Show Me The Sky Read online

  SHOW ME THE SKY

  NICHOLAS HOGG

  missing adj. 1. not present; absent or lost. 2. not able to be traced and not known to be dead. go missing to become lost or disappear.

  Across the empty car park a man walks barefoot. He is carrying a page torn from a book and his electric guitar. Nothing else except the clothes on his back, a pair of faded jeans and a loose white shirt. He follows a gravel path to the cliff ledge. Stones hurt the soles of his feet, but he is glad of the pain, the proof of life. He turns and looks back at the car, the world he has abandoned. Before descending the steep and winding steps down to the bay, he stands and leans, closes his eyes, sways a little in the current of wind. He can hear the Atlantic boom on the pebbled beach, the crash and shatter of waves exploding on the rocks, sliding down the shore, rushing back into hemselves to be born again.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Dead or Alive

  Sydney Is Beautiful

  Terra Incognita

  Show Me The Sky

  Stolen Car

  Missing Person

  Part Two

  Morning Rush Hour In Downtown Sydney

  In a Large, Bright

  We Should Have Investigated

  Riding Between These Homes of Solid Rock

  I Still Have My Clothes in a Plastic Carrier Bag

  What Beautiful Country

  If My Mystery Man Has Been Out to the Ruin

  Terra Incognita

  Show Me The Sky

  Stolen Car

  Missing Person

  Part Three

  Charles Nash lands at Nairobi Aiport

  The Reverend McCreedy

  I Palm Money to Hotel Staff

  The Problem With Drinking is Not Being Drunk

  After Waking Up Drunk

  Terra Incognita

  Show Me The Sky

  Stolen Car

  Missing Person

  Part Four

  'Hello?'

  I Have No Checked Luggage to Collect

  Captain James Cook

  The Original Rendezvous was

  Terra Incognita

  Show Me The Sky

  Stolen Car

  Missing Person

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  Dead or alive, I have the job of finding him, Billy K, the singer who vanished into thin air on a Cornish cliff top. But I’m not another crazed fan, one of the worshipping millions burning candles beneath his poster, singing his songs like a chant or prayer.

  No. I’m James Dent. People who don’t know me call me Inspector Dent, those who do call me Jim. Though the Australian customs officer, erect in his wooden booth, blond, slicked-back hair, not a crease in his starched shirt, flicks his eyes from my passport photo to the flesh and blood standing before him, and addresses me as ‘Mr Dent’. Then he looks again at the photo. ‘Welcome to Sydney.’ He doesn’t ask why I’m missing my connecting flight to London.

  Only when the seat-belt sign illuminates for take-off, and the turbines whirr and roar, will the other detectives know I’m gone.

  I’m missing the flight home because I am a policeman. And I have a job to do, a man to catch. This might sound melodramatic, but I’ve tracked down drug barons and bail jumpers, runaways and addicts, fraudsters with more names than a football team. No chance an errant rock star can escape. Not after a year of hearing his music in my sleep, reading his lyrics over and over for clues of where he might have run. I’ll dream his face for ever if I don’t track him down.

  And this is why I’m walking from an airport with just the clothes on my back. Because the only officer who pulls me from the investigation is this one.

  Sydney is beautiful, what with the bridge and the harbour, all that glittering sea. Winter feels like a rumour, a myth from other climates. But I’m no more connected to the scene than looking at a postcard. Jet-lagged and suddenly alone, in a taxi between office blocks and ocean, storeys of mirrored glass flecked with cloud, it all feels unreal, the city a hologram.

  I ask the cab driver to make a stop at a bank. I withdraw my maximum limit on three different accounts. Nearly ten thousand Australian dollars. If I travel on my credit card I might as well unravel a ball of string as I walk. There’s no electronic trail with cold, hard cash.

  The notes bulge in my pockets. The cab driver drops me at the Opera House. When I leave a tip I catch his eyes, and picture him giving my description to an Australian police officer: ‘Scruffy, even though he was in a jacket and dark jeans. Looked liked he’d not slept or shaved for a few days. Tall, over six foot, medium build. Once upon a time an athlete, but losing it around the middle. And no luggage, nothing. I’d even say he was sleeping rough if there hadn’t been wads of cash spilling from his wallet.’

  The wharf around the Opera House throngs with day trippers and a school outing. Kids in sun hats balancing ice creams, couples posing for photos, a Korean tour group with flag-waving guide. Sun hits the concrete sails of the famous roof, and I’m dazzled by the brightness. Between the melting ice creams, swaying palm trees and policemen in shorts, I feel like a vampire pained by the light of day.

  I need to sleep, to change my clothes. But before I find a hotel and bed, I go to an Internet café and access my MET account. When Roberts, the chief super, realises my untimely disappearance, that I boarded a plane in Fiji bound for London, and bailed out in Sydney, my access to the bureau files will be blocked. Sitting next to Gap-year students and backpackers, I log on to my account, download the entire Billy K file into a private email address and hit print.

  The pages tucked beneath my arm, I exit the dingy café and find a hotel. I choose the Holiday Inn, wait in a foyer filled with fake foliage and model flamingos. Here I can remain anonymous, distant from a concierge too busy to notice I have no luggage. Because, like I said before, apart from the clothes on my back, a ream of paper containing the sum evidence of my year investigating Billy K, I have nothing. Nothing. No job. No colleagues. No wife.

  And no daughter. My gorgeous Gemma, our precious three hours together every second Saturday.

  So what I do have, I abandon. And this most certainly includes Anna Monroe, the woman who’s kept my sanity these last few months. As a fellow officer on the case, I hope she knows me well enough to understand what I have to do, how stubborn I am. As a lover, I hope she knows it isn’t her I’ve walked away from.

  When I said I missed the connecting flight back to London because I’m a policeman, I was fooling myself. Don’t get me wrong, I want Billy K found, beating heart alive, or washed up bloated on a Cornish beach. Either way it’s case closed for the Missing Persons Bureau. But what I need more is the investigation, the focus. A reason to wake up in the morning.

  The very day I drove out to Lizard Point, to see his abandoned Lotus cordoned off from the reporters and fans, the flashbulbs of the paparazzi, Meg left with Gemma. I got home that evening and the lights were out. I thought perhaps Meg had turned in early, parked the car in the garage. The note said she was at her mother’s. And so was Gemma. I’m leaving before she’s old enough to realise you’re pouring your life down the sink.

  A rock star, a daughter, and a wife, all disappeared on the same day. Meg and I were living a lie, and had been for some time, nobly going about a dead marriage for Gemma. I had no idea love could turn to hate so quietly. No slammed doors or broken glass, just days blurred with drink, Meg distant. Then gone.

  I’ve not touched a drop of alcohol since that night. Not a drop. And when I sit on the edge of a hard, single bed, in a hotel
room on the bottom of the earth, I think again how she was in that much of a hurry she didn’t even pull the front door shut.

  5 a.m. In the hotel bar drinking tomato juice with Worcester sauce and Tabasco. From the large windows I can see the bay, fishing boats returning from a night bobbing on the depths, hauling up nets of wriggling silver. Honest, hard, straightforward labour. Raw hands and aching limbs. The lights dangle from masts like fiery bunting, and for at least ten minutes I wish I were a fisherman, that I had a warm bed waiting, Anna to kiss good morning.

  The barman, who’s been pouring bottles of tomato juice for the last three hours, finishes his shift at 6 a.m. The morning barman is a carbon copy of the night barman. Both podgy, redhaired, flashing glasses from hand to hand, and sharp to realise I need no more than a refill, and to be left alone reading the Billy K file.

  When not buried in the pages of interviews and evidence, I stare blankly at the walls. Like a patient sitting in the corner of a hospital day room.

  But I’m only policing. Einstein carried out thought experiments, peered into the workings of the universe via his mind. I’m staring at walls conducting thought investigations, peering into the mind of Billy K, why he might run, who with, and where. The reasons he’d dive into a spring tide with his precious guitar.

  I’m now also one of the 200,000 who vanish each year. An official missing person with a last known sighting. And of that staggering number I plan to be one of the majority, part of the 99 per cent found, like the senile wandering from their houses, catching the bus to the coast in a dressing gown and slippers. Or the office workers who have upped and run, leaving a pristine desk and crowded inbox, simply to start a new job without giving notice. Too well I know the anguish of families left in limbo, the fathers who quit jobs to walk the streets with photos of a runaway child, the mothers afraid to leave home in case they miss a call.

  And the trips to the morgue. Escorting relatives to identify bodies pulled from the undergrowth, the lost sons and daughters, beloved children, now laid out for the coroner.

  Thinking about this when the first guests come down for breakfast, showered and scrubbed, drowsy but bright in new clothes bought especially for their holiday, I go back to my room and wash. I have work to do.

  After showering I put back on the same shirt, jeans, and underpants I’ve been wearing for three days straight. I take my jacket from the back of the chair and shake it vigorously. Time for me to buy a new outfit. A new skin for a new Jim Dent.

  Terra Incognita

  16 June 2002

  Dearest Monique,

  I’m alone but not afraid. Not afraid, because with a pen and paper, the means to write a letter, I have a lightning rod to your soul. Company and love in the middle of a desert.

  Last night I camped between the Aboriginal communities of Arlparra and Alpurrurulam, at least 200 km from the next fuel stop. And this is the real red centre, dinosaur country, a landscape forged by the weight of ancient seas. I expect to see a stegosaurus snuffling through the bush any moment.

  I slept on the groundsheet of the tent, dreams filled with shooting stars and thoughts of you. The warmth of the rising sun, along one side of my body, was as though you’d eased into my sleeping bag during the night.

  Life was good. I stoked the embers and boiled water for a coffee. I was riding across a barren and desolate road to you. How precious the world had become. Tiny birds chirped in the branches of a red river gum. Lizards scurried between the dunes. From the simmering distance, a mob of kangaroos watched as I checked the oil, softened the shocks, adjusted the panniers and rang the air with a pitch-perfect engine.

  Fast and fearless, I rode all morning, slipping and sliding on the drifted sand. Rested at midday beneath another gum, drank a litre of water and again checked the oil and panniers. After an hour soft sand turned to rutted dirt and potholes. Vibrations rattled every bone in my body, and I stopped once more to check the fittings, worried the bike would disintegrate in my hands. Every nut and bolt had been loosened by the shuddering ride. The engine block was only a few turns from falling off the frame.

  I scanned the lie of a dried-up creek bed, smoothed by the last rains that washed along the narrow, shallow banks. But the creek was omitted from my map, so I climbed the higher branches of the gum and followed the watermark to the horizon. The compass needle and creek pointed the same direction as the highway. I declared the ghost of a river my road and revved up the engine.

  You’d be the first to warn about veering from the known track in a featureless landscape. I can hear you now, cursing the brash Englishman, telling me that the testosterone adventurer is doomed.

  You’re right.

  I checked the compass again and eased back the throttle. The packed sand of the creek bed rode smoother than the corrugated track, only the occasional rock or dead branch to avoid. I wove the natural highway, content, even a little smug, that others would struggle on the bombed-out road while I took the scenic route.

  Though what others? I’d passed a German couple in a 4WD yesterday, sharing pleasantries and a peanut butter sandwich, all three of us disappointed to have converged, to have our hectare of personal space intruded.

  But today, no one. The world my own.

  After an hour I stopped and again checked the compass and the direction of the creek. Then, for the last time I rode on, cruising my private highway, a happy fool beneath the searing sun, painting pictures of Paris, making love to you in a rented room.

  And then suddenly the earth was in my mouth. The sky beneath my feet. After a slow, rocky section, the creek bed had smoothed out again. Yes, I was riding too fast, but this wasn’t why I crashed. I crashed because I’d seen death, a skeleton, a fossil of a human being suspended in the eroded bank. In the split second I glimpsed the corpse, I thought it some desert soul escaping from the underworld. I tensed with shock, clipped a boulder and flew. Bits of metal and broken mirror glittered in the air. I saw myself tumble and roll like a stand-in double, the slow-mo scene as bike and body crumpled.

  That machine comes to rest with the ousted rider is the curse of the motorcyclist. No matter what speed or terrain they part upon, the smash and tumble always seems to end in an embrace of engine and body.

  I was pinned by my bike in the dried-up creek. When I came round, I thought I was dead. How could I be in my body and staring at my head, set down on the sand?

  I was looking at the empty helmet, wrenched from my skull by the force of the impact, a fist-sized gash in the left side. Trapped, no ambulance blaring to the rescue, I was happy.

  Happy to be alive.

  Until I wrestled the engine from my dislocated shoulder, turned and scrabbled to see the dead wasn’t chasing, I didn’t even feel the break in my shin.

  I dropped to my knees in pain. I swore so loud that if the rotten body possessed a soul, it would’ve been shaken from the bones. When I grasped it was nothing but hollow marrow, I cursed the empty sky, stranded and broken. I was sat between the body and bike, gripping fists of dirt. Yes, close to crying.

  Before I worked out how to resolve a wreck into rescue, I wanted to know who had ended my adventure, who had delayed my rendezvous with you.

  I crawled across the creek bed, the two ends of my tibia grating, scorching pain, my separated shoulder useless. I should’ve been taking stock of the bike, my food and water, painkillers. But I wanted to touch this attempt at resurrection, confirm it was real, no trick of the desert on a lonely mind.

  All flesh was gone, polished by the soil and its hungry microbes, the wind and the rain and the flaming sun. Though the earth still claimed the bones, something of a life remained in the angle of resting. The left leg, arm, shoulder and ribs lay wedged in the dirt. The distended fingers of the right hand reached out from the bank, almost a Michelangelo touch of the light, but clutching, and missing, at something or someone.

  I almost shook hands, welcomed myself to the dead. But this wasn’t my final resting place, and to greet this corpse would
be to make myself too comfortable. Instead I ran my fingertips along the femur, the blade of the pelvis and the knobbly spine. Feeling this relic of a life, all my own pain was suspended. Who was buried here? Why? And for how long? I thought Aborigines burned their dead.

  Then I saw it, glinting from inside the ribcage. A silver cross. I reached into the heart space, and delicately pinched the flash of silver between my thumb and forefinger. Then I pulled my hand back, slowly, careful as a man defusing a bomb, conscious I was defiling the dead, robbing a grave.

  I held it to the light as though it would deliver me from the accident, to a hospital bed with crisp white sheets, into your arms. I turned it between my fingers and rubbed the precious metal – solid silver, crudely finished with a loop at the top to thread on to a necklace. The band must have decayed, and the cross fallen through the ribs like a coin would a grate. I scratched away the covering of clay, blew off the dirt to find engraving on the reverse: By order of the London Mission Society, 1834.

  A dead reverend in the desert. And he had God on his side. I’m sure the skull was grinning, mocking the living. But then all our gleaned jaws seem to smile at eternity. ‘I’m still in better fucking shape than you,’ I shouted, the words lost in all that sky.

  I crawled back to the wreck, my life. Suddenly the pain returned. My shin felt as though an axe were embedded halfway between the knee and ankle, and my shoulder felt plain wrong, the ball free of the socket. And I was healthier than my machine. No, the bike would never be ridden again. The twisted forks pressed the front wheel against the engine block. Fuel leaked from the ruptured tank and spare jerry can. The exhaust had come clean off, and tiny fragments of the wing mirrors sparkled on the red sand. If it were a horse, it would be shot.

  After I pulled the First Aid kit from the top box and popped a handful of painkillers, I hauled the panniers clear of the mangled metal and stuffed a torn T-shirt into the petrol tank.