The Ottoman Motel Read online

  The milk steamed. Pony took it off the stove and got two large mugs from the cupboard. Two teaspoons of cocoa in each, dissolved with hot water and warm milk poured carefully over the top. He sat down opposite Simon and pushed a mug across the table. Simon accepted it with a weak smile, wrapping his hands around it.

  ‘I think we should tell Ned,’ said Pony. ‘He’s the only person I think we can tell.’

  ‘Tell him what?’ said a voice from the doorway.

  They turned around to see Audrey, wrapped in a large brown coat. It was so big that its hem skirted the floor. Her hands were hidden deep in the sleeves. ‘Tell him what?’

  Pony froze. His mouth gaped open, and he couldn’t seem to close it. Audrey regarded him with passive eyes.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ said Simon.

  ‘Dad went out,’ said Audrey. ‘Gin’s playing upstairs. What’s going on?’

  ‘You’d better sit down,’ said Simon. ‘There’s quite a lot.’

  Kuiper swore and pushed past Tarden to the house, swinging the flyscreen back so it clashed and hissed against the brickwork. Tarden walked in after him, leaving a safe distance, pondering on the irony of two convicted criminals living in a town where you could always leave your front door open. The same town, he thought, in which police officers fucked off home to bed instead of doing their job. And others left their car doors open with a handgun lying on the floor. Tommy had uncuffed Kuiper outside the Ottoman, saying he had better things to do than babysit grown men; Tarden had given him scout’s honour they would go straight home.

  He went into the house. Could hear Robbie rattling open the fridge in the kitchen. Heard him still muttering, ‘Fucking bitch,’ over and over, like he had in the car. Then a clattering sound. Tarden was almost past caring. He came into the kitchen and saw Robbie had swept everything from the table: newspapers, magazines, plates and pens lay on the floor. He had a bottle of beer open already, hand closed tight around it. ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to think quick here.’

  Tarden said nothing. He crossed his arms. The quiet, the calm, in Robbie’s voice worried him. When he was in the middle of a hit, when he was raving and screaming, at least Tarden knew what he had to deal with. ‘You’re using,’ he said flatly.

  ‘You know what, Sherlock? I need you to shut the fuck up for a moment and let me think.’

  ‘It’s our stuff,’ said Tarden, ‘isn’t it? You’re taking it from storage. Giving samples. Samples, Robbie?’ He threw up his hands. ‘You keep telling me I don’t understand. You keep telling me we have to keep our heads down, and you’re fucking barmaids—no, you’re fucking the girlfriend of one of our delivery guys? Oh, and trying to glass the town copper. Fucking outstanding.’

  Kuiper rubbed his hands on his face. ‘Let me think. I just need a release sometimes. This motherfucking backwater gives me anxiety. I just need to let off some steam. Just like you and that whore at Ned’s place. The grandmother. Jesus. At least mine’s a way off the pension.’ He laughed, scratching at his neck.

  Tarden stole a glance at Madaline’s gun, which Kuiper cradled in his left hand, the holster swinging from his finger. He’d begged Robbie not to take it, but couldn’t argue with him once he had it in his hand. ‘Iris,’ he said. ‘I just talk to her. That’s it.’

  ‘Whatever.’ Kuiper took a swig of beer. ‘Whatever makes you happy, mate.’ Tarden sat down at the table, tried to push down his anger. He had to keep his head clear. They had to move the stuff. Somehow. But Robbie’s attitude—Jesus. Something bubbled up. He said, ‘Do you know what used to make me happy? Being with you. This—all this—you know, it really wasn’t what I had in mind.’

  ‘This again.’ Kuiper leaned back in his chair, widening his red-rimmed eyes.

  Tarden sighed. He was sad and he was frustrated and he was tired, and all he had left was anger. And a thought he had been trying, desperately, not to think. The thought that this man, sitting across the table from him—this face that he knew so well—was someone he no longer cared about. Robbie, who had made everything make sense. The man who had managed to convince him that good days could be strung together, that good days became good weeks. That there was something worth living for after those years in Sydney where every day meant waking up with your nightmares so close behind you. Where every day you expected, you accepted, that you wouldn’t make it to the next. The moment they fell into step with each other’s lives was perhaps his happiest moment. Were a few good years better than none at all?

  He went to the fridge and took out a beer. Cap off and already halfway through it, already thinking of how good the next one would taste. He took another, leaving the fridge door open. This life they led now: Tarden knew he had gone along with it. He hadn’t objected to it, not forcefully enough, anyway. Even with Robbie’s habit, with his indiscriminate fucking, Tarden had stuck around. He had—or told himself he had—conquered his own vices, exciting his brain with the crisp sting of early morning air, gambling only his own skill against the sea, replacing the dick-led confusion of his youth with something like monogamy, something approaching a stable life. Even his time with Iris, he had never once had sex with her: had never wanted to, which surprised him perhaps more than it did her.

  He threw back his third beer, felt the softness creep across the edge of his mind. He no longer loved Robbie. He just didn’t. Not this Robbie, anyhow. And he also knew he never, ever wanted to go back inside. Anywhere, he thought, anywhere but back there. He put down the empty bottle. ‘Let’s get the boat hooked up,’ he said. A plan coming together in his head. ‘If we move it all tonight…move it offshore. Won’t have to worry about that at least if Madaline comes sniffing around tomorrow. Or tonight more likely. Get rid of that fucking car, drive it somewhere and torch it. Going to have to ditch the gun, too.’

  Kuiper clutched the holster at his hip protectively. ‘Fuck that.’

  ‘Listen.’ Tarden used his last ounce of calm to keep Robbie’s attention. ‘If we don’t get this right, we’re both going back inside. The merchandise, the missing couple—shit, it’s going to be a long rest of our lives with other people telling us what to do.’ He watched his words settle in Robbie’s head, hoped they could reach that part of it where intelligence was still alive.

  Kuiper pushed back from the table. ‘The boat,’ he said. ‘Right.’

  It was one of those uncertain winter nights. Mist appeared on the windscreen like ghostly breath, appearing from nowhere and fading out in random patterns. Ned’s headlights picked out only a small space of road. Madaline focused her eyes on the narrow stretch of light, nothing else. They had come out of the Ottoman together and evening had already slipped into night. Ned had invited her to dinner and of course she had agreed. She was too exhausted to say no, too full of adrenaline to imagine driving herself.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. She drew herself up in her seat. Rain began to appear and dark slashes through the mist. ‘Thanks for coming to help tonight.’

  ‘I didn’t really do anything.’

  ‘Well, you came anyway.’

  He looked over at her and smiled.

  Silence, and Madaline counted the Morse code of bumps making its way through the car’s suspension. She ran her fingers over the fine whorls of hair at the hinge of her jaw. She watched Ned, in profile, surreptitiously, not able to push the thought from her mind of what his lips would feel like. Only the lightest of touches, she told herself. A graze, a delicate moment like two magnets passing.

  Madaline tipped her head back, closing her eyes. ‘I roped you into all this, and I had no right to.’

  Ned said nothing, steered the car into a right turn. Madaline let her body crush up against the passenger door. The seconds stretched; they were at the bottom of Ned’s driveway, heading up to his house. Madaline’s heart thrummed.

  ‘You—’ Ned began, just as she blurted, ‘What’s for dinner?’ He broke off. ‘Dinner. I don’t know.’ He stopped the car halfway up the driveway. Pulled up the handbrake and c
ut the engine. The rain returned as a static hiss on the roof.

  The headlights cut out and it felt to Madaline like the end of a thousand awkward dates. All the misspoken words she had ever uttered collecting in her head.

  Ned’s breath fogged up the inside of the window. ‘If you’re worried that all this makes me think about Stephanie, then yes. It does.’

  Madaline clenched her fists at her sides. She had to leave. She’d have to walk back to town in the rain.

  ‘But that’s not…I mean it’s something that we…that the kids and I never talk about.’ He stared through the driver’s window, at the house lit up in yellow squares among the rainy haze. ‘It’s always there—she’s always there, with us all, but we never acknowledge her. Did you know we never had a funeral?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  He nodded. ‘She was pronounced…but I mean how can you say goodbye to someone without—’

  Madaline pictured the case file hidden under the couch. Full of so much information, none of it useful. None of it had helped.

  ‘Audrey, she still thinks her mum’s out there somewhere. She thinks Stephanie abandoned her. She used to be so utterly devoted to her mum. But now—’ He gestured helplessness. ‘She’s got this habit of picking up the phone and slamming it down. Every time she goes past it. She says she can feel Stephanie picking up another phone somewhere in the world. But she still keeps things, things she’s found that belonged to Stephanie. There’s a coat she took from storage. She thinks I don’t know about it. She’s left-handed like her mum but she tries to do everything right-handed now.’

  Both he and Madaline kept their gazes dead ahead, as if the car was still moving. She imagined shapes in the shifting rain. ‘Audrey,’ she said. ‘Is she better than she…than she was?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Ned scrunched up his mouth. ‘She’s better than then.’

  Madaline shook her head. The image of Audrey in the bath would not leave her. She couldn’t imagine what it was like for Ned.

  ‘And Gin.’ Ned turned to her and sketched a weak smile. ‘I guess it’s not so bad, being a superhero, but I wish he was himself again.’ His mouth wavered for a moment. ‘I can’t even remember what that was like.’ He bowed his head, leaning over to touch his forehead on the crest of the steering wheel.

  Madaline reached over and rested her fingers on his back. She smoothed down the fabric of his jacket and imagined, despite herself, the feeling of the skin beneath. ‘You’ve done your best,’ she said. ‘You’ve done everything you could.’

  His breaths shuffled together. Madaline realised she had never seen him cry. He was the resilient one. Always calm.

  ‘I’ve gotten used to Stephanie not being here,’ he said softly. ‘But when my kids disappear as well—’

  ‘Oh, Ned, don’t—’ She stroked the base of his neck as he drew his arms up around his face. ‘Gin and Audrey, they’re still so young. They’ve got a loving dad who’d do anything for them.’ She held him tightly as his shoulders shook. The rain came down harder, a roar on the car roof. It felt like it enfolded them.

  Eventually, Ned’s breathing calmed and Madaline withdrew her arms. ‘Do you know what it feels like?’ he said. His eyes stared at his feet.

  ‘What what feels like?’

  ‘To have someone missing from your life.’

  Madaline stayed silent.

  ‘It’s like those divers, who go down into those trenches in the sea, and come back up too fast. That pressure squeezing your whole body. They always talk about the heart, don’t they? But it’s the base of your throat that tightens up, it’s your guts that get the vice.’

  Madaline was unprepared for the match-strike of her own tears. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I do know.’ This was the sensation that grabbed her in every unguarded moment. The constriction of guilt. The asphyxiating struggle of what could have been. And before she knew it: ‘Ned, I’m sorry.’

  He looked at her. His eyes swollen. ‘For what?’

  ‘For the way I handled the case. Stephanie.’

  ‘What did you do? You did your job.’

  ‘I didn’t find her.’

  ‘You—’

  ‘I made mistakes.’ Madaline dug her fingernails into her palms. ‘I feel like I let my…feelings for you affect the way I behaved.’ Madaline wanted to open her door and run out into the night. What the hell had she just said? She shivered. She felt the pressure drawing in around her. ‘Sorry, forget I said anything.’

  Ned gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles whitening. ‘Your—’

  ‘Just forget it. I don’t—’

  Ned was perfectly still.

  ‘No, actually.’ Madaline tensed her shoulders, then let go. ‘I’m…For most of the time I’ve known you, Ned. I know there’s nothing I can do about it. I know the timing was horrible, but that’s the story of my life, really. Every…day I feel guilty that it happened. I tried my best to find your wife anyway, but the best wasn’t good enough and now I’m fucking up another case and I knew I would and I got you involved because you’re the only good person left in this town and I’m sorry. I’m sorry—’

  Ned clasped her hands between his. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Don’t. It wasn’t you that made it happen. She made her decision.’

  ‘What, you think—’

  Ned moved his fingers on her hand, seemingly oblivious. ‘It was pretty clear Stephanie didn’t want to be found. No matter what anyone else thinks. I knew her. You were…you were nothing but professional. I don’t know what we all would have done without you.’

  ‘Ned, that’s—’

  His touch was not what Madaline had expected. It was a weight, somehow.

  ‘I think it myself sometimes,’ he went on. ‘What it would be like to just disappear. Remove yourself from what—from who—you know. Start somewhere new. I hate myself for thinking it and then…then I hate her for doing it. It’s me thinking maybe she just wanted something else.’

  Madaline thought of her own departure. Leaving her husband, her three-week marriage, her mother. She had somersaulted beneath a wave and reality was the inverted world above. Nothing would ever be like it was.

  She looked past Ned, to the mist shifting at his window. Diffuse lines shot suddenly into a face. Madaline cried out. A white shape hit the glass, the flat pink map of a palm slamming, over and over.

  Tarden fumbled the keys, jangling them so loudly that he imagined someone hearing them all the way across town. It wasn’t just the darkness making him clumsy. His head buzzed from beer, pissed off a few drinks. They’d dragged all his crab pots from the back of the house and Tarden cursed himself for not investing in better, lighter traps. Not that they ever had the money to spend on them. His back ached from the lifting.

  ‘Let me do it,’ Kuiper told him, a rare strain of warmth inflecting his annoyance. Robbie placed his hands over Tarden’s and together they guided the key into the lock. They hauled the first pots through the door. The metal frames shuddered over the concrete, clashing out hideous echoes. The next pot Tarden dragged in had a crab’s carcass stuck to its inner edge. The acrid smell of stale sea life, the smell that haunted him. The smell of the midnight trips along the dirt track to Magpie Lake. The rotten stench of his failures.

  Kuiper hit the lights and the fluorescent strips stuttered on. ‘God,’ said Kuiper, hands on his hips. He had attached Madaline’s holster to his belt, but it didn’t fit and the gun stuck out at an alarming angle. He surveyed the room. ‘So many of the damn things.’

  There it was, Tarden saw, the only doubt he’d ever seen in Robbie’s eyes. The thought that maybe they’d taken things too far. It was Robbie’s endless confidence rupturing, finally. Robbie, who was always ahead.

  They’d been released from prison two months apart. That was always the problem, Tarden saw this now. The ever-present imbalance. Robbie getting out first, a head start, a precious few weeks out of Tarden’s watch in which he had already set up their new life. Robbie had met him at the train station
. He already owned a car, already looked impossibly different. His face and body had filled out; he seemed so comfortable in a world Tarden was only just remembering. In the following weeks, Tarden saw their roles reversed: Robbie was the protector now, showing him how to

  live. By the time he realised he’d fallen into someone’s debt, it was too late.

  ‘Are you sure these’ll keep the cans together?’ said Kuiper. ‘They won’t float away?’

  Tarden smiled. ‘Crabs never float away.’

  ‘Don’t see what you’re grinning at. This is our livelihood. This is our future.’

  Tarden wanted to kiss him. He wanted to taste Robbie one more time. ‘Let’s just get this done,’ he said. ‘Sooner the better.’

  Kuiper held a can in his hand, weighing it up before placing it with the others in the pot. ‘There’s two boats,’ he said. ‘Right?’

  Tarden nodded. He had explained it three times already. The pills, he knew, were spreading their chemical confusion through Robbie’s system. ‘My tinny’ll be there,’ Tarden said. ‘And I’ll hotwire the motor on someone else’s. We each take a tinny out, drop the pots from one, anchor it and take the other one back. Safe as houses.’

  ‘What if someone finds the boat?’

  There it was: a definite tremour of anxiety. ‘We’ll anchor it in the cove. No one’s going to go looking there. If they do—which they won’t—they’ll just see a boat, nothing attached to it. We’ll only need a few days I reckon, just wait for it all to blow over.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Kuiper, smoothing down his hair. ‘Safe as houses.’

  They made their way to the end of the row. The Sawyers’ car was still there, hardly hidden under the tarpaulins. ‘One of us is going to have to drive that out of here.’

  Kuiper nodded. ‘Have to dump it.’