by Sarah Bailey
‘Nope.’
Dot’s lips move as if she is talking to herself and I think she might be praying.
‘We’ve been wondering whether someone attacked Rick because they thought he had something to do with Abbey disappearing,’ I say.
Daniel crosses his arms. ‘It’s possible, I guess.’
‘Mr Clark, I’d like to reconfirm that you didn’t leave the house yesterday morning?’
He rolls his eyes. ‘I didn’t touch him. Had plenty of opportunity if I’d wanted to.’
I turn to Dot. ‘Mrs Clark, can you please confirm you were both here yesterday morning between five and seven?’
‘Yes.’ She chews her lip and bobs her head.
I lean back against the chair and it creaks loudly. ‘As a result of what happened we are obviously running two investigations, and we’re trying to determine if your daughter’s disappearance is linked to the attack on Rick Fletcher. We may have more questions for you as we work through the information.’
A dark flush creeps up Daniel’s neck. ‘I don’t like the idea you’ll be focusing on what happened to him and ignoring Abbey. You haven’t even issued an amber alert.’ He says this with the naive indignation of someone who has been given a piece of information to weaponise, despite not understanding its context.
‘Mr Clark, I can assure you we’re working hard to find your daughter. An amber alert is not appropriate for this situation but we’re taking her disappearance very seriously.’ As I give my little speech I’m transported to the Maras’ kitchen. Its white tiles and marble benchtops were a world away from this dingy cave, but Abbey’s parents’ expressions are exactly the same as the ones Deirdre and Lucas Mara had worn the first time I went to their house.
Daniel grunts and mutters under his breath.
‘Had Abbey seemed herself lately?’ I direct this question to Dot, who immediately defers to Daniel.
‘Oh, yes,’ she murmurs absently.
‘Abbey was fine,’ spits Daniel, pitching forward. ‘I know what you’re getting at, but she hasn’t run off or done anything stupid. Either that Fletcher kid did something to her or some other piece of shit did. Whatever happened, you better bloody find her.’
‘We still need to speak with a lot of people.’ I push away from the table and stand up, keen to put some distance between myself and Daniel Clark. ‘I’d like to look in her room, please.’
Daniel cocks his head at de Luca. ‘The other lot already did that on Sunday.’
‘I would like to have a look as well.’
He shoves his chair back, causing wood to screech against wood. ‘You can waste time poking around in her room again, pretending to know this and that, but then I want you out of here.’ Leaning forward menacingly, his palms on the table, he adds, ‘It’s unbelievable, really—you cops are always sticking your noses in our business when it’s not welcome, and then when we actually need you, you’re fucking hopeless.’ He kicks the chair out of the way and yanks a cigarette from a pack in his jeans pocket. Dot flinches as he stalks past her.
The back door bangs loudly against the side of the house, making Dot and I jump, while de Luca just raises an eyebrow.
‘Don’t bother coming back here unless you’re bringing my daughter home,’ Daniel snarls over his shoulder.
Tuesday, 12 April
10.03 am
Abbey’s room is small and exceptionally neat. The single bed is made, and a laundry basket in the corner is half full of clothes. There’s no desk, but sagging shelves hold a few books, an empty glass full of dried wildflowers and several loose sheets of paper. On the wall is a landscape watercolour with Abbey’s name spelled out in stylised font, a stunning mix of feathers and scales, animals writhing and wrestling, faces peering out from the dips and curves. Several other pencil sketches, some clearly unfinished, are attached to the wall with Blu Tack.
Dozens of photos are stuck along the front of the shelves. Some are copies of the ones that were in Rick’s bedroom, while others are of Abbey with female friends. There’s a photo of her brothers but none of her parents.
De Luca stands in the doorway, arms folded. ‘What are you looking for?’
Through the window I can see Daniel in the narrow backyard. He’s squatting on a patch of faded grass next to a motorbike and fiddling with one of the parts, a trail of smoke coming from the side of his mouth.
‘Daniel seemed surprised when we told them Fletcher was dead,’ I say, still watching him.
De Luca snorts. ‘The man is pretty experienced at covering his tracks. You should see him when we come here on DV calls. The lies pour out of him like honey.’
I appreciate what she’s saying, but I saw real shock in Daniel’s face. Still, I have been fooled before; Nicki’s father Lucas had me completely fooled. Some people are so good at lying they could throw their hat into the ring for an Oscar.
‘So, what are you looking for?’ de Luca repeats.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ I reply.
I approach the cupboard with apprehension. The evidence I found in Nicki’s wardrobe was when the problems really started for me.
Nicki had been missing for six days when I searched her room. After an argument with her mother on a Friday evening after school, and some confusion about where she was staying on the weekend, two days had passed before Deirdre reported her missing. Messages sent from her phone on the Sunday and a photo uploaded to her social accounts after that had further confused the timeline.
Another thirty-six hours went by before we made it official, issuing a media release. We may as well have thrown a grenade to them, that’s how spectacularly it exploded. A beautiful young white girl from a wealthy background, who happened to be a talented gymnast, was missing, feared dead. It was a media wet dream.
I had a bad feeling about it from the start. The first time we went to the house, the day Nicki was reported missing, we did our best to navigate Deirdre’s hysteria and unearth some facts. Three days later when it seemed like Nicki might not be a simple runaway, the forensic team went through the house. The techs found nothing to suggest there had been any foul play on the premises, and Mac and I spent another few hours arguing about whether her parents were involved in whatever happened to her. I thought no; he thought maybe.
Both our theories were turned on their heads when Susie, a remarkably articulate heroin addict, stormed into the station six days after Nicki was last seen, sniffing theatrically and demanding to speak to the ‘detective in change of the missing rich girl’.
‘That stuck-up princess is completely fine,’ Susie announced to everyone in the waiting room, after I came out to talk to her. ‘I saw her with my very own eyes. And I have a photo.’ She pulled out a new model iPhone and showed us a dark picture of a retreating figure on a generic streetscape, a figure that did look very much like Nicki Mara.
Susie claimed she’d met Nicki the night before.
‘She was just sitting in the drainpipe that I normally base at, like she owned the place,’ said Susie. ‘She was bragging about running away. She said she thought it was funny how everyone reckons she was dead. She reckoned she was going to head up north and change her name, start a business or something.’
Owen questioned Susie as I sat there silently raging. I’d barely slept since Nicki went missing and had been more convinced than the others on the case that she was murdered.
A few hours later, Deirdre Mara sobbed on her crisp white sofa opposite me after I relayed Susie’s story. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘I want to look in Nicki’s bedroom,’ I told her. ‘Will you show me?’
She nodded and led me to the rear of the house, past Lucas who sat at the kitchen table staring into space. The whole place had a slightly disturbed vibe to it, lingering currents of tension in the air. I watched the back of Deirdre’s head, trying to resolve the nasty and petty woman Nicki described in the messages to her friends with this kind and broken one.
‘This is her room,’ said Deirdre, a
damp hanky pressed to her red nose.
I found the photos in Nicki’s desk cupboard, wedged down the back of the bottom drawer and resting on the carpet. Twenty-four prints of her naked body twisted into various positions, her dark eyes inviting under her thick lashes.
I felt betrayed. Foolish. I still can’t quite explain why, but until that moment Nicki had been an innocent, someone I’d thought had met with the most fatal of bad luck. I hadn’t given Susie’s story much credence but I’m ashamed to say those photos altered my perspective. I judged Nicki, and she shifted in my psyche from a pure victim to a murkier category, a complicated Lolita-esque archetype I found much more challenging to get a handle on.
Of course, the rollercoaster continued. Two weeks later, Susie confessed to fabricating her encounter with Nicki for a cash payment, the request coming from a man she said approached her in the street.
Blinking back to the present, I pull open Abbey’s wardrobe door to reveal a modest collection of clothes—mainly surf-wear—hanging neatly on the rail. A pair of ripped jeans and a few T-shirts and singlet tops are folded in a wire-drawer inset. Six shoes are in neat pairs on the wardrobe floor. None of the items look expensive.
I stand back and survey the small space. ‘It doesn’t seem like Abbey was spending her wages on clothes.’
Two plain calico bags sit on the cupboard floor next to the shoes. One contains bathers and a beach towel, and the other has three sketchbooks, two are A3 and one is A4. I flip through them, impressed by some of the drawings. Abbey has a good eye, especially for birds and animals.
The third sketchbook turns out to be one of her school notebooks. There are several pages of assignment plans and class notes interspersed with half-finished sketches and a few passages of prose. I flip to the reverse of the book and find a few to-do lists and a jumble of loose notes.
‘What is it?’ de Luca asks.
‘About as close to a diary as we’re going to get, I think.’
I check under the mattress and under the bed, feel around in the wardrobe beneath the clothes, then reach up to run my hand over the top of the wardrobe. I check inside an empty suitcase, shoving my hands into the front and side pockets but find nothing else.
When we come downstairs, Dot is still sitting at the kitchen table. ‘Did you find anything?’
I indicate the calico bag on my shoulder. ‘Just a few sketchbooks. Would you mind if we take them?’
She shifts her gaze toward the window and says nervously, ‘Can’t see why not.’
‘That painting in her room is beautiful,’ I say. ‘Is it Abbey’s work?’
Dot’s voice becomes strained. ‘She’s always drawing. That and playing music. She plays the flute. Dan hates her playing here ’cause of the noise, but one of her schoolteachers lets her practise there. She’s a nice lady.’ Dot’s anxious gaze darts to the window again as she grips the back of the chair. A large tear escapes her eye and runs down her cheek.
‘Dot,’ I say, ‘it’s really important you’re certain your husband didn’t leave the house at any point yesterday morning?’
Outside Daniel starts swearing, and there’s a staccato bang-bang, metal on metal. In the lounge one of the boys yells out, ‘Suck it, I killed you. My turn!’ The other cries, ‘Get off me!’
Dot’s face turns impassive and she looks toward the window. ‘He was here. Now he’s not working, he’s here most of the time.’
The kitchen tap drips, marking the seconds.
‘And you’re sure you don’t know where she is?’
Dot meets my gaze this time. ‘No.’
As we stare at each other, I wonder whether everything would have been different if I had pushed Lucas Mara that little bit harder, if I hadn’t been so goddamn blind to what was going on.
‘Well, we’ll be in touch. Please contact us if you hear from Abbey or you think of anything else that might help us find her, okay?’
Dot nods slowly, and we see ourselves out.
We emerge blinking at the sunlight.
‘Was there ever any indication that Rick was violent toward Abbey?’ I ask de Luca.
She pauses and turns to face me. ‘You think what Daniel said in there is true? Come on.’
I raise my eyebrows, surprised at her dismissive tone. ‘One violent man doesn’t write off the possibility of another. Abbey wouldn’t be the first person to grow up in an abusive household and end up in an abusive relationship.’
De Luca brushes back her feathery fringe. ‘There was nothing to suggest anything like that. Rick Fletcher wasn’t on our radar.’
I fall into line beside her. ‘Which neighbours have you spoken to?’ I ask as we reach the car.
‘Of the house party?’
‘No, here.’ I gesture to our surrounds.
‘I don’t think that’s happened yet.’
I smother a sigh and glance at my watch. ‘Well, no time like the present. Let’s see if they have a different view of what happened on Saturday night or of Daniel’s movements yesterday morning.’ My phone rings. ‘Hang on,’ I say to de Luca as I walk a few metres into the middle of the road. It’s Tran.
‘Any sign of Aiden?’ I ask her.
‘Nothing yet. At least, no phone or bank activity.’
‘Damn it. We really need to speak with him. I’m absolutely convinced he knows who attacked Rick—he said it was all his fault.’
‘Gemma, I’m moving you out of the hotel,’ says Tran. ‘I know you’re happy to stay, and maybe the dead possum was just the work of some bored kid. But the director doesn’t want you staying there. Especially not with your son.’
I fight the urge to stamp my foot. ‘Fine. I’m happy to relocate if everyone would prefer.’
‘Good. Vanessa Gordon has suggested you stay at her place. It makes sense, seeing as she is looking after Ben anyway. It will give you a bit more flexibility—which, frankly, I think you’re going to need.’
Although the thought of camping out in someone’s home again hardly fills me with joy, I figure being close to Tommy can’t hurt case-wise. Plus, I can tell that Tran isn’t going to budge.
‘I think it’s completely unnecessary but it sounds like it’s nonnegotiable. I’ll call Vanessa about it later.’
‘Gemma,’ says Tran, but I cut her off by hanging up.
I march back past de Luca, trying to arrange my features in a pleasant expression but failing miserably. ‘Come on.’
It seems three other houses are situated on the court, though it’s hard to be sure because their gardens and nature strips are so overgrown. I knock on the front door of the nearest house. A painfully skinny woman with bleached hair and features arranged in the centre of her face peers out at us. ‘What do you want?’ she barks.
Fifteen minutes later Jacqui Cobb, ‘nee Dawson’, is holding court at her stained laminate kitchen table, flicking ash from the end of her cigarette as she launches into further analysis of Daniel and Dot’s doomed union.
‘Poor Dot,’ she says. ‘Poor stupid Dot. I’ve known her since we were kids, you know. Dan too, but I had the good sense to stay well away from him. We all told Dot he was bad news, but she wouldn’t listen. No siree.’
‘What was wrong with Daniel?’ I say.
‘He’s an angry bastard,’ Jacqui says bluntly, one hand tucked into the opposite armpit, the other hand scratching her head, the cigarette smoke drifting into her scraggly ponytail. She takes a deep drag then coughs the smoke out in a series of sharp puffs. She looks at us as if she’s bestowing precious intel, her voice a little lower. ‘His old man used to beat the living shit out of him, that’s what my mother told me. He killed himself when we were in high school, his dad did. Shot himself in the head.’
De Luca shifts uncomfortably in her chair.
Jacqui continues, her voice slightly dreamy now, ‘I remember ’cause it was the same day I crashed my dad’s car into the fence.’ She lights another cigarette. ‘Daniel Clark could be a charmer though, and he was always nice to loo
k at. Has a lovely smile when he can be bothered to use it. Dot was desperate for a boyfriend and she was a goner over him from the get-go. To be fair, Dan absolutely adored her back then, and she fell for it hook, line and sinker. Dot’s mother had a lot to say about it. I remember her screaming at Dot to stay away from him. She must turn in her grave knowing what he’s like now. I’m not sure Dot’s ever been with anyone else.’ Jacqui shudders. ‘God, can you imagine?’
I begin to steer her away from memory lane and ask her about Saturday night.
‘Dan definitely went off about something. He was ranting and raving like no one’s business. And bashing that bloody plank of wood against the clothesline.’
I raise my eyebrows. ‘Is that something he does often?’
‘Yeah. He generally calms down after a few minutes but it makes a racket, I tell you. I’ve called you lot heaps of times about it.’
‘But you didn’t call on Saturday?’ de Luca asks.
‘Didn’t see the point. I figured JC would probably call.’ She points past my head. ‘He’s in number three.’
‘What was Daniel yelling about?’ I ask.
Jacqui sucks hard on the cigarette, eyes closed. ‘I was having a beer on the back porch, guess that must have been around seven-thirty. That’s when my son called—he’s always wanting money, he lives in Brisbane but just lost his job again, poor bugger. That’s when I heard the yelling start up. Even Matty could hear that bastard down the phone line.’
‘Could you make out what Daniel was saying?’ presses de Luca.
‘Nah, but it was him and Abbey arguing as per usual. Dot was there too—I heard her crying, telling them both to stop. She hates it when they fight.’ Jacqui wrinkles her nose, rubs her wrist along the bottom of it and sniffs loudly. ‘He called her a slut, I heard that. But he does that a lot. He’s always saying it to Dot as well, which is weird cause she definitely isn’t.’
I recall Dot’s empty gaze when we left her house and think about how long her short life has probably felt.
‘Jacqui, do you feel like things have been getting worse lately? Like Daniel’s been angrier than usual?’