The Ottoman Motel (19 page)

Simon's breath left him completely. Pony's fingers dug into
his leg.

A huge crash made them both jump. Then a series of deep, rolling sounds. Halting breaths.

Simon took a risk and peeked around the corner, Pony peering over his shoulder. Dozens of cans had fallen and rolled out in every direction. Tarden was pinned up against a shelf, Kuiper's forearm braced across his throat. ‘Do not go soft on me now, Jack,' he hissed. ‘I know more about you than you even do. You go running off anywhere, I will hunt you down.'

‘Get the fuck off me.' Tarden's voice wheezed like a bellows.

Run. Simon's brain was screaming at him to run, telling him they were going to kill him and Pony too. But he was frozen to the spot.

Kuiper hitched his arm up further. ‘We keep our heads down, we make a little profit, and we let the town go quiet again. Then you can get back in your little boat and keep fishing and everything will be fine. We just need to stay calm.'

‘Put me the fuck down.'

‘Are you with me Jack?'

Tarden was making horrific gurgling sounds. ‘Yes, I'm fucking with you. Settle down.'

Kuiper's face softened. ‘Everything will be fine, okay, Jack?' He removed his arm from Tarden's throat. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I just wanted to know that we're on the same side.'

Tarden rubbed his throat. ‘Sure.' His voice was a weak croak. ‘Let's not do anything stupid.'

Kuiper held out his palms, mock-apologetic. ‘Jack,' he said. ‘Darling, don't be mad at me.' He smiled his wide shark smile. Leaned in and kissed Tarden on the mouth, his hand moving to cup the back of his head.

Simon exhaled with shock.

Tarden shrugged Kuiper away. ‘No,' he said.

‘Come on,' whispered Kuiper, ‘let's seal this deal.' He fumbled at his belt.

‘Not now.'

‘Come on.' He walked around behind Tarden and put his arms around him.

‘Robbie,' said Tarden. ‘I said not now.' He tried to move away, but Kuiper held fast to him.

‘You been seeing someone else?' said Kuiper. ‘You haven't been seeing some whore without telling me have you?'

Tarden whirled around, breaking Kuiper's grip with one arm, shoving Kuiper back against the shelving with the other. Kuiper came back at him, grappling for his throat, but Tarden was ready and felled him with a short sharp jab of his fist. Kuiper crumpled to the ground. He looked like Ned had when the rock hit him.

‘Talk to me later,' said Tarden, ‘when you're prepared to be more reasonable.' He slammed the shed door behind him.

Simon's pulse hammered in his temples. He put his hands over his ears. Tarden and Kuiper, what had they done to his mum and dad? They'd sorted them out. Just like they were going to sort out him. Why were they kissing?

A new noise between the pulsing. Kuiper crying, sitting up, his hands held to his mouth. A growth of blood seeping through his fingers as his shoulders heaved. He stood up, wiped his hands on the back of his jeans, his mouth was a wide red smear. Not crying, Simon realised; it was laughter. Still chuckling, he picked up all the fallen cans and put them back on the shelves. The last can he kept, weighing it in his palm. He left, eventually, locking the door behind him.

Simon's legs howled with pain, and he collapsed on the floor, stretching out.

Pony stood up and peered down. ‘This is serious now,' he said. His voice was clearer, somehow. It had lost its strained quality.

Simon nodded, too much in shock to speak.

Pony chewed on his thumb, seemingly deep in thought. ‘This is something big.'

‘What were they doing?' said Simon. ‘What did they do to my mum and dad?' He felt tears growing hot in his eyes.

‘I don't know,' said Pony, ‘but it's not good.'

Simon covered his face with his hands. He wanted desperately just to dissolve away, to be water gurgling down a plughole.

‘Simon.'

He tried to make his mind blank, to slip into blackness.

‘Simon,' repeated Pony.

When Simon opened his eyes, Pony was holding out a hanky. ‘Don't worry,' he said.

‘It's clean.' He unfolded it, showing starched white.

Simon blew his nose. ‘Thank you.'

Pony knelt down next to him. ‘I'm not going to let anything happen to you,' he said. ‘You're my friend. We're going to work out what's going on, and you're going to be perfectly safe.'

And the way Pony said it—so sure, so clinically, triple-tested sure—Simon almost believed it.

It was well into the night by the time Simon and Pony cycled back up the path to Ned's house. They wheeled their bikes back through the garden, rolling them into a long tin shed that stood at the far corner. Simon felt the grass flicker against his ankles, wet in the night-time air: in the darkness it could have been water or blood.

Pony reached into the shed and flicked a switch, unpacking light from the door. Simon could see—along with mud-caked garden tools and cans of paint-thinner and petrol—a shiny red and blue BMX, with a ribbon attached to its handlebars.

‘Gin's birthday,' said Pony. ‘We got him a bike.'

‘Oh,' said Simon. ‘That's right. There's a party, isn't there.'

‘Tomorrow.'

‘Yes. Tomorrow.' Simon knew they were both avoiding talking about what they'd just seen. Their voices, echoing off the walls, the violence. The threat. ‘Do you think—' Simon tailed off.

‘What?'

‘Do you think they'll go back to the lake tomorrow? Madaline, I mean. To keep searching.'

Pony blew out his cheeks. ‘Simon,' he said, shaking his head. He wheeled his bike into the shed. ‘You just don't get it, do you.'

Simon rolled his bike in too. ‘Get what? I don't—' He stopped. The rest of the shed was a long wooden workbench, as big and thick as a car, scored with scars and nicks, clamped with coloured vices. To one side, all down the wall, was a row of hooks and shelves, locked behind glass, full of tools: hammers and chisels, knives and corkscrews. Ned's wife, Simon thought. Stephanie. Carving, creating.

Pony took the handlebars of Simon's bike and stared right into his eyes. The weak orange light turned Pony's skin to street maps. ‘We can't trust them,' he whispered. His voice was a dripping drain. ‘You heard what Kuiper said.'

Simon tried to remember the exact words he'd heard.

‘The whole town?'

Pony scrunched up his face. He leaned past Simon, pulling the shed's door closed, sealing them in near-silence. He went over to the bench, took off his rucksack. He pulled something out of it, clunking it down onto the wood. A tin can.

‘Is that…?'

‘Yep. Took it from the storeroom.'

Simon felt a fresh panic. ‘What if they realise it's missing?'

‘One can? They won't miss it. Kuiper took one himself.' Pony reached back into his rucksack and pulled out a thick pocketknife.

‘You can't open it,' said Simon.

‘Listen, I don't like this any more than you do, but if you want to find your parents, we're going to have to work out what's going on in this town.' Simon felt numb. He thought of a thousand empty houses, waiting for him to move through them. He nodded.

‘Okay then.' Pony flicked open his pocket knife to reveal
an old-fashioned can opener, with a hooked end, like you
sometimes saw in Westerns and movies about soldiers. With an expert twist of his wrists, Pony made the can opener's edge bite its way around the rim of the can, peeling its top off bit by bit.
Eventually Pony was able to lever off the lid off. His eyes
narrowed. He turned the can over, and Simon heard a wet flop.

Peaches. Glistening orange. Juice swelling out to the bench's edge, dribbling over.

‘What the hell?' Pony shook the can. A small rattle. He turned it back over. Reaching in, he pulled out a dripping sealed bag, made from thick black plastic. Pony grinned, the first time Simon had seen him smile. ‘Bingo.'

‘What is it?' Simon came closer.

Pony flipped shut the can opener and switched his pocketknife to a thin blade. He slid it carefully through the top of the bag. A handful of small off-white tablets fell onto the table, rattling
like heavy rain. They were about the same size as a Panadol, Simon thought, but they were a different shape. He picked one up, brought it to his nose to sniff.

Pony suddenly lunged at him, grabbing his wrist.

‘Ow! What's that for?'

Pony plucked the pill from between Simon's fingers. ‘You can't just swallow these,' he said.

‘I wasn't going to swallow it,' said Simon. ‘I was just going to smell it.'

‘Right,' said Pony, gathering the pills into a pile on the bench. ‘You just shouldn't swallow them, that's all. They're drugs.'

‘Drugs?' The word alone sent a cannon to Simon's stomach. This was a word deep in the forest of the adult world. A secret word like
sex
, or
insurance
.

Pony switched on a lamp that was clamped to the bench. He bent down, picked up a single pill, held it in his palm under the light. ‘Got to be,' he said. ‘Amphetamines, maybe.'

‘What are amphetamines?' Simon peered at Pony's hand.

‘Big trouble is what they are.'

Simon looked over at Pony's face, reflected strangely in the under-glow of the lamp. It looked older, the wear of age sitting strangely on his features. ‘How do you know about drugs?' Simon hated his voice then, how young it sounded.

‘My mum,' he said, ‘I told you. She worked in a doctor's surgery. I spent a lot of time with her there.' Pony picked, unconsciously, at the band-aid on his wrist. ‘These things,' he weighed the pill, the amphetamine, in his hand, ‘these tiny things do horrible things to people.'

Simon exhaled a breath he didn't realise he'd held in. He said, ‘So Tarden and Kuiper are taking drugs.'

‘They're doing more than just taking them,' said Pony. ‘You saw how many cans were in that storeroom.'

‘Why are there so many, then?'

‘I don't know. They might be selling them, or holding them for someone else.'

‘We've got to tell someone,' said Simon, ‘the police.' He saw Madaline's face, heard her promising to find his parents. ‘Madaline.'

Pony rubbed the side of his face. ‘I'm not sure that's safe,' he said. ‘Could be a risk.'

‘You think Madaline could be…involved somehow?' Simon thought he sounded like a police officer now. Words he'd heard on TV.

‘Maybe not just Madaline.'

‘Who else?'

‘Who knows? But there's no way they could keep that many drugs just sitting there without someone in the town knowing.'

‘What about the other policeman? Madaline's boss?'

‘Tommy?' said Pony, ‘he's even worse. He's friends with them all already. He probably
helps
them.'

Simon's voice stammered. ‘My…mum and dad—' He felt dizzy. ‘What have they got to do with all this? Tarden said they
took care of them
. What does
that
mean?'

Pony put his hand on Simon's shoulder. ‘I don't know.'

‘Well we can't do nothing!' Simon was surprised by the loudness of his voice. ‘We can't just do nothing!'

Pony began putting the pills back into their bag. ‘We're going to work this out,' he said. ‘We're going to find out.' He fished a bulldog clip from his rucksack, and snapped it to the drug bag to seal it. ‘Tomorrow, though. Nothing else we can do tonight.'

‘But…what if—' Simon could hardly bring himself to think it. What if Kuiper had killed his mum and dad? What if they weren't just missing, but dead? He tried to push the thought from his mind, but it was like trying to cram a snarling monster into a honey jar.

Madaline woke to the weight of sun-paled paper. She looked down. A whole ream of it, resting on her chest, had fanned out as she'd slept, spreading out from her chin to her waist. She shook blood into her arm, which had spent hours, probably, pressed up against the side of her chair. She felt her hair pasted to the side of her face, tasted stolen sleep. This graveyard of paper, she thought. This was her life.

When she was thirteen, Madaline had known exactly what her future would hold. She saw herself in a tall building, with a desk and a view through grey-tinted glass. Clocks showing three different time zones. One of those tiny swing-frames with silver balls clacking together. Her dream wasn't about importance or wealth. She wanted insularity, that intoxicating feeling of being truly inaccessible. Growing up, she was bracketed by people who knew everything about her before she even did. Her home town was a bent speck on a map: hemmed in by canefields and seemingly endless horizons where all people could do once the sun went down was gossip and drink and sweat.

Her parents' house was central to the town's machine. A Queenslander stumped up on storey-high stilts, an enormous front deck her dad had extended, perfect for gathering under tin cover as afternoon storms churned in. Burnt steak and beer, big men with the same loud mouths, the same tan lines where their hat stopped and the sun began. The women, squint-eyed, hungry and exceptionally bored. And at every get-together, the town trapped between bruised skies and fresh-burnt fields, there was Will Simpson, the son of her parents' best friends. Just a boy then, with a bowl-cut, a breaking voice and already muscled arms. They grew up together, comrades first, before becoming friends. Childhood affinity turned inevitably to something else with adolescence. A ritual procession of night-time trips to the cane fields, awkward fumblings in barns and tool sheds. Sex, it seemed, was dust.

Will was two years her junior, and he was nice enough. But Madaline came to realise he was not a future she wanted. In her final years of school, she began to picture her and Will together: building a house the same as every other house in the town, Will working the fields, the same as every other man in the town. Madaline saw herself as her mother, her desperate sense of happiness strapped to fruitless artistic dabbling.

When they caught her dad's cancer, Madaline was in her final year of school. The stubborn bastard had let the pain
spread through his stomach for nearly a year, grimacing through family meals and days and days of work. All the while letting
that dark and threatening thing extinguish any hope his body had of surviving it.

When they were sure nothing more could be done, he convinced them to let him come home. This was his final day; like all the rest, it went too quickly. He left hair on the pillow, the tiny silver strands from above his ears and told her, over and over,
Never settle, Madaline. Never. Not for anything
. The words that eventually let her escape an expected life. Waiting at the airport, nineteen years old, the bright star of a sudden marriage already burnt out.

Madaline blinked away tears and swung the chair upright, files spilling at her feet and the clunk of an empty wine bottle. Yes, a hangover. Not full-on, just a dull buzz she knew would take half the day to dissipate. She caught the stack of paper sliding down her chest. Stephanie Gale's case file, of course. Of course. She cursed the sun already thrumming behind her long living room curtains. She needed more time. More time to get her head together, to organise this case properly, to do it right.

Tommy was the one liaising with Regional Command. The missing car and the room key at the lake made it suspicious enough to notify them. Her case, Tommy doing nothing to help and still he wanted to be the one taking the credit. Which was fine, usually. She respected the privileges of hierarchy as much as the next person, but to be so
removed
from proper procedure felt insufferable. Floods down south, Tommy said; even if they wanted CID involved they wouldn't have been able to get over the river. She heard her mother's voice:
They want to know how you are, Mads, and I can't tell them anything
. She had to find the Sawyers today. This couldn't go on much longer.

There was something else today, too. Sunday, Sunday…God—Gin's birthday. They'd all be there. All the fragments of her past. The two men, Tarden and Kuiper. Maybe they'd be there too.

Madaline showered, made coffee—still only instant—took the steaming mug out the back door, hoping to blast away her headache in a blaze of sun and caffeine. The morning had brought with it a fierce wind; behind her back fence palm trunks creaked, sent their fronds shivering out like the innards of unwound cassettes. Not far off, Madaline knew, grey-green waves chewed at the coast, seagrass ruffled on the dunes, loose sand snaked along the foreshore. These things would never change.

She sat down in her plastic lounge chair, her single white chair, her matching white table. Even her own backyard, a simple concrete slab, had already succumbed to nature. Tough weeds in tiny cracks, pushing up tufted fingers, leaving little deposits of rubble. Nature would take over the house too, eventually: it would be consumed. Madaline ground the palms of her hands into her eyes. She had never managed to shake the belief that she was only an impermanent part of the landscape; she had never felt truly at home here. That constant foggy unease always there. She stared into her mug, at the scrabbly granules of undissolved coffee. Was it grief? Depression? She didn't know.

She went back into the house and on a whim decided to wear a dress; a birthday was a celebration after all. From the back of her cupboard it came, a vintage flower-dotted pinafore, a favourite from the collection she'd mostly left up north. She held it up, pinned it to her body with her chin. And she saw, of course, her mother. Missing only the shiny walnut skin, the darkness under the eyes. She removed her dressing gown, turning instinctively away from the mirror. One of a thousand unthought movements in a day but a habit that still shocked her when she caught herself doing it. She made herself turn back and run her eyes over her body. A punishment of sorts, even now noting a thickness to her hips that she had never seen, shoulders sloping down more than they used to. Still strong, though. Still a strength. She exercised, she had no worn-in wrinkles, she was still only twenty-nine.

And she imagined Ned's face. His unshaven cheeks grazing her neck. His large hands circling her stomach. His touch like cold stones drawn across her, exciting every hair on her body. Madaline felt chills travel up from the small of her back, saw the goosebumps corkscrewing her arms. She had let herself slip. She had let Ned back in. Unprofessional: this was the worst thing—she had been taught—you could be. Modern policing was a series of checks and balances, protocols and rules. That was the theory. But Madaline soon learned this was shorthand for paranoia, over-analysis and redundant bureaucracy. Policing, it seemed, had quickly slipped from doing good to not doing wrong.

Still. Whichever way she cut it, Madaline knew that falling for Ned was one of the most unprofessional things she could have done. Well, no: the
most
unprofessional thing was to let it affect the investigation of his wife's disappearance. She'd been distracted, made too many mistakes. This was the thought that kept her up every night. This was the reason she was so scared. This was why she was so sure she would never find Bill and Louise Sawyer.

But the kids, that was different. She didn't want to do to Simon what she'd done to Audrey and Gin. At least they still had Ned. Simon would have no one. Iris, maybe. This time the area was different, too. It was contained—the lake—and there were clues. The keys, the luggage. Stephanie had left nothing. Just a space in people's lives where she used to be.

Back then, like now, Madaline had waited too long to start the search properly; she had not followed protocol. The difference was, back then, at the start, anyway, she was still a police officer. She didn't feel like that now.