Gone by Midnight

by Candice Fox

  ‘Why are you in charge of this case?’ I asked Clark. ‘You’re Crimson Lake. This is Cairns jurisdiction.’

  ‘Robert Griswald, the Cairns chief, was in Sydney on holiday when the call came through. I was the first ranking officer to respond, so I’ve bought it.’

  ‘So I’d be working alongside your team?’

  ‘Every team in the region is on this,’ Clark said. ‘And we’ve got specialists in Sydney on standby. They’ll get approval to head here at the twelve-hour mark.’

  ‘Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves?’ I asked. ‘It’s seven hours. The kid could have gone for a walk.’

  ‘He’s not on CCTV leaving the hotel from any of its four entrances.’

  ‘He could still be here. Hiding in a cupboard somewhere.’

  ‘We’ve done a top-to-bottom search of the hotel. We’re about to do a second one.’

  There was a different feeling creeping up my insides now, like cold fingers trailing along my ribs. Chief Clark and I sat in thought for a few minutes. Questions kept coming, but I knew there was no point in asking them now. I needed to take a breather, get my head straight. Sort out the avalanche of actions I would have kicked off between Sean, Amanda and Val. Figure out how I was going to take this case with my daughter in my care.

  I stood again, and Clark remained seated.

  ‘There’s one more thing you need to know,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m approving you to assist on this case,’ Clark said, clasping his hands firmly on the table. ‘But I don’t want Amanda Pharrell anywhere near it.’

  I should have known this was coming. During our last case, Amanda and I had been tasked with discovering who killed two young bartenders in a roadside hovel east of the lake. We’d worked alongside the police, and Amanda had taken the lead, as I’d been tied up down in Sydney fighting a new accusation against my name. Amanda had indeed discovered who murdered the bartenders, but a newly appointed detective in Crimson Lake had been killed. It made sense that Damien Clark blamed Amanda for Detective Inspector Pip Sweeney’s death. They’d been working together, like partners, and Amanda was just as hated for her own dark past as I was, having served eight years for the murder of her classmate Lauren Freeman. I found myself shaking my head immediately, hardly giving the issue any thought.

  ‘No deal. We’re a team. Amanda and I work together.’

  ‘Not on this case you don’t.’ Clark’s eyes were hard, fixed on mine. ‘She’s not to have a hand in it. I don’t want to hear her name spoken. I don’t want to see that woman within a fucking kilometre of this hotel.’

  The door burst open beside me so hard it slammed against the stacks of chairs along the wall, almost toppling them over. As though summoned by the chief’s words, Amanda strode triumphantly into the room and thrust her arms in the air.

  ‘Never fear! Crack a beer! Let the people cheer, for Amanda is here!’ she bellowed.

  There’s something deeply wrong with Amanda Pharrell.

  Whatever it is, it defies logic. It’s a slippery, indefinable thing that arms her with an eternal supply of social confidence, while at the same time preventing her from doing anything except horrifying, disturbing or annoying people everywhere she goes. She has apparently no emotional range, no gut-deep reservoir of guilt or anger at her bloody past, and yet she wears the consequences of that same past on her skin in neck-to-toe tattoos. If she is scarred at all by her past, the only outward evidence of it is the jagged pink scars like lightning strikes that crack and crease her tattoos, the results of a crocodile mauling that almost took her life. When she was young, Amanda killed her teenage classmate by accident, stabbing wildly in the dark at the first thing she fell upon, trying to defend herself from a rapist. Amanda suffers a physical twitch from the incident, cannot travel in cars because of it, spends her life as the town pariah because of it, and yet claims it means nothing. She has militant rules for those around her, and none for herself, and those are just the beginnings of her problems. Having spent a year observing Amanda’s deep-seated quirks, I was only mildly surprised to see her there in the doorway, materialised out of thin air, in a gold sequined minidress and six-inch stiletto heels painted with red flames.

  Clark, however, was more surprised. His face stiffened and flushed with colour. He rose unsteadily from the table and without a word slipped by us and disappeared down the hall.

  Amanda turned to me.

  ‘What’s the drama, bwana?’ She punched me in the ribs.

  ‘There are many dramas. How would you like my monstrous morning presented?’

  ‘I’m thinking …’ She tapped her chin thoughtfully. ‘Reverse chronological order.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘You just burst in on Chief Clark as he was demanding you have nothing to do with our new case. We have a new case. A boy is missing. I was arrested this morning, accidentally, by a couple of douchebags who assumed that I must have taken him. I have a sick goose. Lillian is supposed to be visiting today.’

  Amanda stared at me, bug-eyed.

  ‘None of the aforementioned events involved me drinking coffee,’ I said.

  ‘Who’s the boy? How old is he? Where was he when –’ Amanda began, but I pointed a finger in her face.

  ‘Nope. My turn,’ I said. ‘How did you get here so fast and what on earth are you wearing?’

  ‘This?’ She did a little shimmy. The gold sequins hanging off the dress were as big as ten cent coins, her movements sending them twisting and glittering. ‘I wore it last night. I was already here. I came to see a Kenny Rogers tribute band and stayed in the Sea Breeze, around the corner.’

  ‘You like Kenny Rogers?’

  ‘No.’ She picked a loose thread from the shoulder of the dress. ‘So I guess you don’t need the cavalry then?’

  I looked at my phone. There were seventeen missed calls from Sean, three from Val and none from Amanda.

  ‘I’m going to sort out the mess I’ve made.’ I held up the phone. ‘You’re going to go change into something more appropriate. I think I was accidentally marched into a briefing with the bigwigs when I arrived here. That means there will be an all-staff briefing soon. I’ll meet you out the front and we’ll go in together.’

  ‘What’s appropriate for a missing kid case?’

  ‘Smart casual,’ I said. ‘Discreet, Amanda. Clark’s serious. He doesn’t want you anywhere near this. The mum has hired us. And he’ll have a go at you if you get in his face.’

  ‘He’s going to have to take a number and get in line on that one.’ Amanda flapped a hand dismissively. ‘There must be a hundred cops out there. Who’s going to notice me?’

  Amanda walked into the palm-lined valet parking area of the hotel half an hour later wearing denim cut-off hotpants and a shirt that read Queenslanders like it hot and steamy. The sunglasses she pushed up into her streaked black-and-orange hair when she saw me were studded with dozens of tiny diamantes. A couple of press in the growing crowd beyond the roadblock outside the hotel recognised her and started snapping. She lifted an arm and waved, like a hungover rock star.

  Most of the guests I’d seen being processed as they left the hotel were now gone, and the police presence in the foyer was minimal. I handed Amanda the coffee I’d bought for her when I got my own, and we followed a couple of patrol cops towards one of the larger boardrooms. Before we could squeeze into the already overcrowded room, two cops glanced back at me, angry dogs assessing us from the corner of their eyes.

  ‘Got the prime suspect here already, you ask my opinion,’ one of them said. The other snorted.

  Chief Clark was holding court at the front of the roomful of officers, shuffling papers behind a lectern while two non-uniforms talked at him. There were more angry glances thrown towards Amanda and me, but she didn’t seem to notice them. She was looking out at the gathering appreciatively, as though judging the turnout at a wedding. There were two spare seats in the last row of chairs, but as I looked over at them
the nearest officers straightened, jaws set, almost daring me to sit down.

  We stood at the back as the gathering quietened, and Chief Clark told us the story.

  The boy was Richard Henry Farrow. Richie to his family. He was eight years old, tall and thin for his age, and had two very large front teeth. A photo of the boy flashed onto the screen before us, the sunny and slightly sad victim picture I’d seen a thousand times, a moment captured in the tragically unreachable past. The picture had been taken at a local crocodile farm the previous day, just hours before the boy went missing. On his arm the boy nervously balanced a white cockatoo in what looked like the petting-zoo section of the park. His mother, Sara Mairee Farrow, had taken the picture on her phone.

  The boy and his mother were part of a group that had come up from Melbourne and had been staying in the hotel for two days. Each family had only one boy, a quirk that had brought them together, Sara standing out as the single parent while three sets of others wrangled a boy of their own on the trip. On the first day, the three couples, their three boys, Richie and his mother had set out for a day of sightseeing. They’d left the hotel and been bussed to the marina to take a cruise of the Great Barrier Reef. They’d had lunch on the boat, returned to the hotel in the afternoon, and the families had split up to nap, shower, watch TV and relax in their rooms. In the evening, the parents had taken the kids across to the Esplanade out the front of the hotel and, while the boys had messed around in the fountains and aquatic park, the seven adults had drunk wine and watched the sun set. That night, the four boys had been left unsupervised in one of the hotel rooms. They’d dragged blankets onto the floor, opened packets of chips and cans of Coke, and waited for the three pizzas that had been ordered for them to arrive. Sara Farrow had been the last parent to be with the boys before they were left to watch a selection of movies downloaded for them on a laptop. She’d paid the pizza guy, told the boys to behave themselves and reminded them that all the parents would be in the restaurant on the ground floor. Although a mobile phone had been left with the boys, they’d also been told that if any trouble arose all they had to do was dial seven on the hotel room phone and ask for one of the parents.

  The boys were warned that if they left the room, there would be dire consequences. They had no key to get back in, so would have no choice but to go down to the restaurant and ask their parents for one. If they turned up at the restaurant because they’d broken the rules and gone roaming around the hotel causing mischief, they’d better be prepared for trouble.

  Everything went swimmingly. All seven parents had dinner at the Clattering Clam, a short walk out the grand front doors of the hotel and around a corner past a Sunglass Hut store. Every hour, on the hour, one of the parents went up to the room and checked on the boys.

  The first time the boys were checked on, two of them were watching a movie on the laptop, and two were jumping from one bed to another.

  The second time they were checked on, all four were watching the movie.

  The third time they were checked on, they were all huddled together in a blanket-and-cushion fort, giggling behind their hands.

  The fourth time they were checked on, all the boys were asleep.

  At dinner downstairs, the parents revelled in the absence of their children. All day the boys had run around, climbed on things, wrestled each other and made wet, loud fart noises; a new talent they’d discovered as a group and hoped to hone. They’d touched buttons they’d been told not to touch, picked noses they’d been told not to pick, hung headfirst over railings on the side of the cruise boat, beyond which certain death lingered. The parents consumed a bottle of wine each. They were warned twice by restaurant staff that they were making too much noise and unsettling guests nearby. They stayed until closing, went upstairs, and the three families whose boys did not belong in the room retrieved their sleeping children.

  With such an arrangement having proved successful, the second night was planned the same way.

  During the day the four families had separated. Sara Farrow had taken Richie to the crocodile farm, stopped with him for ice cream on the way back to the hotel, and lay down on the double bed with him for a nap around five o’clock. She’d been sunburned, and Richie had been too, unaccustomed to the sneaky Cairns weather and its ability to roast you through the stifling humidity. The two had overslept.

  At seven, she’d dressed and escorted Richie next door to the room where the other boys were. The three couples had already gone down to the restaurant, and the boys were twenty minutes into a movie. She’d dropped Richie off and taken the elevator down to dinner.

  Sara had told the other parents she was so dehydrated, so sunburned, so hungover from the previous day’s festivities that she wouldn’t be drinking that evening. She’d volunteered to do the hourly checks, and had conducted four, just like the night before.

  Each time she checked, Sara found the boys engaged in the same kind of behaviour as the previous evening. The first time, they were having a competition to see how many marshmallows they could stuff into their mouths, the movie playing, unwatched, behind them. The second time, they were watching the movie. The third time, they were lying on the floor, whispering and plotting and snorting with laughter.

  The last time Sara checked, three boys were asleep.

  And Richie was gone.

  There was nothing to suggest the boys had left the room. The man in room 607, Martin Askin, had arrived from Los Angeles on business and told police he went to bed, exhausted and jetlagged, around 5.30 pm. He’d heard the boys in the room throughout the night playing and romping around. The windows of the room did not open. While there was a small manhole above the kitchenette, searches of the ventilation system had proved fruitless, and the boys would have had a lot of difficulty accessing the manhole without a ladder. While there was an adjoining door to the next room that staff had unlocked for the families, the situation was the same there. The room next door was the Farrow room.

  If indeed the boys had left the room, which they said they hadn’t, they would not have been able to leave the hotel through any other room, as all the windows were secure. They would not have been able to access the service areas of the hotel, as these doors were accessed only by swipe cards belonging to staff, and any of the dozens of members of staff working in offices, drinking coffee in the break room or changing in and out of their uniforms behind the scenes of the hotel would immediately have noticed the boys and known they were out of bounds. The boys were not picked up on CCTV traversing the hotel’s foyer, nor did they appear on any of the cameras covering all four sides of the building and the parking lot.

  The only explanation for Richie’s disappearance that was offered came from the other boys he’d spent the night with, and their account of what had happened simply did not make sense. One minute Richie had been with them, and then he’d disappeared.

  The briefing came to a noisy finish, with scraping chairs, talking, teams getting together to head out on their assignments. When Amanda and I returned to the foyer there was a group of handlers leading a pack of three search dogs into the elevator, the animals already snuffling at everything within reach of their leads. A couple of cops shoved past us, murmured something about Amanda being a killer.

  Amanda slurped the last of her coffee with an exaggerated sigh of satisfaction and looked around for a bin, but they’d all been confiscated to be emptied in search of evidence. She put the cup in the base of a potted palm tree.

  ‘Well, all the boys left the room,’ she said.

  ‘How do you figure that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘But four eight-year-old boys don’t stay in a room quietly all night long without their parents while there’s a huge labyrinth of adventure just beyond the door. Seven o’clock until midnight – that’s how long they were left unattended both nights. Five hours. They’re kids, so time is double.’

  ‘Time is double?’

  ‘Yes, time and gravity are double for kids,’ she s
aid. I let it go. ‘So that’s ten hours each night. Even I’d have gone nuts. I’m telling you, they got out of the room.’

  ‘They say they didn’t,’ I reminded her.

  ‘They’re lying.’

  ‘How’d they get back in?’

  ‘Well, they didn’t prop the doors open,’ Amanda mused. ‘Those key card doors send an alarm to the security office if they’re left open too long. It’s possible the door was faulty.’

  ‘Or one boy stayed behind to let the others back into the room while three went out adventuring. Or two stayed behind and two went out. Maybe they took turns.’

  ‘Pfft.’ Amanda rolled her eyes. ‘You ever seen eight-year-old boys try to take turns?’

  ‘However they arranged it,’ I said, ‘they had plenty of time to get it right.’

  Chief Clark exited the hallway near us in the company of three plain-clothes officers.

  ‘You better scram,’ I told her. ‘I’ll go get our instructions from the big boss and meet you on the –’

  ‘Forget that,’ she scoffed. ‘I’m not creeping around this hotel like a leper trying to avoid him. Hey, Clarky!’

  Amanda marched off towards the group of detectives like a madman striding towards a cliff edge. I caught up to her as the three men stopped short at the sight of the pint-sized, tattooed pixie fluttering into their midst.

  ‘Clarky, mate.’ Amanda grinned. ‘We need to meet our client and get the lowdown. Can we have a run sheet?’

  She was asking for the sheet that detailed the parents’ contact numbers, their addresses, heights, weights, ethnicities, marital statuses – all the basics officers could then avoid asking the distraught parents themselves. The run sheet would have all the info on the kids, the most detailed data being about Richie himself. There would be a draft timeline of the events leading to the disappearance and the contact details of all the staff in command. Amanda put her hand out and the officers with Clark made their excuses and left as a distinctly red colour crept up the chief’s neck like mercury in a thermometer.