by Stephen Orr
Patrick lifted his head and looked at the policeman. Laing studied the boy’s face. ‘Hello, Patrick.’
No reply. Patrick looked down at the lino and the black marks at the bottom of the counter where thousands of boots had scuffed the wood.
‘Patrick’s staying with me,’ Moy said.
Laing leaned forward, although he was no closer to the boy. ‘Are you sure that’s something you want to do, Patrick? This man hasn’t cooked a meal since 1986.’
‘Thanks very much. At least we don’t have cats sleeping with us.’
‘That’s not my fault,’ Laing replied, attempting to meet the boy’s eyes. ‘It’s my wife, she loves cats.’ He leaned across the desk. ‘That’s what happens when you get married, Patrick…be warned.’
Moy looked at him, the kindergarten teacher with the bobbed hair on the tip of his tongue; Laing shot back a glare. Patrick (if that was his name) watched them with a blank expression.
‘Well, you look after yourself,’ Laing said. ‘Detective Moy will find your parents in no time. He’s very good, despite what everyone says.’ The phone rang and he answered it.
‘Come on,’ Moy said, taking Patrick around the shoulder and leading him towards his office. As he went Laing covered the mouthpiece and said, ‘Oh, Superintendent Graves rang. He was wondering why he hasn’t got a report on—’ he indicated the boy. ‘And the fire.’
‘Thanks, Constable.’
‘Thank you, Detective.’
Moy took Patrick through into the hallway. ‘You find this place a bit…intimidating?’
‘No.’
‘Any of these fellas would help you, you know. All you gotta do is ask.’
They got to a room with a steel door. Moy produced a fistful of keys he used to open a seam of locks. ‘This is the armory.’ He walked inside and switched on the lights. Patrick followed him in, his eyes lighting up at the sight of three shotguns, two pistols and a rifle locked in a cradle. There was a silver cage, itself locked up, full of old pistols, rifles and shotguns. ‘These are the ones we’ve confiscated,’ Moy said, shaking the cage. ‘They have to be sent to town, to be destroyed.’
The boy had seemed fascinated with Moy’s revolver, snuggled into a holster on his belt. He’d studied it, his mouth open with anticipation, plainly resisting the temptation to ask if he could hold it.
Now he looked at the cradle with the guns and said, ‘Have you ever had to use them?’
‘Not these, but back in town, there were times…’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, there was this dad, and he’d locked himself in his house with his wife and kids…’ He stopped.
‘And what happened?’
‘What happened? Nothing, he gave up.’
‘You didn’t have to shoot him?’
‘No.’
‘You should’ve.’
Moy looked at the boy, looking at the guns. ‘Why’s that?’
‘If he was threatening them.’
Moy could hear Laing whistling from the front desk. ‘But he gave up. Everything was okay.’
‘I suppose.’
‘Of course, we don’t put up with violent people. If we can just work out who they are.’
‘Sometimes you know,’ Patrick said, looking at him.
‘What do you mean?’
But the boy’s head just dropped.
‘So there’s a violent person?’
No reply.
‘But it’s not someone you know, is it? Someone from Guilderton, for instance? Someone you’ve met today?’
Nothing.
‘The thing is, if you told me, I’d have him in here like that.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Or if it was someone close, we could go and have a talk.’
The boy worked at a hole in the lino with the tip of his shoe.
‘Someone you know, someone in your family?’
Silence.
Moy switched off the lights and locked the door, and they continued down the hall. He entered a code on a keypad and another door opened. They walked into a room made up of three small cells. The cells were clean, with tiled floors and fold-down beds that had been made up with fresh linen and rugs. Each had its own stainless steel toilet, a single roll of paper and a hand basin.
‘This is where we put the bad guys,’ Moy said. ‘Or sometimes, on nights, we have a sleep here.’
‘You do?’
‘The beds are quite comfy. Try one.’
Patrick stood staring at the closest cell, its door wide open.
‘Air conditioning, heating, everything. We have meals sent over from the Wombat Inn. If this was a motel it’d be two hundred a night. What do you think?’
Patrick was still looking, unsure.
‘Come on,’ Moy said, going into the cell, sitting and then lying on the bed. ‘It’s mainly for the farmers who get on the grog.’ He stopped again. ‘It’s like a cubby house.’ He motioned for Patrick to come in.
Patrick took a few steps, looked up at the bars and then crossed the threshold.
‘See, you could decorate it: lava lamp, the whole lot.’
Patrick’s face twisted. He dropped to his knees, fell forward and crumpled into a ball.
Moy knelt beside him. ‘You okay?’
‘Please…’
‘Should we take you out?’
But the boy just kept crying.
Moy picked him up and carried him from the cells. He draped him across his shoulder, entered the code and left the room. When he had him in his office, he lowered him into a chair. ‘Hey,’ he said, but Patrick just sobbed, fighting for breath.
Laing stepped into the office. ‘Everything okay?’
‘Fine,’ Moy replied.
The constable just waited.
‘Fine.’
Laing left the room.
Moy sat beside the boy. ‘I’m sorry about that. It wasn’t such a good idea, was it?’
A vacant stare. Moy looked around. Picked up the old photo on his desk and held it for a while. ‘I didn’t tell you what happened to Daniel Moy, did I?’
Patrick shook his head and sniffed.
‘See, after all that walking, the photographer wouldn’t go with Daniel.’
Pause. ‘What do you mean?’
‘After walking for two days the photographer wouldn’t go with Daniel, to take the photo of his daughter, Lizzie. So Daniel said, listen, she’s my only daughter, and she’s gone. Me and my wife are worried we won’t remember what she looked like.’
‘But you’ve got the photo,’ Patrick said.
‘Wait, I’ll explain,’ Moy replied. ‘Daniel was in tears…he was a broken man. As the photographer carried on he sat in a chair and cried like a baby. Eventually he stood up and pleaded with the man. You want money? How much money? I only want one photo. But this photographer, he just kept on with what he was doing. You listening? Daniel asked. You listening to me? And then he got angry. He saw this knife on a bench and grabbed it. Then he held it to the photographer’s throat. You will come with me, he said, calmly.’
Patrick looked closely at the photo. Studied the expression in Daniel’s face.
‘Next thing,’ Moy said, ‘this photographer’s son comes in the room and Daniel lets go of the photographer and grabs the boy. He takes the knife and holds it to his throat.’
Patrick’s eyes widened; Moy could see him picturing the boy, his face screwed up, his hands trembling and his knees weak.
Moy talked in a whisper. ‘Right, pack your camera, and let’s get going, Daniel said. He held the knife to the boy’s throat as the photographer went outside and got his cart ready. Then they set off for Cambrai, the photographer driving, and Daniel sitting in the back with the boy, his neck all nicked and bleeding, blood on his shirt.’
Patrick settled back in his chair. Looking, Moy thought, like someone was reading to him from a book. He took the photo and looked carefully.
As the boy contemplated the image, Moy’s inbox rang its little bell. Moy knew he
should ignore it, but hoped it might be something useful: the boy’s father discovered, the whole mystery solved in the click of a mouse. He opened the email and there was a message from Superintendent Graves at Port Louis: ‘DS Moy—Is this a familiar face? He was found washed up at Mangrove Point. Early 30s, brown hair, greying on sides, 171 centimetres…’
He opened the attachment and studied the face. The young man’s body had bloated in the ocean, and his skin was red and flecked with broken capillaries. He had three or four days’ worth of stubble. His hair was wet, full of sea grass.
‘He was found like this, naked. Looks like he’d been wearing a ring and earring, both removed.’
Moy studied the dead man’s flat chest and stomach, and his white skin.
‘I suppose you won’t recognise him, but I wondered if someone there might. He’s not a local. Coroner’s coming tonight but they reckon he’s been in the sea for twelve hours.’
Moy saw the lifelessness most in the hands, the fingers. The way they might have, but never would, move or twitch or form a fist.
Doesn’t ring a bell, he replied, but I’ll forward to the fellas here.
23
PATRICK WAS STILL not talking, but Moy had a lead. Sort of. He left the boy in the lunch room in front of a television documentary about seals and set off towards the south-east corner of Guilderton. It was a little enclave hemmed in by roads named Oxford and Cambridge, Margaret and Elizabeth, running off the central spine of King Edward Terrace. But there was nothing regal in the scribbly gums and stunted eremophilas; the roads worn away and colonised by grass; blue metal footpaths and humming transformers.
He pulled up in the driveway of a house on the far end of Cambridge Street. Fibro, with a tenuous brick veneer cladding, most of the fly-screens hanging loose. He walked up the drive past a half-buried fish pond full of brown water and what looked like a carburettor. At the edge of the scoria stunted cacti survived the Armageddon that had laid waste to the front yard.
He went to the front door and knocked. And waited. A neighbour stared over the fence. ‘Hello, do you know if Mr Williams is at home?’ he asked.
Blank face.
‘Alan Williams? Does he live here?’
The man said nothing and went inside. Moy knocked again. ‘Hello, anyone home?’
He took a few steps across the verandah, past a box of old National Geographics and looked in the front window. ‘Mr Williams?’
There was a table with plates and mugs and breakfast cereal. A lounge suite and a coffee table covered with magazines. There were clothes on the floor, and a suitcase with a collection of airline tags attached.
He walked around the side of the house, standing on his toes to look in the higher windows: a bathroom (with frosted windows, latched); a spare bedroom (a single bed with a bare mattress, a dresser, a wardrobe); the main bedroom (a double bed, another wardrobe, open, full of neatly hung clothes); the toilet; and a third bedroom (empty, marks on the carpet showing where furniture had once rested).
His phone rang. ‘Shit.’ He fumbled for it and answered with a whisper.
‘Guess who I just got a call from?’ George said.
‘Dad, I can’t talk now.’
‘You been goin’ behind my back.’
‘What?’
‘You know.’
Moy continued whispering. ‘Dad, I’m in the middle of something.’
‘Speak up!’
He raised his voice slightly. ‘I’m with a suspect, Dad.’
There was a short pause.
‘Well, I’d like a word when it suits.’
‘Fine. I’ll pop around later. I’ve got some news, and someone for you to meet.’
‘Who?’
‘Later.’ He hung up and switched off the phone.
The shed door was locked, so he looked through the louvred windows and saw dozens of boxes, taped up and stacked on top of each other. There was a lawnmower and he could make out one end of a train set on an old door resting on trestles.
He looked around the yard. Tall grass growing through the remains of a vegetable patch. ‘Fuck.’
‘Can I help you?’
He turned to face a woman in late middle age, her hair up in a bun, one eye compressed in what he guessed was the legacy of a stroke.
‘Detective Sergeant Bart Moy,’ he said, producing his warrant card. ‘Guilderton police.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m looking for Alan Williams.’
‘That’s my son.’
‘He lives here?’
‘You know…why are you asking me?’
Moy shrugged, uncomfortably. ‘You live with him?’
‘Are you asking or telling me?’
‘Asking.’
‘In that case, no. One of the neighbours called me.’ She looked at him with contempt. ‘So?’
‘I didn’t catch your name?’
‘Naomi Williams.’
‘Naomi…you might have heard, last Monday, a young boy—’
‘Oh, goodness me,’ she said. ‘You’re making some very… tenuous connections.’
‘No…I didn’t even know about all that business.’
‘There was no business, Detective. A few paintings. And a town full of very bored people.’
‘I wouldn’t necessarily argue with that, Naomi. But the thing is, this woman claimed to have seen Alan driving down Ayr Street when the boy was taken…by a man she said looked like your son.’
Naomi closed her eye and slowly shook her head. ‘That was very convenient. She got a good look?’
‘She wasn’t sure.’
‘No, she wasn’t, was she? But that’s enough reason for you to come and…snoop?’
He stared at her. ‘Well, yes, in a case of possible child abduction.’
Moy could see her jaw tensing. ‘Seeing how Guilderton has decided that my son’s a paedophile?’
‘No.’
‘Yes, he is, apparently. He brought a student home. The student told everyone, all we did was look at some art, but that’s beside the point. Only a paedophile would lure a student back to his house.’
Moy was lost for words.
‘So that’s why you’re looking in the shed. Alan got that child—’
‘We found him.’
‘So he would’ve told you to come here?’
A long pause; the sound of the fly-screen tapping.
‘I think I’ll put in a complaint about you, Detective.’
‘I’m sorry you see it that way.’
Naomi turned, found a key in her pocket and opened the shed. ‘Come in,’ she said.
They both walked into the shed. She switched on a light. ‘You can come out now,’ she called.
‘Listen, Mrs Williams, it’s not about what I think,’ Moy said. ‘It’s just my job, to follow up on everything.’
‘Rubbish. Did you ring Alan?’
‘That’s why I came—’
‘You were trying to be clever! As with everyone in Guilderton you assumed—’
‘I didn’t know about your son. I’ve been in the city for the last fifteen years.’
She stood her ground; then she turned and indicated the writing on the sides of the boxes: paints; small canvases; brushes; sketchbooks; charcoals and pencils.
‘See, after all that business he just didn’t feel like continuing,’ she said.
Moy was scanning the shed. ‘I could imagine.’
‘Now he just gets up and goes to work.’
‘It’s a small town, isn’t it?’
‘And getting smaller, it seems.’
He shook his head. ‘Okay, I’ll be honest, Naomi, I acted very stupidly.’
She looked at him, her face calming.
‘I thought, maybe…What can I say?’
‘Sorry would be a good start.’
‘Sorry.’
Naomi’s eye was clear and bright. ‘And I bet I know who saw Alan near this boy?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘It
was the mother—her name’s Silvia.’
‘No, I can tell you. Her name wasn’t Silvia.’
‘Or her sister, the boy’s aunt—Jay.’
Naomi stared at him, and knew. ‘See, you listen to gossip, Detective.’
‘I didn’t say…’
‘You listen to gossip…’
Yes, in fact. It was his job. He said nothing.
‘The thing is,’ Naomi said, finally, ‘Alan drove me to town last weekend and shouted me a ticket to King Lear. He took an extra day off school and we drove back on the Monday afternoon.’
‘King Lear?’
‘So, he might’ve taken him. Assuming he went missing after that.’
‘No.’
‘When was it again, Detective?’
Silence.
‘Mrs Williams, I’m sorry. I suppose I’d complain about me too.’
Naomi stepped forward, took his hand and attempted a smile. ‘Perhaps it’s best if we all start again.’
‘Yes.’
‘Almost like you’d never been here, Detective Moy.’
24
MOY SAT BESIDE his father at the small dining table in the old man’s kitchen. Patrick sat in a smaller chair, his hands under his legs, occasionally looking up at the stooped man with his big ears and hairy nostrils.
‘We’re looking for Patrick’s parents,’ Moy told George. ‘Until then, he’s staying with me.’
George looked the boy over. ‘You speak?’
‘He’s a bit shy.’ Moy placed another crossword book in front of the boy. ‘You can do these?’
Patrick picked up a pen and started writing.
George glared at his son. Moy stood his ground, his arms crossed.
‘Well?’ the old man asked.
‘What?’
‘Is there something you’d like to tell me?’
Moy shrugged.
‘I had a phone call earlier on.’
‘Good.’
‘Don’t get smart.’
‘Who was the phone call from, Dad?’
George stopped to think. ‘Janice…Janet? Either way, she was from the nursing home. She was after you, but she must have got the numbers mixed up.’
Moy didn’t know what to say. ‘I was gonna tell you.’
‘You were?’
‘It was just an inquiry.’
‘He’s put down your name, she says.’