He pulled up in the driveway of a house on the far end of Cambridge Street. Fibro, with a tenuous brick veneer cladding, most of the fly-screens hanging loose. He walked up the drive past a half-buried fish pond full of brown water and what looked like a carburettor. At the edge of the scoria stunted cacti survived the Armageddon that had laid waste to the front yard.
He went to the front door and knocked. And waited. A neighbour stared over the fence. ‘Hello, do you know if Mr Williams is at home?’ he asked.
Blank face.
‘Alan Williams? Does he live here?’
The man said nothing and went inside. Moy knocked again. ‘Hello, anyone home?’
He took a few steps across the verandah, past a box of old National Geographics and looked in the front window. ‘Mr Williams?’
There was a table with plates and mugs and breakfast cereal. A lounge suite and a coffee table covered with magazines. There were clothes on the floor, and a suitcase with a collection of airline tags attached.
He walked around the side of the house, standing on his toes to look in the higher windows: a bathroom (with frosted windows, latched); a spare bedroom (a single bed with a bare mattress, a dresser, a wardrobe); the main bedroom (a double bed, another wardrobe, open, full of neatly hung clothes); the toilet; and a third bedroom (empty, marks on the carpet showing where furniture had once rested).
His phone rang. ‘Shit.’ He fumbled for it and answered with a whisper.
‘Guess who I just got a call from?’ George said.
‘Dad, I can’t talk now.’
‘You been goin’ behind my back.’
‘What?’
‘You know.’
Moy continued whispering. ‘Dad, I’m in the middle of something.’
‘Speak up!’
He raised his voice slightly. ‘I’m with a suspect, Dad.’
There was a short pause.
‘Well, I’d like a word when it suits.’
‘Fine. I’ll pop around later. I’ve got some news, and someone for you to meet.’
‘Who?’
‘Later.’ He hung up and switched off the phone.
The shed door was locked, so he looked through the louvred windows and saw dozens of boxes, taped up and stacked on top of each other. There was a lawnmower and he could make out one end of a train set on an old door resting on trestles.
He looked around the yard. Tall grass growing through the remains of a vegetable patch. ‘Fuck.’
‘Can I help you?’
He turned to face a woman in late middle age, her hair up in a bun, one eye compressed in what he guessed was the legacy of a stroke.
‘Detective Sergeant Bart Moy,’ he said, producing his warrant card. ‘Guilderton police.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m looking for Alan Williams.’
‘That’s my son.’
‘He lives here?’
‘You know…why are you asking me?’
Moy shrugged, uncomfortably. ‘You live with him?’
‘Are you asking or telling me?’
‘Asking.’
‘In that case, no. One of the neighbours called me.’ She looked at him with contempt. ‘So?’
‘I didn’t catch your name?’
‘Naomi Williams.’
‘Naomi…you might have heard, last Monday, a young boy—’
‘Oh, goodness me,’ she said. ‘You’re making some very… tenuous connections.’
‘No…I didn’t even know about all that business.’
‘There was no business, Detective. A few paintings. And a town full of very bored people.’
‘I wouldn’t necessarily argue with that, Naomi. But the thing is, this woman claimed to have seen Alan driving down Ayr Street when the boy was taken…by a man she said looked like your son.’
Naomi closed her eye and slowly shook her head. ‘That was very convenient. She got a good look?’
‘She wasn’t sure.’
‘No, she wasn’t, was she? But that’s enough reason for you to come and…snoop?’
He stared at her. ‘Well, yes, in a case of possible child abduction.’
Moy could see her jaw tensing. ‘Seeing how Guilderton has decided that my son’s a paedophile?’
‘No.’
‘Yes, he is, apparently. He brought a student home. The student told everyone, all we did was look at some art, but that’s beside the point. Only a paedophile would lure a student back to his house.’
Moy was lost for words.
‘So that’s why you’re looking in the shed. Alan got that child—’
‘We found him.’
‘So he would’ve told you to come here?’
A long pause; the sound of the fly-screen tapping.
‘I think I’ll put in a complaint about you, Detective.’