Faceless, page 12
Max
The young constable looked up from the enquiries counter, not a flicker of recognition on his face. Max couldn’t help the smile that crept across his chilled face.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I’d like to see Detective Meredith Peters, please.’
‘Is she expecting you? Who can I say is here?’
Max cocked his head to the side and raised his eyebrows.
‘Max Grimes.’
‘If you’ll wait a moment, please.’
The constable turned to head out the back and was partway to the doorway before he paused, and then turned around, a look of confusion on his face.
‘You were the one here earlier?’ he asked slowly, as if trying to avoid looking like a tosser if he was wrong.
‘Yes.’
Max heard the murmured ‘wow’ as the constable went back to page Meredith. Now he was here, the all-too-familiar nerves started to plague him. He felt the pull of the wide-open spaces beyond the automatic doors; and he felt the deep squirm of uncertainty at how she might react. Maybe she’d thought he would wimp out and she’d never see him again. Maybe that was what she was counting on.
He didn’t have long to wait before he heard the click of the side security door opening, the rap of heels across the hard floor, and saw the striking form of Meredith stride through. When her eyes found him she pulled up so short her ponytail slapped around the side of her head. Astonishment splashed across her face before she pulled it back to her usual mask of brusqueness. There were four beats of silence as she finished her assessment.
‘Good, we can talk now,’ she said. She turned her back on him and headed to the security door, swiped her card and walked through. Max waited for further comment about his transformation, but none came. He scampered after to get through the door before it swung closed, and then followed her silently up to the second floor and along to an interview room.
It had been a long time since he’d been in this room, and it hadn’t changed a bit – well, apart from being a more faded and stained version of its former self. If he was honest, the same could be said for him.
Meredith sat on one side of the table and indicated for him to sit opposite. He sat down, pulling the chair forward so he sat with schoolboy good posture. When he raised his eyes, he found her studying him intently in that exhaustive way that intimidated the good and the bad alike. He couldn’t bear the scrutiny and had to look away.
‘Right, you’d better tell me all about it, then.’ No preliminaries, no ‘How are you?’ Straight down to business, with a tone in her voice that made him realise, with a stab, that she still blamed him. He fought back the flood of emotion that barraged him again. The last few days had been like an awakening. The intensity with which he felt every barb, every ache, every tinge of guilt was like the sharpness and relief of your ears popping as you come down from altitude, making you realise that everything until now had been muffled.
‘Her name is Billy.’ He spoke fast, and direct. It was not the time to gloss over what was real, and of all people, he knew Meredith appreciated candour. ‘She’s a street kid, occasionally worked it if she needed money for something specific. Mostly clean, only a bit of marijuana, nothing serious. She’s a good kid.’
‘How long has she been missing?’
‘Three nights. And it is completely out of character for her. We kept an eye out for each other, so she would have told me if she was going to be away for long.’
‘How old?’
‘Eighteen.’ His voice sounded very small as the number left his lips.
Meredith picked up the difference and looked at him closely. He saw the change come across her face again, that slight softening.
‘The same age that—?’
‘Yes,’ he replied, before she could say the name and finish the sentence.
She nodded and he felt an immense sense of relief in that small acknowledgement of understanding.
‘Her full name?’
‘I don’t know. It’s just one of those things on the street, we only know each other by our first names – if even those are real. I’m pretty sure hers is short for Vilimena – is that the Fijian version of Wilhelmina? – which isn’t that common, so it should help.’
‘Better than if she’d been called Ella, I suppose – isn’t that the current favourite?’ It was a small attempt at humour, and he appreciated the effort. ‘So she was definitely Fijian?’
‘Is, is Fijian.’
She leaned forward, elbows on the table between them. ‘Look, Max, let’s be honest here. You know how this sounds. Young woman streetworker missing. You know the stats as well as I do. It’s highly likely to be foul play, and you have to face the possibility she may already be dead.’
‘Don’t say that.’ He spoke with more passion than he had in – what? – years. ‘I refuse to believe that. She is alive. She’s in trouble, but she’s alive, I know it.’ How could he explain that he could feel it, feel her? That she haunted his dreams; that he felt some long, thin line of connection with her. But he wasn’t about to give Meredith more opportunity to think he was a washed-up kook.
She looked startled by the outburst, but pushed on regardless. ‘Well, she must have family here. What did she tell you about them? You don’t think they would have come and collected her?’
He shook his head, the question refocusing his energy. ‘No. She didn’t talk of them much. Basically they had disowned her. Came over from Fiji three or four years ago. They are very involved with one of the churches here; her father may even be a preacher of some kind. But they had a big falling-out and she was kicked out of the house.’
‘The prodigal daughter?’
‘She certainly wouldn’t return home, if that’s what you mean. She was very strong about that. Couldn’t handle the hypocrisy. I think it had to do with a boy, and, well, as I said, they are a very religious family.’
‘You don’t happen to know her birthday, do you?’
God, did he? He thought back to some enormous muffins she’d bought one day, big iced decorated things you’d get for kids. Time had held such little importance for him that even a vague date was a struggle. ‘It was summer, light until late, so maybe December, January?’ What else had happened on that day? Was there anything else that made it differ from the nothingness of every other day? Something was niggling at the back of his mind. There was something else, he was sure of it, but what? He wished he’d paid more attention – to many things, as it turned out. He thought back, tried to visualise that day – and suddenly it came. ‘There was a bus crash that day, up on K Road, hit a pedestrian … the old lady died. You’ll be able to look that up, that will give you the date.’ The surge of hope he felt at such a small thing again threatened his equilibrium. With so little information, it was the small things that were going to count. He watched Meredith writing down the details.
‘So where’s this photo?’
He put his hand into his pocket, felt the dry tickle of the paper under his fingertips and pulled it out. He unfolded it and flipped it around so it was the right way up for her before passing it over. ‘It’s grainy as hell, taken from a pimp’s cellphone on Monday night. K Road. Unfortunately you can’t make out any detail of Billy, she’s got her hoodie up.’
‘And you’re sure that is her?’
‘Certain. The pimp was, too. She wasn’t his, but he’d been trying to get her in his stable – probably why he was photographing her rides as well as his girls, trying to find a way to extort her in. Full credit to her, she’d held him off so far.’ He didn’t mention the unsavoury bargain he’d made on Billy’s behalf to obtain the image.
Max tapped his fingers on the photo. ‘You can’t see the badge for the make and model of the car, but it’s definitely a dark colour – not black, maybe charcoal or navy blue – and you can make out two of the numbers of the plate.’
Meredith bent over the photo. ‘A five and a nine,’ she read aloud. He recognised the signs of her struggling to say something, or not say something. ‘Look, Max, I know you think this is going to be significant, but this is Auckland, it’s full of dark-coloured cars, there will be hundreds of vehicles that share those numbers. The simple fact is we have got precious little information about your girl to go on, and we don’t even know that she is missing. She may have just gone away for a break or something.’
He started to protest, but she held up a hand to stop him. ‘And before you say you’re sure something is wrong, yes, I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt on that one, because for you to come back like this, after how you turned up this morning, you must be pretty damned certain.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Yeah, we’ll see how charitable I am about all this later. If it’s a wild-goose chase I’m going to be pretty pissed off.’
‘It’s not a wild-goose chase, Meredith.’ He reached into his pocket again and pulled out the twenty. ‘Here – here’s the money I owe you.’ He pushed it across the table.
‘You didn’t spend it on booze or fags?’
‘Nope.’
‘How did you get the threads?’
‘It’s a long story.’
She pushed it back towards him. ‘When was the last time you ate something, Max?’
God, when had it been? He’d been so intent on Billy it hadn’t even occurred to him to eat. He couldn’t answer her because he had no idea.
Bradley
He couldn’t go back home – as far as Ange was concerned, he was at work. He could have gone to the gym, but his mind was such a jumble of fragmented and warped thoughts he felt the need to escape, so he’d spent the afternoon in a café-bar in Mission Bay, looking out over the water, watching the pram-pushers and dog-walkers go about their daily business, listening to the inane prattle of a group of women at the relaxed end of a power lunch while he nursed a beer, and then a second. Beyond the trees the peak of Rangitoto drew his eye; the extinct volcanic island still held an air of threat and mystery. The chill effect of the beer buffered his turbulent thoughts, his way-too-fast pulse and the slightly sickened weight in his stomach. The third one helped to soften his inhibitions, and he allowed himself to acknowledge that he was beginning to enjoy this; that in analysing the risks to benefits ratio, the benefits – or potential benefits – were becoming more appealing. He had a captive; he had a captive audience, and a compliant audience. He didn’t want to hurt her, he honestly didn’t, but his drifting mind kept filling with ideas, ideas that could sate his needs yet not flagellate his conscience. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered to himself. How the hell did it come to this? His mother would be rolling in her grave if she knew her beloved boy held such dark desires. His parents had never been overly religious – he remembered going to church only at Easter and Christmas – but they believed in good values and hard work. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ They were solid, salt-of-the-earth people, and he and his sisters had enjoyed the carefree childhood of most people of his age. His mother took care of all their needs, and his father supported the family, much like he did. His father worked hard, long days, like him, but he had been a mechanic, a man who worked with his hands; his was the end-of-day tiredness of physical labour, rather than mental exhaustion. He recalled the image of his dad slipping into his armchair with a beer at the end of the day, tired and happy. He didn’t get that luxury. When he got home exhausted from another thankless day at work, Ange saw it as her time to clock off. She’d had a tiring day with the children, she’d say; it was his turn to be the parent, to do the bathing and bedtime routines, clean up after dinner, do the laundry, because she had a full-time job being a mother and he had to play his part, equal partnership. Trouble was, there was nothing equal about it. He didn’t see why he should have to do half the housework when she spent all day at home. He spent ridiculous hours in that hellhole of a workplace to earn all the household income, and she spent it. Then he had to justify purchasing what he wanted. Shit, the grief he got about buying a decent stereo system, one that linked in with their smartphone apps and computers, and had the depth of sound he liked – you’d have thought he’d gone out and bought a bloody Harley-Davidson, the way she’d gone on. He felt the bitter tang of resentment and swallowed it back. Yet she always turned up with new shoes or clothes, and he didn’t want to think how much money she spent on her hair.
He half-smiled at the irony of it, as he looked at the view through the amber remains in his glass. The first thing that had attracted him to Ange was her hair, her beautiful, glossy, lustrous hair. The night he’d met her at a friend’s birthday party he’d been bewitched by the drop-dead gorgeous, vivacious young woman with the mane of golden hair. He’d fantasised about running his fingers through that hair, smelling it, burying his face in it. It had taken four months of active campaigning before he had got the chance, and it had been a hard sell; but persistence had paid off, and the reality had lived up to the fantasy. As far as he was concerned, he’d scored his dream girl.
Reality was now far removed from those carefree days. Now his job was grinding him into the ground, and the woman he adored paid more attention to their children than to him. Not that he could blame her – he lived for those two little girls. But the undeniable fact was that now he felt less and less in command of his life. It was like the power was slipping through his fingers; like he was stuck on a treadmill that was getting faster and faster, propelling him forward with relentless motion. And over the past few months he had felt it was accelerating at a pace he had no hope of keeping up with, and that at any moment he was going to be spat off the back, wasted and torn, a mangled mess.
That had changed now. Everything had changed. Despite the fact it scared and horrified him, despite the fact it went against everything he believed himself to be, he had learned something today, in that room, with the girl. He had control, he finally had control over something, and it felt so damn good. He couldn’t give that up now.
Meredith
She finally let out the breath it felt as if she’d been holding for the last hour. Yes, the transformation had been remarkable, but to her it only accentuated the true depth of his fall. The once handsome face was now gaunt, his skin pockmarked by the scars of infected sores past and the unhealed remains of those present. With his head shaved he looked like some prison-camp survivor; the thin lines of white skin showing through the stubble more signs of how tough life on the streets had been. The hardships were reflected in the haunted look in his eyes. He had been painful to look at, and she feared she’d been too abrupt, too harsh with him; but it had to be done, for both their sakes. She had to think about the girl, take her mind off the history that had just walked out the door.
When she had told Max the results of her hospital and morgue search she’d expected him to be relieved. He’d been unwavering in his belief the girl was still alive, in his grail-like quest to find her. Still, chances were she was a body in a ditch somewhere just waiting to be found. No one matching her description had turned up at the Sallies or the City Mission – although the lady at the mission thought she knew who they were talking about, only she hadn’t seen that particular girl for a couple of weeks. It was reassuring news as it meant they were chasing a real person, not some phantom Max’s mind had dreamed up in an effort to get attention. For now there were two avenues of inquiry: her family and the partial numberplate.
She looked at the ghostly hooded form in the photograph.
Eighteen. Shit, this had become personal.
Bradley
The door loomed large in front of him, and he stood there, acutely aware that he was about to cross a line, consciously cross a line. This wasn’t about lashing out in anger, this wasn’t about acting on impulse: this was a deliberate act. Was he certain he wanted to go through with it? The undeniable rise of excitement in his chest, the surge of adrenaline in his veins, the dizzying apprehension of what he was about to do was intoxicating.
Because the simple answer was yes.
‘Fuck, I can do this, I can do this, I am going to do this, I am going to do this.’ Before he could back out, he reached forward and unlocked the door. He pushed it open and stood on the threshold, watched with a sense of satisfaction the look of fear that crossed the face of the girl, the way she shrank back before him; he felt a swell of pleasure at the sight, wanted more of it, wanted to wallow in it. It fuelled him. He strode into the room, put his bag of supplies on the table, let his fingers reach out to the leather object lying along the back of it.
‘We have some business to attend to,’ he said, his voice clear and strong as he walked over and stood above her. ‘If you cooperate, you’ll be fine, if not…’ He lashed out and struck the whip against the wall, a mere foot from her head. Her eyes jerked up to his, her full understanding of the threat clear.
‘Sit on the chair and hold out your hands.’ He kicked the chair her way so she could do as he asked within the constraint of her chain. He didn’t trust her. He couldn’t afford to trust her, even though he knew if she tried anything he could crush her resistance in an instant, because he had the advantage of size and strength. He didn’t want it to get to that. In truth he still felt uneasy about hurting her: he wasn’t a complete monster. So what he planned today wasn’t hurting her. If she sat still, it wouldn’t hurt at all. Which is why he needed her hands.
