One Boy Missing(79)

‘You think someone might be after him?’

He held his head. ‘I should’ve considered it.’

‘I reckon it’s the father.’

They walked along a dusty race between two rows of stalls. Dagwood dogs and hot chips from greasy caravans; a shooting gallery with rabbits strung up by their legs; open-mouthed clowns and wart-covered masks.

‘You take that side,’ Moy said.

They separated, stopping at each stand to ask about the missing boy.

The missing boy, he thought. Missing boy.

He’d hoped the horrors of the last few weeks were behind them. Helen Barnes, burnt beyond recognition, her son Tom, lost, murdered. But Patrick, precocious bowlsman and golfer? George’s mate. He’d been saved from all this. He was protected, perhaps more than any child in Guilderton. No one could’ve got to him.

He felt too sick to go on. The sound of Patrick’s voice, his hands, placing a seedling in its small hole. Moving into a gap between two tents, he closed his eyes and held his head. This won’t have a happy ending, he convinced himself, aware that he was the detective that couldn’t solve crimes. ‘Charlie,’ he whispered.

‘You okay?’ Gary asked, standing beside him.

He opened his eyes. ‘Just getting my breath.’

‘Should we get on?’

Moy worked his side of the alley. ‘A boy, yes.’ Again and again. ‘This tall.’ He tried to remember, to show them. ‘Nine years old. Name’s Patrick Barnes.’ And that sounded worst of all: Patrick’s transformation from survivor to victim. His face on a missing persons poster, the sort that were pinned up around the station. Almost none of the dates recent.

The sideshow attendants he spoke to weren’t concerned. ‘There’s hundreds of kids by themselves,’ one said, and Moy asked, ‘A nine year old, with brown hair?’

‘Who knows?’

‘By himself? Looking lost? Maybe he was running?’

The attendant turned to a pair of fairy-winged teenagers.

‘Are you listening?’ Moy shouted.

The young man, with his cut lip and stubble, looked at him. ‘What?’

‘Don’t what me. Listen.’

‘Hey, simmer.’

But Gary was there. ‘Come on, Detective.’

They moved into the crowd. ‘You sure you haven’t got a photo somewhere?’ Gary asked.

Shit, Moy thought, have I taken a photo of him? Surely I have? Surely? ‘Maybe at home. I could go look.’

Gary seemed to have taken over. ‘I don’t know. By the time you get back half of these people would’ve gone.’

‘Let’s keep going.’





41

IT WAS AFTER nine and Guilderton was drifting off to the sound of humming cold rooms and not-quite-tightened taps. Moy, cruising in his Commodore, heard a distant helicopter but knew it wasn’t for Patrick. Where would it look anyway? Pig sheds? Under logs? Guilderton was no Simpson Desert, Patrick no little boy lost, wandering in scrub. This would be a search in sheds and creek beds, chook houses and seed bins. In places where no one would think to look.

Jason Laing sat beside him, scrolling through information on the comms screen. ‘They’ve locked the showgrounds,’ he said.

‘Nothing?’

Moy knew there wouldn’t be. He’d seen the State Emergency Service volunteers, done up in their orange overalls and black boots, prodding haystacks and climbing up to look in the hoppers of the big seeders. Spread out, crossing paddocks, calling, ‘Patrick Barnes…can you hear us?’ Waiting at the coffee caravan, leaning against fences.

‘He might’ve tried walking back to town,’ Laing suggested.

‘Why?’

‘Maybe he thought you’d gone home?’

‘I was in the toilet.’

They passed up and down lanes that ran behind shops and homes. Moy would stop and Jason would get out, looking behind bins, over fences and in and under grain trucks.

‘I shouldn’t have left him,’ Moy said, as they drove.

‘It was only a minute,’ Laing replied. ‘When we were kids we’d be gone all day. Down the creek, up those trees in Civic Park.’

‘No, he wouldn’t have gone off.’

‘He doesn’t have a mate, someone who might’ve said—’

‘He doesn’t know anyone…that I know of.’

‘What about his brother?’

Moy looked at him, thinking. ‘How?’

‘What if he wasn’t missing? What if he’d been hiding too, and seen Patrick?’

He did a circuit of Civic Park. ‘That wouldn’t make sense. Patrick’s been talking about him for weeks.’

‘Maybe Patrick didn’t know.’