‘Of course.’ She paused, and smiled. ‘He’s such a lovely little fella, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well-mannered, which always says a lot.’
Moy looked at the light glowing inside her living room.
‘Ironing,’ she said. ‘It’s this damn insomnia.’
Moy shrugged, but there was no point discussing anything.
He let himself into the house and stood in the dark hallway. ‘Patrick?’
As his eyes adjusted he noticed clothes, piles of shoes, their mud dried, crumbling, forming a pile of dirt on the boards. He moved into the lounge-room. ‘Patrick?’ There was a shape on the couch; small, cramped, irregular. He touched it. It was just a blanket, twisted around the other rugs George nested in as he watched American crime shows. Asking questions like, ‘They’d need a warrant to do that, wouldn’t they?’
Think…think. What would I do with a boy? With Paddy? Probably the same thing I’d done with Tom.
He sat down and tried to imagine both of them. Track pants and T-shirts, tied up with heavy ropes, blindfolded, gagged. He had to feel the power, in his stomach, his chest and neck, his head. To know what it was like to enter a darkened room, to kneel beside them, to have the power of life and death. To work out what he would do next.
Silence.
He sat forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘Patrick,’ he whispered. He stood up, went to the boy’s room, switched on the light and stood thinking.
He looked in the wardrobe. Pants, shirts, more jackets; empty pockets, apart from lolly wrappers and lint. Robinson Crusoe, borrowed from the library with a gleaming new card.
His phone rang. He fumbled it, studied it, answered it. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s me.’
‘Dad.’
‘I’m waitin’.’
‘What?’
There was a pause. ‘I’ve packed my gear and I’ve signed myself out.’
‘In the middle of the night?’
‘They won’t let me walk home.’
‘I was just about to go somewhere.’
‘Come and get me, will yer?’
‘Now?’
‘I’m all ready to go. This nurse isn’t gonna let me be.’
‘Okay. I’ll bring you home, then I gotta go out.’
‘It’s Patrick? No point wastin’ any time. I’ll come with yer.’
‘No.’
‘I’m not sittin’ around on my arse. Not when he’s lost. Not like I’m gonna have another heart attack, is it?’
Moy stopped to think.
‘Hurry up. God knows where the poor little kid’s hidin’.’
Moy slammed the front door, jumped from the porch and was in his car in three strides. He shot back onto the road and selected drive. Then he saw Mrs Miller, running across her yard towards him. ‘Have they found him?’
He wound down his window. ‘Very soon, Thea…I’ll let you know.’
He drove along every road at full speed, braking hard. A few minutes later he was parked in front of the hospital’s glazed doors. George was standing in the foyer wearing slippers, track pants and a jumper with his old suitcase and a hard-faced nurse behind him.
‘Ready?’
George was already putting his case in the back seat.
‘Thank you,’ Moy called to the nurse, standing watching them from the foyer. She smiled grimly and walked off.
‘Old dragon,’ George muttered, as he settled into the passenger seat.
‘Seatbelt,’ Moy said, slipping in beside him.
He followed a familiar route back towards Creek Street. He felt like he’d spent years trawling this town, cruising the same roads in fractured grids that always came back on themselves. Like he knew every front yard, every rosemary bush, every frangipani. Knew the people who lived in these little boxes, too, the colour of their cardigans, their dressing gowns. But the more you knew people, he guessed, the less you really understood them. What they did in their sheds, their spare rooms.
‘So what’s up?’ George asked.
‘Jo Humphris.’
‘Humphris?’
‘Farmer, on Creek Street. All that land behind the burnt house. Alex Naismith used to work for him.’
George shifted in his seat. ‘Naismith…that fella that took the boys?’
Moy explained.
‘So, I’m thinking…that’s where they must have been taken.’
‘Why didn’t Paddy tell us?’
Moy shrugged. ‘Too scared.’ He braked, and turned down the dirt road to the Humphris farm.
George was staring at him. ‘So, what’s this fella done to Paddy?’
‘That’s what I want to find out.’
‘I’ll kill the bastard.’