by Candice Fox
‘Please.’
She went to the sideboard and poured me a short glass of Turkey, dropped a few big ice cubes in. She had the full set-up over there: ice box and pickled cherries, decanter and a canister of stirrers. There were straws and tiny serrated tongs, a chopping board as big as my palm for the limes clumped together in a bowl. Seasoned drinker. Good taste. I took the glass and inhaled its scent it for a long while.
‘Why “game”?’ I asked.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You said “If this is some sort of game”. Why would your husband’s disappearance be a game?’
‘He had secrets, and he played games. So in terms of men, he was nothing special.’
‘You can run Ted through the last time you saw Jake,’ Amanda suggested.
‘Sure.’ Stella gave a worn sigh. ‘It’s been twenty-two days. We went to bed together January twenty-first, at around ten in the evening. We’d both been drinking. I remember Jake getting up some hours later, but I didn’t think much about it. I had no idea what time it was. He was always up and down throughout the night. When I woke in the morning, he wasn’t there. His wallet, keys and phone were gone. I looked outside. He’d taken the Jeep, left the Jaguar in the garage.’
‘You didn’t get a phone call or anything during the night? Didn’t hear knocking? Talking?’
‘Nothing.’
‘He just spontaneously got up and left?’
‘Yes.’ Stella swallowed her drink and smacked her lips.
‘Bit odd.’
‘The whole thing is rather odd, Ted.’ She smiled.
‘None of the missing personal items have been recovered as yet? The car?’
‘No. We did a big press release and the newspapers put pictures and everything up. The only thing anyone has found was the ring.’
‘Yeah. Weirder still. Amanda tells me that your husband’s wedding ring was found inside a seven-foot-long saltwater crocodile.’ I took my notepad from my back pocket, flipped through the pages. ‘The animal had been captured and euthanised for the purpose of harvesting. It was a nuisance animal up the top end of Pine Creek. The animal was killed and butchered at Macalister’s at Oak Beach. Have you or your husband ever had anything to do with either of these locations? Macalister’s or Oak Beach?’
‘You’re not a Cairns local, Ted?’ Stella asked.
‘No, I’m a Sydney man.’
‘Well, if you were a Cairns man, you’d know there’s nothing over at Oak Beach but black tribes and swamp.’ She sipped her drink. ‘It’s a reserve. No one goes there. And Macalister’s is miles away from here. Neither of us wear croc skin. It’s a very coarse leather.’
Amanda was fiddling with a box of cigars she’d taken from the bookshelf. Stella and I watched her extract one of the dark chestnut tubes from the box and sniff it with a loud, prolonged snort.
‘I assume there were no remains found in the animal,’ I said, trying to distract Amanda from the knick-knacks on the shelves.
‘There were remains,’ Amanda replied, ‘but they were too degraded to know if they’re human or not.’ She put the cigar box back and struck a theatrical pose. ‘I’m an expert on this. I’ve done tons of research. Indo-Pacific crocodiles, like most crocodilians, have a heart valve that bypasses the lungs, shunting blood through the aorta straight to the stomach. The blood hangs onto its carbon dioxide rather than releasing it into the lungs, and it’s used to produce large amounts of highly corrosive gastric acid. They secrete ten times the gastric acid of any other animal on the planet. They can digest things other animals reject – cartilage, bone, clothes, leather …’
‘All right.’ I winced. ‘Take it down a notch, David Attenborough.’
‘The wedding ring was found way down in the intestinal tract,’ she continued, poking her own navel. ‘So it looks like we caught it after the biological material was massively degraded but before the platinum took much damage.’
‘Right,’ I said, nodding. ‘Okay.’
‘In the nick of time, you might say. Just before it could be crapped out and lost forever in the murky depths of the local wetlands.’
‘You can be quiet now, Amanda,’ I said.
‘The remains are with the Queensland Police,’ Stella said. ‘I think they’ve moved them on to the coroner’s office now. They keep telling me their tests are inconclusive. They can’t separate the cell compounds. Everything is … chemically neutralised … or something. They think the guy at the coroner’s office might be better than their own people. All they can really say is that the croc ate something. They can’t tell me what it was.’
‘Soup,’ Amanda said. ‘Dead croc shit is just like brown soup.’
‘Amanda!’
‘And there’s not much Husband Soup left to examine, either.’ Amanda clicked her tongue ruefully. ‘Wally and his boys were just about done gutting the croc and harvesting its hide when the ring fell out of its … well, its ring! By that time, Minestrone à la Scully was spread over the killing floor.’
‘If your husband is alive, Stella,’ I sighed, ‘my vile and tactless friend and I will do what we can to find him. And if he’s met his fate with this animal, whether accidentally or maliciously, then we’ll try to suggest how that happened.’
‘I appreciate it,’ Stella said. ‘You sound like you know what you’re up against.’
‘What’s to say Jake mightn’t have faked his own death by putting his wedding ring on a lump of meat and feeding it to a crocodile?’ I wondered aloud. ‘I mean, it sounds very Agatha Christie.’
‘It sounds like a bad plan,’ Amanda said. ‘You’d need too much to go right for that to work. You’d need the croc to get caught. You’d need the ring to be found.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right.’
‘It was a good idea, though,’ Stella consoled me. ‘Lateral thinking. You’re a retired policeman, Ted, is that right?’
I cleared my throat and focused on Amanda, who was now playing with some golf clubs leaning in a bag by the door.
‘I’ve done some work for law enforcement.’
‘You carry yourself like a cop,’ she said.
I mumbled something noncommittal. We were straying into dangerous territory. Amanda was practising her swing with a nine iron. We sat in silence watching her until she decided to take the instrument outside. She whipped the grass a couple of times and looked at the horizon as though to track the ball.
‘She’s an interesting choice of partner.’
‘She’s an interesting choice of investigator,’ I said. ‘You don’t mind her … weirdness?’
‘Oh, look, she can be terribly annoying, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.’ Stella smirked. ‘But she’s a breath of fresh air after the police investigators I’ve been working with. They don’t pick up the phone, and when they do they give you all that gruff newspeak rubbish about the integrity of the case and investigative rigour. You don’t know if they’re keeping you in the dark because they have a suspect or because they’ve got nothing.’
‘And what about her crime?’ I said. ‘You don’t mind that she’s been convicted?’
‘Look, even if I did, Amanda Pharrell is the only non-state investigator in the top end,’ Stella said. ‘I need someone to find my husband dead or alive or I can’t file claims on our assets.’
I frowned and made some notes in my notepad, felt a strange coldness come over me.
‘Oh, come on,’ she laughed. ‘Don’t pull that face. It was hire Amanda or wait seven years for the state to declare Jake dead.’
‘It’s only been twenty-two days.’
‘When was the last time you stopped using your phone, bank or internet accounts for three weeks?’ she said. ‘Jake couldn’t go two days without his antidepressants. They’re in the bathroom. And he hasn’t filled his prescription. He’s been all over the news. No sightings. Not one. My husband is dead, Mr Collins.’
‘I suppose.’ I sighed. ‘I guess it’s hard to maintain hope when it looks this bad.’
‘It’s impossible. And I have no confidence in the state clearing this up. The police liaisons they’ve sent me so far have been one lazy idiot after another.’
‘It just doesn’t sound like …’ I stopped myself. Stella watched me. It didn’t sound like she missed her husband, or cared if he was still alive. But as I sat there looking at my notes, I thought about Kelly. I remembered how easy it seemed to have been for her to stop loving me, her face slowly hardening in the rows of people behind the defence table, her eyes beginning to fail to meet mine by day three of the committal hearings. As the evidence grew against me so too did her hatred, blossoming slowly like a black flower, seeming to wait until I wasn’t looking to unfurl, petal after petal. There were times when I glanced back into the crowd and failed to recognise her there. She changed her hair. She lost weight. She stopped calling me Ted and started calling me Edward.
I’d been in remand four weeks when she gave an interview to 60 Minutes, distancing herself from me completely.
Maybe it hadn’t been as easy as it seemed. Maybe she’d just been trying to survive, the way I was. Maybe Stella was the same. Just trying to move through the days after her husband got up out of bed and disappeared into the ether.
‘What sort of man was Jake, Stella?’ I asked, watching Amanda come inside and wander back to the shelves.
‘He was an addictive man,’ she said. ‘Workaholic. Alcoholic. Shopaholic. Big boys’ toys – cars and boats, gadgets.’
‘Drugs?’
‘When we were younger. Recreationally. Not lately. We don’t like the idea of Harrison catching us.’ She waved towards the foyer, the stairs. ‘He’s at that age.’
‘How is Harrison taking all this?’ I asked.
‘It’s hard to say.’ Stella shifted in her chair, stifled a yawn. ‘He’s a complete arsehole.’
I scoffed, looked to Amanda to see if she’d heard.
‘He’s –’
‘An arsehole,’ Stella said more clearly, sipped her drink. ‘It’s not illegal to say that, is it? He’s a teenager. He’s into the whole alternative scene. Goth. Emo. Hipster. Whatever they’re calling it. The kids who hate everything. Think they’ve got a raw deal, that no one understands them. He was grumpy and sullen before Jake went missing. He’s grumpy and sullen now.’
‘Is it all right if I talk to him?’
‘You can talk at him. There’s no guarantee you’ll get anything back.’
‘What else? Was your husband loyal to you?’ I asked. ‘Were you loyal to him?’
‘Lately,’ she said, eyeing me. ‘Again, we’ve been well-behaved since we had Harrison. If Jake had anyone on the side, she’d need to have been pretty low maintenance.’ Stella curled her feet up beneath her. ‘He worked here in his office five days a week. His spare time was after work but before dinner, and the occasional Saturday night when I wasn’t up for dancing.’
I looked at my papers. ‘So, a pretty quiet guy.’
‘Yes.’
‘You said he’s on antidepressants?’
‘I think all writers are, aren’t they?’
‘But he wasn’t suicidal?’
‘No.’
‘No major family disputes to his name? Inheritance? Insurance? Power of attorney? Trust?’
‘No. He’s an only child, and his parents are in aged care.’
‘Was he prone to wandering in the wilderness? Taking reflective sojourns?’
‘Certainly not.’ She smiled. ‘Jake was not the outdoors type. The reflective type, sure. But the plastic yoga mat, ocean sounds, meditation variety. Not … you know, the flies, ticks, sunburn variety. The most outdoorsy he gets is wandering the manicured lawns of the golf course. But if the ball goes into the bluff? Forget about it.’
I noticed the swift change from past tense to present tense. Had she righted herself for my benefit, so I wouldn’t catch her referring to her husband as something gone, never to return? Or was she just naturally wavering, sometimes hoping, sometimes resigning herself?
‘Right.’
I looked at the ceiling and tried to remember my training about missing persons. I’d been off the job for almost a year, and even then, it had been so long since I’d covered this stuff in the academy. I was floundering.
‘What were his interactions with his followers like?’ I asked. ‘Any strange fans? Anyone weird him out at book launches or send him anything strange?’
‘Oh, in the early days, when the books took off, we’d get the occasional weirdo calling the house or turning up to hang around the front gates,’ she said. ‘It’s the aspiring authors who are the worst. Jake’s got the ear of all the biggest publishers, so they think if they can just somehow get their work under his nose, he’ll be so impressed he’ll call up his people and say “Get a load of this.” We had manuscripts being dumped at the front door. Bottles of wine and chocolates. We just threw them away.’
‘But none of this sort of thing has happened recently?’
‘Oh no. Not for years. If you ignore them completely, they go away. None of it was threatening, in any case. Just – I don’t know. Desperate. There’s a box of fan letters in the office,’ she said. ‘You’re welcome to look. The police have been through them.’
‘So there’s nothing sinister in Jake’s life that you can point to immediately? No really obvious thing? You can’t tell me if your husband had any deep, dark secrets that might have caused this? Any skeletons in his closet?’
‘Not that I can think of.’ She shrugged.
The shrug was weird. Too casual, and I thought she knew it. I must have had ‘that face’ on again, because she laughed and studied her fingernails, sat smiling sadly for a moment or two.
‘Look, the love went years ago, Ted. That’s the honest truth,’ she said. ‘We were private people when we met, and the older we got, the more private we became. It seemed only natural to me that sometime, one of these days, it would all come to a quiet end. We’ve been coexisting here.’ She gestured at the house around us. ‘Sleeping in the same bed, eating at the same table, but not really being together. You know? He’d write. I’d play tennis. At night we’d read in bed together, saying nothing at all, until after a while we both turned off our lamps. I thought he’d find someone new, eventually, probably after Harrison was old enough to be out on his own so neither of us would be lumped with him. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you? You look like a man who knows what it feels like to watch a marriage dry up.’
‘I am,’ I admitted.
‘Well, it’s not my first time.’ Stella sat back in her chair. ‘My daddy went the same way. A regular night. A Tuesday, I think. I can remember the sound of the door opening and closing in the hall. But I thought, with Jake, it’d be simpler than this.’ She looked at Amanda. At me. ‘I thought it’d be cleaner.’
I took a wander through the house, leaving Stella to endure Amanda chattering away on the couch about crocodilian biology. Everywhere the natural environment was on display through gaping, frameless windows, huge sheets of glass that opened onto tropical rainforest creeping up to the house on three sides. Ferns and vines, wet flowers. I peeked at the master bedroom, saw paperbacks still stacked on Jake’s side of the bed: Michael Connelly and Jeffrey Archer; Danielle Steel on Stella’s. Down the hall I came upon an open door and found the beanied boy sitting on the edge of an unmade bed, fiddling with a phone.
‘Knock-knock.’
‘Yeah?’ The boy glanced up at me, gave me a cold once-over, like he was judging his chances in a fight. Teenage boys. So ready for the world to hate them.
‘I’m Ted Collins. I’m a private investigator looking for your dad.’
‘Well, you’re not gonna find him in here.’
‘You sure?’ With my foot I nudged a pile of clothes as high as my knee. A stack of magazines on top of the pile slid sideways and flopped on the floor.
‘Yep.’
‘You speak to your dad the night he went missing?’
‘Uh-h
uh.’
‘What was he like?’
‘The usual.’
‘What’s the usual?’
The boy shrugged.
‘You guys have some kind of beef?’
Harrison squinted hard. ‘I didn’t feed my dad to a crocodile, if that’s what you’re getting at.’
‘I’m not getting at anything yet.’ I said.
‘Whatever.’
‘Why do you think your dad went out that night?’
‘Dude, I’ve already run through all this shit with the cops,’ the boy huffed at me and licked the piercing in his bottom lip. ‘You guys don’t share reports?’
‘We’re a private agency. Your mum’s pretty concerned with getting him found.’
‘Yeah.’ The boy snorted. ‘She likes money, that one.’
Harrison Scully went back to texting, and I considered that a marker of the end of the conversation. I decided to take another run at the boy when I got the chance, but downstairs I heard footsteps and knew that Amanda had finally worn Stella down. Sure enough, Amanda’s voice came trailing up from below, bouncing off the high walls.
‘Most people get drowned in the death roll,’ she was saying. ‘Or, if it’s got hold of one of your limbs, the death roll will twist it off. So you’re supposed to go for the eyes. Scratch them, punch them, blind the thing if you can. Distract it, before it can start to spin. Everybody says that about sharks, but with sharks it’s the nose. Punch ’em in the nose. They’ve got these sensors, see, along the sides of their …’
I took a quick glance at the boy’s bedroom, the posters on the walls, the clutter on the desk, cabinets, cupboards and floor. A mental snapshot. Then I left.
Amanda went through the ritual of stretching before she mounted her bike. Flexing her muscles and rolling her ankles. I sat in the driver’s seat and watched her, let the heat of the vehicle drain out the open window.
‘Man, that was hilarious in there.’ Amanda grinned suddenly, remembering. ‘Drink, Ted? Sydney man, Ted? Married, Ted? She wants your body, that Stella. I can tell.’
Amanda did a saucy little dance on the road, rubbed her hands suggestively up over her breasts and down again. She made kissy noises at me. I didn’t know whether to laugh or burst into tears.
