One Boy Missing(15)

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?’