the memento mori story was published as ‘The Photographer’s Son’ in Quadrant, November 2013.

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro 12/16.5 by J & M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Orr, Stephen, 1967- author.

  Title: One boy missing / by Stephen Orr.

  ISBN: 9781922147271 (paperback)

  9781921961663 (ebook)

  Subjects: Detective and mystery stories.

  Kidnapping—Fiction.

  Dewey Number: A823.4

  Prologue

  THE BOY WAS nine or ten years old. He was still in his pyjamas, baggy track pants full of holes with a frayed cuff where he let them drag. Now he pulled them up, but they slipped; he only bothered when they were down past his hips. He wore a plain white T-shirt, covered with food, and an adult’s pyjama top—buttons missing, sleeves down past his fingertips.

  Stopping, he closed his eyes. His lips moved. He might have been saying, ‘…where?’ He clenched his hands and started to cry, briefly. Punched himself on the thigh, then turned and ran down a laneway that provided rear access to most of the shops on Ayr Street, the main drag through the centre of town. There were bins, piles of flattened cardboard boxes and empty milk crates. On the other side, a fence, and hard up against this, a pair of industrial waste bins branded with hippo heads.

  The boy ducked into the gap between the bins. There was a strong smell of Chinese food. He felt something soft between his toes and looked down at a pile of rotten fruit that had turned black. He was out of the wind but it was still cold and he started shivering.

  There was the screech and grind of a rubbish truck. Sounds from the main street: bags of grain being dragged out of the fodder store; wind-chimes being hung out in front of Elder’s Hardware.

  Random voices called out across Ayr Street, Guilderton.

  Minutes passed before a tall man opened the back door to his shop, jumped down the few steps to the laneway, took out a cigarette and lit it. The boy could see he was wearing a vest with the words ‘Mango Meats’ above a pocket full of pens. The man inhaled a quarter of the cigarette in one go, held the smoke and blew it out.

  The boy moved a little towards him, tempted. Then sank back.

  A voice called from inside the shop. ‘Where are yer?’

  The man shook his head. ‘What?’

  ‘Larry’s here.’

  He flicked the cigarette to the ground, stepped it out and went inside.

  Silence.

  A crow landed near the boy’s feet and started working on the remains of a ham roll. A cyclist turned into the laneway, sped up and was gone. The boy leaned on the fence and allowed his body to slide down. Then he heard the car. He breathed sharply and squeezed himself deeper into a corner wet with black syrup. The car moved slowly, and stopped. There was a heavy chug from the motor and the smell of poorly burnt petrol; the handbrake; a door opening; the click as the boot released.

  He took the boy quickly. His big hands wrapped around the child’s arms and he yanked him out of the gap then grabbed him around the chest so he was pinned.

  ‘Don’t move.’

  The boy struggled, but could only move his legs. The man’s hand was across his mouth and he bit down into a ring, and bone, and the taste of salt. The man released his hand and jagged him to the side to shut him up.

  The boy started screaming. In a single movement the man threw him into the boot. The boy’s ribs landed against a spare tyre and jack. He screamed again. The man reached for the boot lid and as he did a small, bony fist struck him in the ribs. He grabbed the boy’s hair and forced him down. ‘Y’little cunt.’ He spat and slammed the boot.

  The boy started kicking at the boot lid.

  ‘Stop it,’ the man said, close to the metal. ‘Or else.’ He opened the door of his car and in one movement, slipped into the driver’s seat, released the handbrake and planted his foot as he closed the door. He wrestled the wheel; collected the side of the hippo bin anyway as he tore off.

  The butcher stepped out of the back door of his shop and saw a man in a car turn and shout. Then he saw the boot fly open, the car stop and the man get out and shout at a figure in the boot, a small boy, perhaps. The man shut the boot, glanced up at the butcher and slammed his hand against the rear window. He got back in the car and took off.

  The butcher went back inside. The laneway was still, the cold metal of the bins and fence warming in the early morning light. The crow returned to the ham roll. Seconds passed. The butcher emerged from the back door with another man. ‘…not sure, maybe someone in the back,’ he was saying. ‘Anyway, not too many dads put their kids in the boot.’

  Both men stood in the middle of the laneway. ‘What was he doing?’ the second man asked. ‘The kid?’

  ‘Mate.’ The butcher shook his head. ‘Scared fuckin’ shitless.’

  They looked up and down the laneway, as if this might help them decide what to do.

  ‘Well, I reckon we call the cops,’ the second man said.

  The butcher stared at him. ‘Y’reckon?’

  ‘We don’t know who he was, eh?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The butcher went in and a moment later the other man followed.

  Minutes passed. The butcher emerged with a woman, pointed to where the car had been, and they both went back inside.

  A delivery van pulled up in front of the hippo bins. A man got out, pulled back a tarp and produced a pile of newspapers. He threw them up against the back door of the newsagent. Then he returned to his truck and drove off down the laneway.

  1

  BART MOY’S HEADACHE extended from his temple to his shoulder. He’d tried a warm shower, a series of stretches and a few tablets he’d found in the pocket of his jeans. He knew it was all a waste of time—what he needed was sleep.

  He waited at Guilderton’s only set of traffic lights. They always seemed to be red, no matter what direction you were going. He noticed the screwed-up piece of paper on the seat beside him. Picked it up, flattened it on his knee. ‘Application for Professional Development’. He hadn’t filled it in. What could you do in Guilderton? DNA sequencing? Still, he wondered if it was symptomatic of something greater. Why apply if you didn’t want to be developed? Why can’t I just do my job? Or is that the problem? Just a shithouse copper, going through the motions? Like the old man who walked past his house every day. Socks and sandals. Returning with a litre of milk.

  He stopped and got out of his unmarked Commodore. Straightening his back, he remembered he hadn’t brushed his teeth. He ducked back in to search for mints.
Nothing. Then he stood looking down the laneway behind Ayr Street.

  Moy glimpsed his face in the wing mirror. He was getting fat, he knew; he’d lost his chin, gained a blush on his cheeks. He didn’t care anymore. He’d passed into his forties with little or no fuss: the stomach had arrived, the trainer-bra boobs along with a sort of giblet effect under his arms, but his legs were still strong, his buttocks tight, his mind sharp. Growing old didn’t bother him; the glib childhood promises of career and wealth had long since given way to gas bills and self-pollution. Now life was just movement—a slow progress through the world in the dawning realisation that you were stuck with your own company for the rest of eternity.

  A tall figure appeared behind him and asked, ‘Detective Sergeant?’

  Moy turned. ‘Bryce.’

  ‘Down the laneway,’ the younger man said, indicating with a nod.

  Moy looked at him. There were still traces of enthusiasm in his eyes, in the way he kept his shirt ironed and his shoes polished. Since arriving in Guilderton, Constable Bryce King had done all the right things: joined the Guilderton Maulers, Mallee League ’91 Premiers, where every Friday night pig farmers and diesel mechanics got to tell him to fuck off; continued a tradition of Stranger Danger talks at Guilderton Primary; helped replace a urinal at a Civic Park working bee and, to the delight of most, started dating the girl from the forestry office who walked with an audible limp.

  ‘You meant to have knocked off?’ Moy asked.

  ‘I can wait,’ King replied, and Moy remembered what pissed him off most about the young and ambitious.

  ‘Where’s this butcher?’

  The constable took a moment, wondering. Moy studied his eyes and guessed what he was thinking. His lips almost formed words, but he stopped short: It’s because I haven’t shaved for three days, isn’t it? Give it twenty years and see if anyone thanks you for your sixty-hour week.

  ‘There he is,’ King said, pointing to the butcher, emerging from the back door of his shop.

  Moy locked the car and walked down the laneway, under tape that had been stretched between fence posts, past the hippo bins and broken crates left, he guessed, by the old wog baker he’d arrested for laying into his wife.

  He attempted to tuck his shirt into his pants where it kept coming loose around his hips. Walking around a mud-splattered patrol car, he shook hands with the butcher. ‘Detective Sergeant…’ he began, but stopped short.

  The butcher smiled. ‘Moysie,’ he said.

  ‘Justin Davids, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, good to see you. Where you been all these years?’

  Moy shrugged. ‘Working in town.’

  ‘What brings you back?’

  ‘You know…Dad’s ill.’

  The butcher studied his old friend’s face and made up his mind about this new, middle-aged Moy. ‘Well, welcome home.’

  Moy could guess what he was thinking: Wife shot through? Couldn’t get ahead, couldn’t get a promotion, couldn’t afford the nice house, the car, the trips? Had to come home and slum it with all the farm boys and bush pigs?

  Moy had one strong memory of Justin Davids. It was primary school—grade six or seven. There was a little Lebo and Justin and his tribe of followers had given him hell. They’d called him Castro which, Moy realised at the time, just proved how completely stupid they were. They’d spoken to him like they were clearing phlegm from their throats: ‘Hey…cchk…Mohammed.’ Justin had inspected Castro’s sandwiches and confiscated the mettwurst to flick at his mates.

  Standing at the back door to Mango Meats he found himself wanting to mention Castro but stopping himself.

  Moy could remember the day Justin and his mates chased Castro into a cubicle in the boys’ toilets and proceeded to throw fruit, missiles of wet paper and a floater from an adjacent toilet over the concrete wall at him. He could remember laughing as the olive-skinned boy with the black curls flung open the door, threw a punch at Davids, ran out and wasn’t seen at school for another two weeks.

  He could remember the talk about the evils of bullying, and he could still see Davids looking at the ground and smirking.

  He took out a notepad and a pencil that was mostly blunt. ‘So, what did you see?’

  ‘Dark colour, blue I think,’ the butcher began. ‘Falcon. Early eighties…you know, the boxy ones.’

  ‘We’ve got a book. Can you come and look?’

  ‘When I knock off.’ He closed his eyes, took a moment. ‘Sticker on the back window. Red and black, mighta been a car-yard sticker. And the back mud flap was loose, dragging.’

  Moy wrote it down. ‘And what about this kid?’

  Davids described a boy, maybe ten, in a pyjama top and baggy track pants. Middling hair: between long and short, blonde and dark. The man throwing him in the boot, kicking and screaming. ‘Didn’t want to go with him, that’s for sure.’

  ‘See the boy’s face?’

  ‘Just quickly…we were in the shop getting the meat out and I heard screaming. I thought it was kids playing, so I ignored it. By the time I realised and went out…’

  Then he described the man. Thirty, a few years older; dark hair; tight T-shirt; goatee. ‘Big bastard, you know, muscly. No taller than you or me, shorter perhaps.’ He told Moy about the slammed boot, the wheels skidding on small rocks.

  ‘This kid, he was still in his pyjamas?’

  ‘It looked like it.’

  ‘In the boot? Strange, eh?’

  Davids paused, maybe wondering if there was some suspicion attached to the comment. ‘Why?’

  ‘Outside, playing, in pyjamas?’

  ‘He wasn’t playing.’

  ‘And you’ve never seen this kid?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Or the fella?’

  ‘No. I would’ve recognised him. He looked up.’

  Moy was struggling with his pencil, and the picture of the boy. ‘So, was this fella an Aussie?’

  Davids shrugged. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Nothing distinctive? Big nose, scars?’

  ‘I can see him but…’

  ‘Okay. We got someone can help you with that too.’

  Then they looked at the hippo bin, the scar of paint left by the car. ‘Looks like he got spooked,’ Moy said.

  ‘He gave it a fair whack.’

  Finally, Moy looked at him and said, ‘You remember Karim?’

  Davids remembered, and smiled. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He still around?’

  The butcher wiped his cold hands on his apron and laughed. ‘He’s running Cummins these days.’

  ‘Cummins?’

  ‘The concrete people.’

  And Moy smiled. ‘Castro…concrete?’

  ‘Yeah. He coaches my son’s footy team.’

  2

  THE MORNINGS WERE best. Wheatbelt mornings, enough damp in the air for the smell of wet grass. Moy would often go for a walk in his thongs and shorts and singlet—no one saw him, stranded on the edge of town—running his hand through waist-high barley in one of Paschke’s paddocks that ran along Wauchope Road.

  Bart Moy loved piggeries. Rex Paschke had one of these too, packed with three hundred sows, emptying their bowels into concrete gutters that drained into tanks the size of swimming pools, filling the early morning with a smell the locals on the west of town had been going on about for decades.

  Moy guessed the boy was somewhere close. He might have been kidnapped or taken by a dirty. Then again, crime in Guilderton was usually about stolen timber, some horny kid who couldn’t wait for his girlfriend’s fifteenth birthday, graffiti on a new Toyota in Olsen’s car yard. Not enough to justify a full-time detective. But there were other issues that had brought him home.

  Later, he drove down the same streets he walked, aware of the morning, damp clothes on heavy lines, bikes left on frosty lawns, tractors and grain trucks starting and revving in farm sheds on the edge of town. He moved slowly, his window down, his hand drumming on the car roof. Occasionally he’d stop and ask some
old fella, ‘You seen a kid…a boy? In pyjamas?’

  ‘How old?’

  Thinking, what the fuck’s it matter if you haven’t seen him?

  ‘You see him, you call the police, okay?’

  ‘What’s yer number?’

  ‘It’s in the book.’

  He arrived at a big bike park where town met paddock. It was full of pine trees that kept the few hectares dark all day. Usually it was crowded with kids building jumps with their dads’ spades, flattening the mounds with their little feet in farm boots, spending Saturdays jumping into a sky that promised twisted ankles, and fun. Other times, especially early on a Sunday morning, it was the place to bring your girlfriend.

  He parked, got out and walked along the bike track, dragging his feet, thinking he should call out and having no name to call.

  ‘Who you looking for?’ A kid’s voice.

  He turned to the nine- or ten-year-old standing with his hands in his pockets. Not a missing child, this one. ‘Kid your age.’

  ‘You his dad?’

  ‘I’m a policeman. He’s lost.’

  The boy didn’t seem concerned. ‘No one here,’ he said, almost defiantly, and Moy could smell the cigarette smoke on his clothes.

  ‘You gettin’ ready for school?’ he asked, but the boy almost laughed.

  ‘Dad got me harvest leave. No one goes to school this time of year.’

  He turned and ran off and Moy took a few moments to survey the rest of the park. He could remember coming here himself, in the days before the track. Back then it was all about climbing the pine trees.

  He looked up, as if the boy might be hiding in the limbs. He saw himself with a slingshot, waiting for an old woman to go past with her shopping. Remembered just sitting there, unable to do it, the rock heavy in his hand.

  He cruised the length of Gawler Street, a succession of cream-brick government houses full of teachers, nurses and coppers who’d come from other places, marooned in the wheatbelt, biding their time, planting vegetable gardens to soak up weekends with absolutely nothing to do. The smart ones loaded their cars on Friday night and drove to town, returning in a semi-depressed state every Sunday night, deadening the rest of the week with overwork and alcohol. But mostly it was just the hum of harvesters, conversations about reflux and milk teeth, the taste of microwave meals and snow-drift CSI, no matter how big your antenna.