One Boy Missing(2)
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.