by Tim Buckley
The receptionist was a kindly woman whose face might have been fixed in a sympathetic expression by years of sharing people’s pain. She showed me into an empty waiting room and told me the doctor would see me in a few minutes. It was a stark little room with dirty white walls, a few plastic chairs and a pile of dog-eared magazines on top of a Formica table, lit by a single bare bulb that dangled from the ceiling. I have a dread of doctors’ waiting rooms, of their surgeries in fact. They are infinitely depressing places where bad news lurks like a spectre in a kids’ cartoon and where everybody is reduced to helplessness. I would prefer to – and have – put up with pain and discomfort for weeks on end when a simple prescription for antibiotics might have cleared the problem in a couple of days. If it’s killing me, I don’t want to know until its job is done.
“Doctor Carlton will see you now,” the receptionist said with a reassuring smile, holding the door open and pointing me to a room at the end of a short, narrow corridor.
Carlton was a nondescript man, around middle-age I guessed, with glasses on a chain around his neck and without which he had his face close up to a piece of paper on the desk on which he scratched a signature and tossed it in the out-tray.
“Mr Wilde, is it?” he said, sitting back in his chair. “What seems to be the trouble, then?”
I should have had an elaborate story concocted to dupe him into letting slip what I needed to know, but I hadn’t had time and I really didn’t have the energy.
“Actually, Doc, there’s nothing wrong. Not with me, anyway.” I took a photograph of Cara out of my wallet. “This is my daughter. She was abducted a few weeks ago and I’m looking for her. I wondered if you might have seen her?”
“Gosh,” he said, taking the picture, “I’m terribly sorry to hear that. That’s terrible.”
He put on his glasses and looked hard at the photograph, then shook his head.
“I’m really sorry, Mr Wilde, but no, I haven’t seen her. She’s a beautiful little girl.”
He handed me back the photograph.
“You think she’s around here, do you? In Carravale?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. But you’re sure nobody like her has been into your surgery, in the last couple of weeks?”
“I see lots of kids, Mr Wilde, especially this time of year. I can’t say that I remember all of them, of course, but she doesn’t ring a bell. Have you spoken to the police? The station is not far from here, you know?”
“The thing is, Doc, I was told that you saw a little girl like her the week before last. She was wearing boots with fairy-tale princesses on them, and she had a cough. You thought she seemed a little bit ill at ease with the woman she was with?”
He sat back in his chair again, suddenly disconcerted. He thought for a moment, started to speak, then thought again.
“Where did you hear that?” he said finally, racking his brain to try to think who the informant might be.
“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “But you know the little girl I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“Look, Mr Wilde,” he said, carefully, “you know that I can’t discuss other patients with you. I’m very sorry for your trouble, really I am, but if there’s nothing else I can help you with then I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
I knew, of course, that he wouldn’t just volunteer the information but Napier knew that too and so he’d given me something else for my kit bag.
“Look, Doctor,” I said, with a frustrated sigh so that he knew I was indulging him but wouldn’t for long, “I’ve also heard some other things about you. I’ve heard that you’re the man to see if I needed, for example, some painkillers. Or some sleeping tablets. Or even antidepressants, apparently. I’ve heard that you’re not too concerned with symptoms, that around two hundred dollars is the going rate for a note from your little black book.”
He was dumbstruck for a moment but regained his composure just enough to express his furious indignation.
“Mr Wilde!” he blustered. “That is an outrageous accusation! If you don’t leave this instant, I will call the police! This instant! Get out!”
I sat still and shook my head.
“I can’t stop you calling the police, Doc,” I said, quietly, “but if you do, maybe I should get Nicky Kefu down here to talk to them too? Or Sandy Lee? They might have a few interesting stories for them, what do you think?”
He was about to continue his indignant tirade, but stopped short in his tracks. The names that Napier had given me had the desired effect, he went a deep red colour and started to wheeze as if he might pass out.
“Shall I ask your receptionist to bring you some water?” I asked.
“No!” He shook his head violently so that his glasses fell off and swung from the chain. “No!”
If looks could kill, he’d have murdered me there and then. He thought for a moment, desperately looking for a way out, but there was none. Then he opened up his desk drawer and pulled out a file.
“Her name was Annie Hall,” he said, through gritted teeth. “The little girl was Annie Hall. Her mother’s name was Faye.”
“Annie Hall?” I said, incredulous. “And that didn’t make you wonder? Annie fucking Hall?!”
“Look,” he snarled, “I don’t have time to investigate every patient that comes in the door. I just try to treat them and get them better, OK?”
“Do you have an address?”
He paused again.
“No,” he said. “She said she was between places, that she didn’t have an address she could give me.”
I was about to threaten him again when he flicked through the file and pulled out a scrap of paper.
“But I know where she filled the prescription. The pharmacy called to confirm it. Here.”
He passed me the note with the pharmacy’s name – Glendower Pharmacy in Bellevue, the next suburb over.
“How does this help me, Doc?” I said, ready to go on the offensive again. “Bellevue’s a big fucking place, you think I’m just going to wander over there and see her on a street corner?”
“I know the pharmacist there,” he said. “He called me because he knows her, he knows the two of them. They’ve been living in a flat over his shop for a few weeks, renting it off the guy that owns the building, some Greek fellow. The whole arrangement looked a bit odd to him and he wanted to make sure the kid was OK.”
I nodded and stood to leave.
“If you’re shitting me, Doc, I’ll be back, OK?”
53
We were lucky that Cara wasn’t often sick. She seemed to be a fairly robust little girl and even when she was struggling with a cold or a sniffle, she seemed usually to soldier on through it, unwilling to let it get in the way of whatever was holding her attention at the time. I remember one time, though, when she caught a bug that was going round and it did manage to lay her low. We took her to the doctor in Clovelly who prescribed some antibiotics to put her right. We picked up the prescription from the pharmacy in town and headed back to the house, ready to administer the cure. Whatever it was had left her uncharacteristically grumpy and belligerent, far from the easy-going child who was eager to please at all costs. The antibiotic was in the form of a syrup to be taken after meals, and that was where she drew the line. The fever and the aches were bad enough, but the foul concoction we were trying to force on her was the final straw. She refused point blank to take it, and even the two of us working as some sort of tag team couldn’t force the spoon through her sealed lips. Eventually, and after wiping splattered medicine off the countertops, the table, the floor and ourselves, we took her back to the pharmacy. We told the pharmacist that she just wouldn’t take it and asked was there anything else that might do the job that might not be so objectionable.
The pharmacist was a pretty young woman called Jenny and she leant down to Cara in her buggy. Cara, who had been grizzling an
d whining all day, was suddenly silent, staring at Jenny as she spoke to her in calm and soothing tones. Jenny had a chain with a gold elephant pendant and it seemed to hypnotise Cara as it swung gently from her neck. She took the bottle of syrup from me and unscrewed the little dosage cup from the top, talking to Cara all the while in a mesmerising croon.
“Open up, Cara,” she said, with a broad smile, “here comes the medicine and it’s going to make you all better!”
Cara did what she was asked without a murmur, opening her mouth wide and staring at Jenny as she took the medicine without even wincing or pulling a face. Jenny dabbed the corners of Cara’s mouth with a tissue and kissed her on the forehead. It took Cara four days to get over the bug and another to finish the course of antibiotics and so, for the next five days, three times a day, we took her to the pharmacy and Jenny gave her the medicine. I can never go into a pharmacy now without thinking of Jenny and of Cara, staring up at her with big, adoring eyes, relieved to have found at least one adult who knew what they were doing.
The pharmacy in Bellevue was at the end of a two-storey terraced arcade on a quiet street. A couple of the other units were boarded up, there was a fast-food takeaway and a mini-market and what looked like it might have been a charity shop although it wasn’t obvious what it was from the sign nor from the tat piled high on the floor inside. The top floor of the retail units all appeared to have been converted into flats, and the entrance to the one above the pharmacy was round the corner on the next street. There was a wheelie bin outside and a bicycle chained to a railing. I parked the car at a discreet distance and watched the door for a short while. Nobody came or left and there were no customers in the pharmacy. A couple of kids bought some sodas from the takeaway and that was it.
The day had been a frantic chase from the moment I got the call from Napier and it was the first time I’d had a quiet moment to arrange it all in my head. I suddenly had the same feeling I had in Mitchelstown, what seemed like a lifetime ago. I knew that this was, in all probability, another wild goose chase. The odds that the child the doctor had seen was in fact Cara were surely millions to one. But the sequence of events tallied with what we knew and the circumstances were undeniably consistent. Like Napier, I don’t believe in that much coincidence. So I sat in the car almost afraid to move, my gut knotted with the anticipation that it might be her and the sickening fear that it might not. The lights went out in the pharmacy and a man I assumed to be Carlton’s friend locked the door and lowered the security shutter. If Cara was there, the only way to find out was to ring the doorbell.
There was no light on the cracked old intercom buzzer and so I had to use the light on my phone to see in the gathering gloom and, when I did, there was no name. I buzzed a couple of times but there was no response. The buzzer made no sound so I couldn’t even tell if it was broken or if it was just out of my earshot. Just in case, I banged on the front door and I thought I might have seen a brief flash of light. I peered through the frosted glass but there was nothing and it might have been a reflection or just my imagination.
Eventually, I gave up and went to the takeaway to get something to eat. The kid behind the counter was tapping into his phone when I walked in and he finished what he was doing before reluctantly seeing to me.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Hot dog please, and a Coke.”
He grunted and took a packet of frozen frankfurters out of the freezer and threw one into a deep fat fryer. He coughed a phlegmy cough and scratched under his arm with dirty fingernails and I decided I’d just throw the hot dog in the bin when I got outside.
“I’m meeting a friend of mine, she lives over the pharmacy, but she’s not in – you haven’t seen her, have you?”
He shook his head.
“I thought she might have been in with her little one?”
“Don’t know her,” he mumbled. “Four fifty.”
He put the hot dog down on a counter stained with old ketchup and mustard. I gave him two dollars and took the Coke.
“You can keep the hot dog,” I said, and left.
I got back in the car and moved it out of sight of the takeaway, further down the street away from the door to the flat and facing away from it. The door was lit by a street light and I could see it in the mirror, so I just settled in to wait.
I suppose that we’re so immersed in the every day of life that, like the frog in a pot of water coming slowly to the boil, we don’t notice how much and how quickly it changes. Where we are and what we’re doing is the ever-changing norm and we can’t see over its parapet to understand how it looks from the other side. Sitting in my car, in a dingy suburb of Perth, drinking an out-of-date Coke and spying on a stranger’s door in my rear-view mirror seemed natural, seemed like exactly what I should be doing on a Wednesday night. Now, looking back in the context of what my life had been and what it had become, it’s a story I would never believe from a stranger.
I sat there for hours and, despite the surging anticipation and the caffeine, I started to doze off. Eleven became midnight became the early hours and, the next thing I knew, I was sitting bolt upright in the driver’s seat. It was just light and it was cold and the windows of the car had fogged up so I couldn’t see anything of the outside. I rubbed the driver’s window so that I could see the wing mirror and there she was, Faye Hall. Or whatever her name was. If that was indeed her. She was struggling with the bicycle lock and she didn’t have a child with her.
I jumped out of the car and ran back up the street. She was engrossed in unlocking the bicycle and didn’t notice me coming until I was beside her. She jumped when I spoke.
“Faye?” I said. “Faye Hall?”
She stopped dead and stood up straight.
“What?” she said.
“You’re Faye Hall, right?”
There was a flash of fear in her eye and it took her a moment to regain her composure.
“Sorry,” she said, with a weak smile, “you’ve got the wrong person.”
My brain was still a little bit sleep-addled so I just waded in without thinking about a plan.
“Look, my little girl has been kidnapped,” I blurted, “and I know you have a little girl up there. I know you’re using a false name, I know you’re only staying here temporarily and I know she has a cough, the same cough my little girl has. So you’re going to take me up to see her. Right now.”
She edged away from me but I got between her and the front door.
“Get the fuck away from me, you nutter,” she growled. “Get away from me or I’m calling the cops!”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialled Carter’s number. I showed her the screen.
“I’ll do it for you,” I said. “This is the cop in charge of looking for my daughter. I’ll give him a call now and there’ll be a patrol car here in five minutes.”
“NO!” she shouted. “Don’t do that! I can explain, I promise, I can explain!”
I couldn’t believe what was happening. A big part of me had expected her to laugh in my face with an obvious, innocent explanation that would send me on my way with my tail between my legs. But she didn’t have an explanation. She didn’t call the police. Cara was upstairs.
“She’s not your daughter,” she said, but I didn’t believe her.
“Take me to her,” I shouted at her. “Take me up there right now or I’ll smash this fucking door down!”
“Are you listening to me? She’s not your daughter!” she pleaded again, looking around to see if anybody was watching. She looked at me and pulled me into the doorway out of sight of the street and the arcade of shops. She put a hand to her brow and decided that telling me the truth was her only way out of an impossible situation.
“Look,” she said, “I’m going to tell you what’s happening here, but you have to swear to me you won’t tell another living soul?”
“You’ve got six
ty seconds,” I said, “and then I’m kicking this fucking door down! I mean it. One minute!”
“OK, OK. I’m on the run, all right?!” She pulled up the sleeve of her jacket and, though I’m no expert, even I could see that her arm underneath was pock-marked with cigarette burns. “I’m on the run because my husband does this to me. And he beats me. He’s broken my arm and cracked my ribs. He can never find me, do you understand? I’m on the run because, if he finds me, he’s going to kill me and he’ll hurt my little girl!”
In that split-second, I believed her. Before I could apply any logic or reasoning, I believed that she was telling the truth. But I wasn’t leaving without seeing the little girl with my own eyes.
“I… I’m sorry… I…” I stuttered. “But, I… I have to see her. You must understand. Someone’s taken my little girl and she might be in there. I have to see her, or I’m calling the police.”
“But if you call the cops, I’m dead,” she appealed to me. “Don’t you get that? He’ll find me, they’ll tell him where I am!”
I shook my head.
“I’m sorry, but I have to see her. If you’re telling the truth, I’ll leave and you’ll never hear from me again.”
She slumped back against the door, trying desperately to think of a way out but there was none.
“OK,” she said, quietly. “You can see her, but then you go. And you better not frighten her, she’s already spooked enough without you putting the fear of God into her.”
I nodded and she pulled her keys from her pocket. She opened the door and let me in, then locked it again and slid across a deadbolt. She walked ahead of me up the stairs into a sparsely furnished living room with a sink and a cooker in the corner and softly opened the door to the bedroom. In a cot beside the bed, a little girl was lying flat on her back in a pink nightshirt with her hands up by her head, sound asleep. She had a head of soft, thick curls and she wasn’t Cara. I turned to the woman and nodded, and we backed slowly out of the room. She led me back down the stairs to the front door.