Gith Page 3

  I pointed with my thumb over my shoulder. 'I better go.'

  'Of course,' she said. 'Of course. They'll be using a profile, I expect. That's what they do, isn't it?'

  'Right.'

  Inside it wasn't going well. They'd given Gith a pen and a pad. She'd done an okay picture of the van and a weird-looking drawing of the driver, with spiky hair and eyes round like a pair of goggles. Now she was leaning over, all tense, trying to do the number plate. I sat down beside her.

  'This isn't a good idea,' I said.

  Jones and Jackson looked at me like I was obstructing the course of justice.

  Gith gave a snarl and straightened up. Suddenly she threw the pen across the room. Jackson ducked back and it missed his head by a couple of inches. It crashed into the metal cabinet against the far wall. Gith buried her face in her arms and started to sob. I put my hand on her shoulder and she spun round towards me, grabbing me round the neck, clinging on tight. I looked at Hemi. He gave a shrug, saying sorry.

  'She knows the number but she can't write it down?' Jackson couldn't believe it.

  'She thinks she knows the number,' I said. Gith's arms tightened around my neck, choking me. 'I guess she does.' She relaxed a bit.

  'Look,' I said, 'I don't think you're going to get much more here.'

  'No.' Jones pulled a face.

  'I can tell you a few things though,' I said. 'I saw Anneke myself. She was wearing a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up.'

  Jones was quickly to her feet, retrieving the pen.

  I waited till she was settled. 'And there were other people there. Monty Praguer and Mavis Blake. And there was a red Holden Commodore. Anneke got out of that.'

  'Who was driving?' Jackson asked.

  'Not sure. I think it was a city dude. Neat plaid shirt and khaki pants with lots of pockets. Dark hair? Yes, I guess so.

  Tall. Maybe a metre ninety.'

  'Anything else?'

  'No. But there would've been at least six cars out there. I don't remember. Oh, except there was a blue-grey wagon with a dog in the back seat.'

  'What sort of wagon?'

  'Don't know.' I felt Gith tense. 'Camry, maybe?' She relaxed. 'Yes, a Camry.'

  Gith suddenly started to kiss me on the cheek, five, six, seven times, then she bit me on the ear.

  'Ouch!' I tried to push her away but she was hanging on hard. I let go and she clung in close again. I could feel her laughing. Jackson and Jones weren't that impressed.

  'Thank you, Mr McUrran, you've been very helpful,' Jackson said. 'One thing we'd find very useful: can we get a look at your online transactions for that day and a day or two following?'

  'Yes, sure. No problem. A lot of people round here pay cash though.'

  'Of course. We understand.' Jackson gave a tight little smile.

  'And do you have closed-circuit TV by any chance?'

  'No,' I said. 'We've been thinking about it, but no.'

  2

  I'M NOT SURE how much I need to say if I'm going to get this story straight. I was born in Tacketts Valley, on the farm, in the same bed where Bill and Joanne had come into the world. That's just about where the likeness stops. I was always the odd one out in the family. All the others — and that includes Ma and the Old Man — are skinny and energetic and smart. They're into sport and stuff like that and they were good at school. I'm the opposite. I've been wearing glasses since I was nine and I've always been . . . well, not real fat . . . but heavy enough to get the Fat Boy tag. I think if the Old Man hadn't known from managing his flock that even the best breeding programme throws out a dud now and again, he would have asked himself seriously where I came from.

  But seeing me as a fact of life didn't mean he had to put up with me. Pretty early on he made up his mind that, useless as I was, he was going to get some good out of me. For the most part this meant beating it into me. I guess I got the flat of his belt on average about once a month. It didn't make any difference — I still took twice as long to do any job as the others and I still did it half as well. This was partly because I was slow and a bit thick about most things, but also because I was a dreamy kind of kid. I liked watching the clouds go by a lot more than I liked the sight of a pile of well-chopped firewood. The Old Man used to give Bill a hiding too every now and again, but he never touched Joanne. Being the girl kept her safe, although it might have been one of the reasons she turned into a spoilt brat. Bill never suffered as much as me. He was smarter and he was quicker. He knew how to keep the Old Man sweet and he liked doing it. The two of them got on like a house on fire. With me, it was always love–hate. On both sides. Sometimes I felt he just couldn't stand the sight of me and belted me because of that.

  I can't say I hated farming but I always knew it wasn't for me. I guess this was mostly because I knew I could never live up to the Old Man's standards. The only thing I cared about was cars and machinery. At first this was just watching and dreaming, looking at books and magazines, spotting different kinds of vehicle when we went into town. We had an old Austin A40 up on blocks in one of the sheds. It had something wrong with it that the Old Man had always been going to get fixed but had never got round to. I used to spend hours in it, pretending I was driving, even though my feet couldn't reach the pedals and I could hardly see through the windscreen. Sometimes I'd just look at it, seeing how the gear lever was connected in, poking about with a torch in the mess of wiring behind the dashboard. After a while I figured out how to open the bonnet and lift it up so I could get a look at the engine and all the other bits in there. Working along from my reading and what I could see, I started to figure out which was the distributor and which the sparkplugs, how the cables connected things to the battery, where the fuel line and the carburettor were. By the time I was ten years old I was unscrewing bits and going over the insides before putting them all back again.

  One day — I guess I was about twelve — I got a wild idea. What if the Austin's engine was still in working order? If so, there were three things it needed: petrol in the tank, a battery that wasn't flat and an ignition key. Petrol was easy. We had our own tank and pump for the farm vehicles. The battery wasn't a problem either. I got the one out of the Old Man's ute. It was a different size to the Austin's and the contacts weren't right but I managed to get it connected, sort of. The ignition key was more of a problem, but I figured out that all the key did was turn a switch in an electric circuit. If I took the switch out and connected up the two ends of the wire I wouldn't need a key. It took a while but I managed it — the first and only time I ever hot-wired a car.

  It was all ready to go. I topped up the radiator, just in case, and then I climbed into the driver's seat and pulled the starter. There was an urr-urr-urr sound and then a graunch and a cough. It kicked into life, making a noise like a concrete mixer with rocks in it, but it was going. I was so excited I couldn't help but take the next dumb step. I pressed my foot down on the clutch and eased the gear lever into what I thought was first. The noise was even worse this time — a high-pitched screaming — and the whole car started to shake. I'd never dealt with a hot-wired car so I couldn't figure out how to turn the bloody thing off and I sat there in total panic. I was too scared to get out and too stupid to do anything else. The good news was that the engine stalled within ten or so seconds. The bad news was that the Old Man had just got into the ute to drive into town and found out he didn't have a battery. I got belted that time too.

  ***

  BY WEDNESDAY THE cops were on to the Anneke Hesse case big time. Hemi came round that evening and told me about it. I guess he felt he owed us after the way Jackson and Jones upset Gith. We sat on the verandah in the warmth of the setting sun. Gith was inside listening to her music and I broke out a couple of bottles of Tui to toast the end of day.

  'Cheers,' Hemi said, raising his beer. He was still in uniform but that never seemed to bother him.

  'Same.'

  He drank, smacked his lips and put the bottle down on the little table between us
.

  'They traced the owner of the red Holden, eh,' he said.

  'Yeah?'

  'Jack Prichard's nephew. From Palmy. He was driving north and decided he'd stop off and see Jack and Shirley for half an hour. Anneke figured she'd keep going.'

  'And?'

  'He didn't see her get into a white van.'

  'But there was one.'

  Hemi took another pull at his beer. 'Well . . . he isn't sure. And neither's Monty. Mavis remembers another vehicle there. She says it was white but she thinks it was a wagon.'

  'How could you mistake a van for a wagon?' I asked.

  He shrugged. 'Don't know, bro. They've got a name for the Camry with the dog, too, but they haven't talked to him yet.' He gave a little snort. 'They all remember that. They all remember the bloody dogs barking.'

  'But they don't remember Anneke?'

  'Oh, they remember her. But not getting into anything.

  Now, you'd think, with all those people, somebody would have noticed.'

  'No, they were all queuing at my till. Except for Gith. Gith noticed.'

  He didn't answer, just wriggled around in his seat a bit, like he was settling his backside in more firmly.

  'Something must've happened to her,' I said. 'She didn't just vanish into thin air. I mean, if she walked off up the road, somebody would've seen her for sure. She would've been thumbing rides.'

  'I don't know.' He thought about it for a bit. 'Suppose it happened this way. She gets out of the red Holden and she decides she needs a pee or something. Goes round to your public loo, which is round the north end of the building, right?'

  'Right.'

  'When she comes out, the forecourt's cleared. She walks on up the road round the corner. Not much traffic now. Somebody comes by and picks her up.'

  'Is that the official idea?' I asked.

  'Is it possible?'

  'Yeah, it's possible.' I was a bit pissed off. I figured that if Gith had been a normal-talking person, even one who was as thick as pigshit, like Bobby Tackett, people would be believing her. Mavis Blake was a bit of a worry though. A white wagon? Gith would never make a mistake like that.

  'I know she's not a hundred per cent,' I went on, 'but Gith's not dumb. She notices things. And she knows motors.'

  'Good kid,' he said.

  'She's not a kid. She's twenty-three.' My voice lifted a notch and he looked at me. I couldn't read him. Did he know more than I thought he did?

  'I believe her,' he said.

  'But those city cops don't?'

  He shrugged. 'Don't know, bro. They're sceptical, I guess.'

  We sat in silence for a while. The music drifted out from inside the house, an orchestra and a solo instrument, something high and sweet.

  'Mozart,' Hemi said. 'Nice.'

  'Well.' I wanted to stick to what we were talking about. 'If you find all those vehicles, we'll have a better picture.'

  'It'll help,' he said. 'But people aren't always traceable and they don't all come forward, eh. They might have other reasons for not going to the cops. Plus, there's not much to tie Anneke to any vehicle right now. She's only been in the country a week. Stayed a few nights in Wellington and then hit the road. We don't have reliable fingerprints. We don't have DNA.'

  'What about the Commodore? Her prints must be in that.'

  'Yeah but the driver's had other people in the car since then, including a couple more hitch-hikers. He's a fan of them, apparently. No, the best bet for an identity benchmark is probably Austria. They're waiting on that.'

  'Maybe she'll turn up,' I said.

  'Maybe. They don't think so though. Last seen at your place.'

  Just like Dolly said. It was a scary thought.

  'How old is she?' I asked.

  'Twenty-nine.'

  'By herself?'

  'Seems so.'

  'Guess she's got people back home worrying about her.'

  'Yes,' he said. 'It's always tough on the whanau, eh?'

  'Who the hell would do a thing like this?' I asked.

  'Weeell . . .' He thought about it. 'Could be anybody. Any bloody ratbag who's capable. It's what they call a crime of opportunity. Not planned or anything. A guy, on his own, acting on impulse.'

  'The same guy as with Mattie Barnes?'

  'That we don't know.'

  Not if it was Billy Cleat, I thought. Billy had got sixteen years for cutting and raping a prostitute in Palmy. He was out on parole after eight and since then had been living with his mother, Pansy, in an old house up Maungaiti Road. When Mattie Barnes went missing, Billy was still inside.

  ***

  AFTER HEMI HAD gone, Gith and I had tea and then we popped next door to see Leece's uncle and auntie. There were two empty sections between the service station and their place so it was maybe sixty metres door to door. I took a big bar of chocolate from the shop because I knew Len had a sweet tooth. Their house was a little old four-room cottage with a bathroom tacked on the back. The front garden was full of flowers and, in the evening air, we felt swallowed up by the scent as we walked up the path.

  Kath opened the door and led us through into the little living room, where Len was sitting hunched up in a chair. I hadn't seen him for a while and I was shocked by the way he looked — thin and old. I guess he was around sixty but he seemed like he was way more than that. Most of his hair was gone and what was left was pure white. His skin was a kind of orange colour and his eyes had a glittery look to them.

  'Gidday,' he said, and lifted his hand. It was icy cold.

  I gave him the chocolate and he said thanks. He didn't do anything with it though. Just let it lie in his lap.

  Kath made Gith and me a cup of tea, which we didn't need, and then we sat on the sofa and talked to her, mostly about the family. She wanted to know how Leece and Bill were and how the kids were getting on. Now and again Len would say something but for the most part he just sat there. He had been a fencing contractor most of his working life, a tough old sod who had ignored the skin cancer when it first showed up. I guess he'd never been the cheerful sort but to see him the way he was now upset me a lot.

  We left after maybe an hour and walked back home. It was dark by then. Gith put her arm through mine and squeezed it. We stopped in the light over the front door while I felt in my pocket for the keys.

  'You okay?' I asked.

  'Gith.' There were tears in her eyes.

  ***

  AROUND ELEVEN THE next morning a battered red Honda Accord pulled up to the pumps. I left the workshop and went out to see if the customer needed help. She was short and plump and wearing a shapeless thing that looked a bit like a worn-out car-seat cover. Straight brownish hair, watery blue eyes, a narrow face and pointed chin, a mouth that was caving in. It took me a few seconds to remember her name. Pansy Cleat.

  'How's it going?' I said, walking up to her.

  She waved a twenty dollar bill at me and pulled a sour face. I got the pump started and stood beside it. She was on the other side of the car and was looking around like she was searching for something.

  The car itself was in bad shape. There were several dents in the panels and a mess of rust bubbles along the drainage channel. The top of the door pillar was rusty, too.

  'You need to get that fixed,' I said.

  'How much?' She stared at me.

  'Don't know. A few hundred, I guess.'

  She gave a snort of laughter. 'Blow that,' she said.

  'You won't get a warrant with rust like that.'

  'Then that's the end of the bloody warrant, isn't it?'

  The pump stopped. I hung up the nozzle and we went inside. I moved round to the back of the counter and unlocked the till. Took her money.

  'How's Billy?'

  'Billy?' She stared at me like I'd said something odd. 'Well, he's all right, thank you very much.' Her thin lips wriggled around like she was chewing something real small. 'You're the first bugger in years to ask that question. Everybody else round this place acts like he don't exist
.'

  'Well . . .' I wasn't sure what to say.

  'Billy did a bad thing,' she went on. 'You know he did a bad thing. I know he did a bad thing. Billy knows he did a bad thing. Somebody, sometime gotta say he done his time so let's forget all that.'

  'Fair enough,' I said, but I couldn't help thinking of the woman with a face full of stitches.

  Her thoughts seemed to be on the same track but with a different ending. 'That slut!' She spat the words out like they were used sump oil. Then she suddenly changed her tone, looked at me, almost smiled. 'Anyway,' she said. 'Billy's all right, if you really want to know. He'd be a bloody sight better if the cops'd leave him alone and somebody would give him a job. Bloody probation officer was supposed to do something about that but. No use complaining, though, eh. No bugger listens.' She turned and walked away.

  I locked the till and followed her out. The Honda started with a cough and took off in a cloud of blue smoke. Not long for this world, I thought.

  ***

  DESPITE BEING AS mad as buggery, the Old Man was pretty impressed by the fact that I'd got the Austin started. He treated me different after that. He let me have more free time and he stopped giving me the belt anywhere near as often. The thing I liked best was that he said I could have the Austin if I could fix it. For a little while I was the happiest kid I knew. All my mates were jealous as hell.

  It didn't last long though. The next year I was off to boarding school. It was the same place Bill had gone to. He had been a prefect and in the first fifteen, plus he was in the top stream. Given what I was — a dumb, fat boy with glasses and not much cheek or sense of humour — I was done from the start. It wasn't getting beaten up that bothered me — that was hardly worse than what I got at home — it was the mind games. Their favourite trick, which they never seemed to get sick of, was stealing my glasses. It took a bunch of them to hold me down, but there was always plenty volunteering for the job. The glasses would be gone for days at a time, except when somebody waved them in my face just to remind me. Then suddenly they'd be there again, on my table or my desk, like I'd left them there by mistake. I think they got given back so other kids could have the fun of taking them off me again. I could hardly read or write without them, so I often missed out on prep and I was lost in class.