One Boy Missing(6)

‘Good news?’ the woman asked.

Moy looked at her. ‘What?’

‘Good news…you just had one?’

‘Had what?’

‘A kid. You look like you’ve been in there for days.’

He stood up and walked down the ramp where the ambulances arrived. The smell of paint from a handrail made him feel sick. Sicker. He stopped, turned and looked over the ramp, down three levels to the asphalt below. There was another ambulance unloading. Parents, and relatives, trying to console each other.

Before he reached the street he saw Megan coming up the ramp. She was shouting at him, standing screaming a few inches from his face. He stepped back and lifted a hand but she just kept going.

‘Where is he?’ she was saying, and he pointed.

He remembered footsteps and watching his wife storm off. He remembered her stilettos, the sound they made on the concrete.

And then the phone rang, and the principal was back in his ear. ‘We’ve got a couple missing, but we’ve rung home and they’re accounted for,’ she said.

‘No one that age?’

‘No.’

He took a moment to think. ‘A kid doesn’t just appear from nowhere. Not in Guilderton anyway.’

‘Maybe he’s not local.’

‘Yeah.’ He waited, annoyed that she didn’t want to be more helpful. ‘Well, if you hear anything, my name’s Bart Moy.’

‘Moy? Didn’t they farm out near Cambrai?’

‘Many years ago,’ he said, looking at a photo he kept propped up on his desk.

It was old. 1915. Black-and-white, blistered. It showed a man in his late forties or early fifties with a bushy moustache extending from his nostrils to his ears, a flat forehead, and wisps of fine brown hair. Daniel Moy, Bart’s great-grandfather, was dressed in a suit, and he’d forgotten to do up a button on his vest. He stared at the camera with a sort of quick, get-it-right expression. His wife was looking down into the mid-distance, her face devoid of any emotion. Helen was wearing her best dress, finished with a brooch and a lace collar, her hair tied back (clumsily, as though done in a rush).

Between Daniel and Helen lay their twenty-three-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, in a black velvet dress and pearls. She, or her mother, had taken time with her hair—braided into a long ponytail that had been posed over Helen’s arm. Elizabeth’s head was tilted, supported on her father’s chest. Her fingers were interlocked, resting in her lap, which was covered with an old rug.

The room was plain: a raw, board wall; a mirror covered with a sheet and what looked like a harmonium framing their heads. Moy could almost smell the grease, the wood, the fire.

It was a standard Edwardian portrait, normal in every respect except that Elizabeth was dead. Her eyes were open; she seemed to be looking up at the ceiling. But she was four days dead. Daniel and Helen had posed her, as though they might be trying to fool future generations, but they weren’t. It was a memento mori, a photo taken to remember a loved one lost early. Moy knew it was a way for parents, twenty or thirty years later, to remember what their child had actually looked like. When the body was gone, this would be all that remained.

According to family history, Daniel had walked two days to find a photographer. Sore with grief, he’d trudged wheatbelt roads, ignoring the blisters on his feet and the dust in his mouth. Meanwhile, Helen, exhausted by tears, had tried to keep her daughter’s body cool, at one point, in the heat of the afternoon, placing her in a bath full of cold water. At night, while Daniel was still walking, she lay next to her daughter in bed, stroking her hair and talking to her.

All that was a long time ago, Moy thought. All of them gone and nearly forgotten.

He walked from his office down the hallway and arrived behind Gary. ‘No one missing from the school,’ he said.

The desk sergeant shrugged. ‘I think your butcher might be full of shit.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Kidnapped?’ Gary looked at him. ‘In Guilderton? That’d be the first time in…ever.’

‘Y’reckon?’ Moy hoped he was right.

‘Guilderton, seriously? Most parents would’ve lost count of the kids they’ve got. Why would they want to kidnap another one?’

‘Gary, how long have you lived here?’

‘Long enough to know. Tell you what it was, some dad about to give his kid a whack and he does a runner. Wife says, let him go, but do you think he’s gonna let him? Right now there is a little kid with a very sore arse.’

‘No kidnap?’

Gary just shook his head.

Moy noticed the empty seat where the old man had been sitting. ‘You lock him up?’ he asked.