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.
Most people with a guvvie house had given up on caring for it. For one, they were inspected annually and if the agent decided the place was in good condition they’d put the rent up. Secondly, the government didn’t do routine maintenance. Paintwork, cracked windows, nothing. The message was clear: just do your time. Survive, marry a local girl and buy something decent, or piss off.
Moy passed his own house, slightly shabbier than the rest, the broken blinds drawn, the window shades blowing in the breeze. He could see down the drive, into the backyard, where his undies and T-shirts hung on the line.
There had been problems with truants—harvest kids, or other ferals—bored shitless during the holidays, stealing washing from clothes lines. Making their way to Civic Park and dressing the busts of old mayors in bras and singlets. Mayor Humphris (1878–1883) in a summer frock with a lace collar.
Moy pulled out just as a grain truck flew past raising a shower of dust and fine gravel. He listened to it pepper his car and noticed a chip appear in the middle of the windscreen. He reached for his lights and planted his foot; overtook the truck and slowed it to a stop in front of the Guilderton Rotary. He got out, fuming, and the driver climbed down to meet him.
‘Well?’ Moy said.
‘I got me tarp on.’
It was one of Paschke’s sons, a farm boy who spent his days driving between his father’s place and the silos. ‘How fast were you going?’
‘Wasn’t much over fifty.’
‘How much?’
‘Fifty then,’ the driver changed tack.
Moy took a deep breath and wondered whether it was the chip, his headache or other things. ‘You chipped my windscreen,’ he said.
‘Council needs to sweep these roads. Dad’s been on at them.’
‘If you go slow enough it’s not a problem.’
The Paschke boy shrugged. ‘I stick to the limit but there’s two headers, full up, waiting in the paddock. Twenty minutes each way and a line at the silo. Maybe you should tell ’em to build some new receiving bays.’
‘What’s that got to do with speeding?’
Here, Moy guessed, was why he was becoming a second-rate copper; one of the reasons. If he were any good he’d find his infringement book and start writing, but he just didn’t care enough anymore. Paschke’s boy would be back along this road in his truck, ten times a day, raising a cloud of dust and gravel that no one gave a shit about. A few neighbours, perhaps, but they never complained. It was just the way it was if you lived on the western edge of Guilderton. Gawler Street was the only road the trucks could take to get to the silos.
He looked at the boy. ‘Slow down,’ he said, and walked back to his car. The truck pulled out around him, raising another shower of dust and double-tooting its horn: See you later,
mate
.
Moy switched off his lights and let his head drop onto his steering wheel. He noticed a sticky mess where he’d spilled something on the console and thought,
things could be a lot worse
.
Which reminded him of the boy.
He drove along Murchland Drive, over a railway line that was only ever used by a tourist train, and along Creek Street, the waterway dry two months early. He slowed to look in the crevices along the creek, the roots of ghost gums covered in leaf trash where the soil had been washed away. He pictured a small, pyjama-clad body trapped in dead branches. A grazed shin, a lick of wet hair across the mouth and a twisted limb. For a moment he wasn’t sure if he actually hoped to see it.
There was nothing in the creek. He stopped his car and went into a toilet block. Nothing. Except paper shoved down the head and a cracked sink. Cracked, as it had been when he was a boy, and probably always would be.
He walked another thirty or so metres into Civic Park. There was an old steam train that kids still climbed over, pretending to be drivers and firemen, burning their legs on iron plates in summer. In the cab all the knobs had been removed and the firebox welded shut. Even as a kid he’d known there wasn’t enough train left for a decent imagining. Surely it was just an easy way to get rid of industrial junk? Shit. Give it to the kids, they won’t know.
Nothing under the train.
Then he searched a set of concrete pipes laid out for the kids to crawl through. He found a used franger and a dead bird but no boy in pyjamas. Started to wonder if there really was any boy. A kidnap? In Guilderton? Who was this butcher, this turd-thrower turned meat-trimmer, and why had no one else seen anything?
He checked the rose garden, the wisteria arbour and even the little bit of space under the electric barbecues.
Nothing.
He gazed up and, across the road, noticed the Wesfarmers man dragging rolls of wire out in front of his shop. Then there were packs of droppers on a wheelbarrow, bags of starter rations on a trolley and a few water pumps. He returned to his car and drove down Ayr Street, the shops open now, or opening. The word had got around and a few shopkeepers stood about chatting. They looked at him and he raised a finger from the steering wheel. A pair of mechanics stood at the gate to Boston’s Motor Repairs, looking at something in a newspaper and laughing.
Moy turned the corner and stopped in front of the butcher’s laneway. Bryce King was still standing with his hands behind his back, scanning the road and laneway as if something might happen.
‘Bryce, let me know when Crime Scene arrives,’ Moy called from his car.
‘When are they due?’ King asked, approaching.
‘It’ll be mid-morning. Everyone in Ayr Street—’ He wound up the window. He hoped King hadn’t noticed the rubbish in his foot wells. ‘Don’t care when they arrived. Ask ’em if they’ve seen a lost kid hanging around.’
Moy started to drive off. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he called back, ‘remind that butcher to get down to the station.’
He followed a tractor with a raised plough. Each of the tines was tangled with roots, weeds, pieces of paper, and one with what looked like a flannelette shirt. He studied it, but wasn’t sure. Then, it fell to the ground, and the tractor turned the corner. He stopped, got out, examined it, even smelled it. But it was too big for a boy.
And how would it have got there?
3
IT WAS MID-MORNING before Moy arrived at the station. Up the road a small group had gathered outside the courthouse. He recognised a man with a goatee done up in a white shirt and loud tie. It’d been three weeks since he’d arrested him. Stealing from his employer, a shed company. Coming in on the weekend to help himself to sheets of stainless steel and aluminium that he sold to a cousin who made kitchens. Simple case, no one believed he intended to replace the stuff. And here he was, looking up at Moy, mumbling something to his wife and parents. They turned and glared at him.