One Boy Missing (6 page)

He let his eyes settle on the group and felt in control.

‘Alternatively,’ he said, ‘this boy may be sitting in front of me today. It may be that he was not taken but has things going on at home, with Dad, or another relative…something Mum doesn’t know about.’

Why was it his job, he wondered, to say these things? There was no point saying any more; they either knew what he meant or they didn’t.

‘So, maybe it’s not you…maybe it’s a friend. And if you were a good mate…’ He let it hang, then looked up. ‘Miss Downey?’

‘Thank you, Mr Moy.’ She returned to the front and started telling the kids what an exciting life a detective leads.

9

IT WAS MID-MORNING, cloud threatening a blue sky, when Moy received a phone call from Justin Davids asking him to return to the laneway. He drove past a row of empty shops and slowed past the old cemetery. He’d sometimes spend an hour on a Sunday morning walking around the graves. The marble headstones, their names and dates and
Asleep with God
all faded.

He arrived in the laneway behind the Ayr Street shops and the butcher and two girls from the two-dollar shop were waiting for him. He got out of his car and shook hands. ‘What’s up?’

Davids indicated the tape that had been strung out around the crime scene. ‘All my deliveries,’ he said. ‘The guy has to park on Boucaut Street and carry everything in.’

‘We’re trying to bring stuff in the front,’ said one of the shop assistants, ‘but it’s in the way, and we’ve got people tripping over.’

Moy looked up and down the length of the laneway. ‘Haven’t seen that car again?’

‘No, nothing. Is anyone official actually coming?’

Fuck it, Moy thought. He pulled the plastic tape from the wall and started gathering it in a ball. ‘That’s probably the end of it,’ he said.

Davids started on the other end and soon the cordon was down, the tape dumped in the hippo bins.

Moy moved on, driving a few blocks, stopping beside Civic Park where three teenagers were sitting on the bottom rung of the monkey-bars, white school shirts hidden under windcheaters. A tall boy lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and passed it to a girl. She took a quick puff and passed it to another girl who kept inhaling and refusing to hand it back to the boy.

Moy stared at the teenagers. Fuck it, he thought again. Who made me the truant officer? There’d just be excuses and arguments and then they’d walk off. What would I be taking them back to anyway? Surface area of a sphere? Quotes from
Macbeth
? Stuff that couldn’t possibly mean anything to anyone in the wheatbelt.

His mobile phone rang and he checked the display.

‘How are you, Gary?’ he said, recognising the voice.

‘You’re never gonna believe this.’

‘What?’

‘A house fire.’

Moy watched the teenagers stand up and walk back towards the high school.

‘I didn’t hear any sirens,’ he said.

‘Fire’s out…but they want you there.’

Cigarette in bed, Moy thought. Someone falling asleep in front of the telly. Faulty wiring. There were a few people in town who claimed to be electricians. Generally they were also builders, tilers, plumbers and carpet-layers.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘A woman, what’s left of her.’

Gary gave him directions and he scribbled down the address. He drove out of town in a north-east direction. A few minutes later he turned onto Creek Street, a faded stretch of bitumen with grass eating away at its edges. The street followed what was left of Belalie Creek as it narrowed and became overgrown with weeds. A kilometre out of town there was still enough of it to warrant a small bridge but another hundred metres on it flattened out into a rocky patch of scrub.

As Moy left the town behind the road turned to gravel. The houses along Creek Street started spreading out. Dead orchards and wrecking yards; chooks, and a few sheep. These were the backblocks: fences overgrown with prickly pear, goats that hadn’t been shorn in years, whole yards full of door-less fridges and lid-less washers, children that ran mostly naked through forests of salvaged fence posts.

Moy had visited a family on Creek Street a couple of months back. There was no father and the mother would tie a rope around the three-year-old boy’s leg and tether him to the front porch when she went out. A neighbour, sick of the crying, had eventually called the police. Inside the house Moy had found an old box with a rug, a bottle for the boy to piss in and a scattering of shit left by the family of rodents that helped him eat the food left for him every second night.

Another two hundred metres along the houses stopped altogether. Then there was just scrub along the road that led to the one-pub town of Cambridge, another thirty minutes on.

There were farms behind the scrub: wheat and barley stretching back to the horizon. Distant homesteads with grain bins and tractor sheds. Every few hundred metres along Creek Street gates led to access roads that cut through the wheat.

In the middle of the scrub that lined Creek Street there was the smoking ruin of a house. Moy looked at what was left of the collapsed structure: the floorboards, mostly; two of the four outer walls, a few internal walls and the roof trusses. The roof iron had fallen into the rooms. In the lounge room, which was now completely open to the bush, there was a blackened couch and a charred table without legs.

Strange, he thought, looking at the bush around the house. How the fire hadn’t ignited the scrub or nearby wheat crop; how the rising embers hadn’t caught in the overhanging trees.

There were two CFS units. A few men in orange overalls were hosing down smoking walls and furniture as others lifted wet bedding and carpets. Other men, and a few women with smoke-black faces, stood about with their arms crossed.

Constable Jason Laing approached Moy. ‘Busy couple of days, eh?’

‘Too much drama for Guilderton,’ he replied.

Laing led him towards the house. ‘We don’t know who she is,’ he said. ‘No purse, bag, nothing. No letters—unless they got burnt.’

They climbed three concrete steps. There was a stripped-down engine on the porch with a box full of parts beside it.

Moy stopped to look. He bit his bottom lip and felt the stubble that had grown since yesterday morning. ‘Kids?’

‘Just her,’ Laing replied.

They went inside, following floorboards that were unburnt, protected by a runner that had been dragged out front. ‘Have you rung the council?’ Moy asked.

‘My brother-in-law.’

‘He still there?’

‘All this verge is council land,’ Laing said, ‘but according to their records no one’s lived in this house for forty years.’

‘She was a squatter.’ One of the CFS volunteers had overheard. ‘Years ago they tried to get the council to demolish it but in the end they never bothered.’ He wiped his nose with his sooty hand.

‘Ever seen anyone around here?’ Moy asked.

‘No. I live on Doon Terrace. No one ever comes out here. Could be running a meth lab, no one’d ever know.’

The volunteer walked out of what was left of the house. Moy noticed a few pieces of Lego on the floor, bent down and picked them up. One piece had melted but he clicked the others together.

‘There’s nothing in the other rooms,’ Laing said.

‘No toys? Kids’ clothes?’

Laing shook his head. ‘There are two other beds in the front room. It looks like someone was sleeping in them.’

He led Moy to the bedroom at the front of the house. There was bedding smouldering on the floor. A wardrobe and chest of drawers were empty.

Moy sniffed the air. ‘Petrol.’

‘Diesel.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve got a good nose. And I worked at a servo for four years.’ Laing led him back to the lounge room and there, partly covered by roofing iron, was the woman’s body, stretched out on a piece of singed carpet. Her legs were twisted together and her charred left arm was bent up under her body. Most of the corpse was burnt and swollen.

Despite his line of work, death wasn’t something Moy had ever quite got his head around. There it was, this thing of flesh, blood and bone. Human as anyone, minus a heartbeat. Out of the game, and because of what? A poorly installed downlight; a kid trying to light a match. He always experienced a moment of black-and-white fascination—like watching news footage of twins joined at the head, or the
memento mori
on his desk—before the enforced separation. The distance, which came before the technical concerns.

Still, she was dead. He couldn’t help but stare for a few seconds to try and comprehend how a living thing had stopped working.

‘What do you reckon?’ Laing was watching Moy study the body.

‘It was a hot fire.’ He knelt down. ‘Funny, isn’t it, the way she’s fallen?’

‘How’s that?’

‘You’d think she’d be near a window or door if she was trying to get out.’

‘What, you reckon someone’s walloped her?’

‘Don’t reckon anything. Not till someone’s looked her over.’ Moy stood up. ‘Maybe this time they’ll send someone.’

10

MOY LEFT LAING and King with the body and headed home, stopping at the Taj Masala to buy a chicken vindaloo. He opened his musty house and sat on the back verandah in shorts and thongs. Admiring the view of his dead lawn, contemplating his curry. There were big blocks of hard potato which he pushed aside. Then he tried the chicken, enormous lumps joined by skin and sinew, trailing watery sauce that had started life in a packet.

Undercooked.

Now, he supposed, he’d get sick.

Guilderton had nothing resembling a health inspector. Apparently teams were sent from town to spend their days trawling the pubs and takeaways. Ineffectually, since he always got sick.

He binned the debris, locked up and headed to the Guilderton public links. A ten-minute walk, passing front yards full of home-made Coke-can windmills and lacework outdoor settings. Murchland Drive was alive with galahs celebrating the last minutes of sun. He noticed one of the Paschkes out on a header, its lights cutting through the wheat dust and its giant wheels compacting the earth. He could feel the rumble through his feet.

Checking to make sure the club house was locked, he jumped a waist-high fence and took a plastic bag out of his pocket. Started walking through the bush and leaf litter beside the first three holes. Within five minutes he’d found half-a-dozen balls.

He checked the sand-trap on the fourth hole and moved on to the small lagoon beside the fifth green. It was getting dark so he produced a small torch from his pocket and searched the murky water: six, seven, maybe more. He took off his socks and sandals and waded in.

The lagoon was his best bet, always had been. After he and George moved to town he’d come here of a night with his mates and collect half a wheat bag full of balls. On Saturday they’d fill a big tub with water and bleach and wash them. Then they’d leave them out in the sun to dry, package them in bags of a dozen and sell them to the local sports store.

He crawled out of the water and wiped his feet clean on the grass. Dropped his socks and sandals in the bag with the two dozen balls and continued on.

The scrub beside the sixth and seventh holes ran beside Murchland Drive. There were homes on the other side of the road so he had to move quietly. Three, four months before, an old woman out working in her garden in the twilight had noticed him in the bushes. Minutes later there’d been a patrol car cruising down Murchland Drive, moving its spotlight in and out of the bushes and trees. He’d waited as the light got closer, wondering how it would look on the front page of the
Argus
: ‘Rogue Cop Stalks Locals’. Just as he’d been about to step forward, the woman had flagged the car down and pointed in the opposite direction. Seeing his chance he’d walked out of the scrub, across the ninth, and sprinted over the fairways towards the back fence. When he was well clear he ran through the sprinklers like a ten-year-old, jumping in the air and calling out at the top of his voice, ‘Who’s been naughty tonight?’

There were no dusk gardeners or patrolling cars now, though. Moy climbed a hill towards a grove of pine trees that always hid balls in a bed of pine needles. He used a stick to search through the litter that sat on the edge of the grove and looked out across Guilderton, squatting grey and solid in the moonlight. Ayr Street was deserted and he could see lights flashing from the Commercial Hotel’s bottle-o. Music was still thumping from the converted cellar that passed as their night club. The back door of the bakery was open and he could feel its lavender light and the heat from its ovens.

His phone rang. Gary. ‘The fire investigator’s arrived.’

‘Already?’

‘Ossie’s taking him out there.’

Moy stopped to think. ‘Okay, I’m on my way.’

He stood up, grabbed his bag of golf balls and looked regretfully at the pine-trash, wondering how many balls still lay hidden.

But then he jogged off down the hill, past a water pipe they’d been meaning to fix since he was thirteen.

11

AN HOUR LATER, Moy arrived at the house on the end of Creek Street. A freshly shaved Metropolitan Fire Service investigator greeted him on the front steps. ‘Sid Lehmann,’ he almost barked, and Moy introduced himself as the lone detective of the mid-north wheatbelt.

‘Nice little town, Guilderton,’ Lehmann said. ‘I was here a couple of years back.’

‘A holiday, in Guilderton?’

‘No. This boy and his mum, dead at the front door. She was holding the keys, trying to undo the deadlock.’

Moy decided not to think about it. ‘So, what’s the verdict?’

‘Diesel. Mainly in the two bedrooms and the lounge. And the woman.’

‘The woman?’

‘She’d been doused in it.
Whoosh
. Which makes you wonder.’

‘Christ, was she dead?’

The fire investigator smoothed his stubby moustache. ‘That’s why we need a coroner. Dead, or unconscious. We hope.’

Lehmann showed him into the lounge room, to the body—grey and featureless in the moonlight.

‘Where did it start?’ Moy asked.

The investigator led him to the front door. He pointed to a partly burnt match on the floor. ‘My guess is he’s knocked her out, spread the diesel and worked his way back here. Then he’s stood outside and flicked it in.’