Siren (12 page)

Mak had seen a lot of odd bookshops, but never a place such as this before.

She was the only customer in the shop, and she wandered from shelf to shelf, feigning a sense of purpose as she examined books on the American illusionists Thurston and Kellar, the inventive French magician Robert-Houdin, and the famous American escape artist Houdini, who borrowed the Frenchman’s name. She noted books on various illusions, levitations, mindreading techniques and card tricks, and flicked through them with a cursory interest. Many of the shelves were dusty. The shop did not sell the toys and magic kits for children she’d been expecting, but catered for those serious about the art of magic.

A book on lock-picking caught her eye, and she took it off the shelf with an eagerness unrelated to her current mission. She was pretty good with simple locks like handcuffs, but her effort with more sophisticated locks had been abysmal the one time she’d really needed the skill. She could make a three-pin lock look like a seven-pin. Which was not a compliment. She put the book under her arm and continued browsing.

Eventually, the shopkeeper approached her, as she had hoped. ‘Is there anything I can help you with, miss?’ he asked.

Makedde found herself face to face with a man who could only be a magician himself. His mane of silver hair was slicked back dramatically from the temples and forehead, displaying a distinctive widow’s peak and elongating a pleasant face with oversized teeth, presented in a polite and disingenuous smile. The man was dressed in a high-collared coat and slacks, and had the air of one who’d just emerged from one of the dusty books.

‘This is a great shop,’ she told him.

‘Thank you, miss.’

‘You’re the owner?’ Mak ventured.

‘I am he.’

‘Has this wonderful shop been around for long? I don’t know how I could have missed it before.’

The shopkeeper seemed to take umbrage at her question. His smile vanished and his eyes wandered away. ‘We are the oldest and most respected purveyor of illusionists’ tools, manuals, historical books and paraphernalia in New South Wales,’ he explained a little stiffly.

Is that so?

Mak extended her hand. ‘My name is Makedde,’ she said, to make amends.

He shook it. ‘What an unusual name,’ he remarked. ‘A stage name?’

‘No.’

‘I am Mr Millard,’ he introduced himself majestically, bowing ever so slightly. She imagined him sweeping a top hat through the air as he spoke. He gestured to a large framed poster that hung over the cash register, and there it was, an
image of Mr Millard in the top hat and tails he seemed to wish he was wearing. His photograph had been transformed to a grainy sepia tone, giving it the look of an old-fashioned flyer, though his toothy grin seemed not at all convincing for the period.

‘Mr Millard, it is a pleasure to meet you,’ Mak said, implying in her tone that she had heard a lot about him. ‘Can you tell me, do you sell these coins here?’ She had brought the cut coin from Adam’s room with her, and she pulled it from her pocket.

‘Mmm, yes,’ he said, with what seemed like mild distaste.

‘It’s not a good trick?’

‘We specialise in rather more
sophisticated
tricks. But yes, I have such coins.’

‘Thank you.’ Mak slipped the offending coin back into her pocket. ‘Do you have a members club perhaps, Mr Millard?’

He lit up. ‘Yes, we do. Are you interested in joining?’ He moved to the register and took a thick book from under the counter. ‘We could use more female magicians,’ he told her enthusiastically, opening the book up at a marker. ‘There really aren’t very many, which is a shame.’

Mak brought the lock-picking book over and put it down by the cash register. ‘Actually, I’m interested in someone who I believe may be one of your members,’ she told him, and pulled Adam’s photograph from her pocket.

He closed the book with theatrical indignation. ‘I can’t reveal the identity of our members.’

‘Of course not,’ Mak backtracked. ‘Let me explain why I’m interested.’

Playing mind games with this magic shop owner would be an exercise in frustration. But honesty might just work.

‘I’m a private investigator helping out a very worried mother who’s looking for her son.’ She passed him the photo. ‘Adam Hart. I think he’s probably been in here some time.’

‘Good-looking kid,’ Mr Millard said, studying the photograph. ‘Is he a performer?’

‘Probably an enthusiast.’

‘Well, all the
real
enthusiasts come here.’

‘So he is a member, then?’

‘I couldn’t say.’

Mak took a breath. This was beginning to get annoying. ‘I see. Perhaps he’s a member of another magicians’ club,’ she said, taking the photograph out of his hands. ‘Sorry, I’ve come to the wrong place. Thanks for your time.’

She began to leave, the lock-picking book sitting unpurchased on the counter.

‘It’s possible he might be part of our membership,’ she heard him say as she reached the doorway. ‘I’ll just check for you.’

Mak turned and flashed him one of her dazzling smiles. ‘That would be most helpful, Mr Millard. Thank you.’

If Adam was an active member she could find other people who knew him, who might have seen him in the past week and might even know where he was. She might be able to find additional contact information for him, information on his interests. Perhaps someone would even have a helpful theory on his disappearance?

‘I don’t have an Adam Hart listed.’

Mak’s heart sank. ‘Thank you for checking,’ she said, defeated. She pulled her credit card out of her wallet and purchased the book.

‘Excellent choice, miss. You’ll find it most helpful,’ he assured her.

‘I hope so. You never know when you might need to bust out of a pair of handcuffs,’ she joked.

She might find the book helpful, but she sure wasn’t finding the coin lead very helpful. Perhaps most nineteen-year-olds had a coin trick or two in their bedrooms.

‘Oh, I wanted to ask you one other thing,’ Mak said. ‘If you were going to conceal something personal in a room—say, some valuables, or a diary—how would you do it?’

‘Things are always best concealed in plain sight!’ he declared.

Concealed in plain sight?

‘You wouldn’t want to use padlocks and the like,’ he added. ‘Locks can be picked. Yes, conceal it in plain sight. That’s what I would do.’

Makedde was puzzled by his response.

‘Or fake books. You know, like this.’ He pulled out what looked like a thick Bible from behind the counter. There was a liquor flask inside.

‘That’s neat,’ she said, and smiled. She’d seen those things a hundred times. ‘Thank you. It was nice to meet you.’

Makedde Vanderwall left the magic shop cloaked in disappointment, passing a cork bulletin board covered with flyers for classes from various ‘Master Magicians’ and playbills for local shows. The words ‘Le Théâtre des Horreurs’ caught her eye for just a moment, printed in gothic letters at the top of the board.

The Sydney show dates had just ended.

Adam Hart could not remember ever having felt so free.

Destiny.

His world was an exciting new invention of richer colours and greater possibilities. He lay with his beautiful older lover in her caravan, enjoying the feeling of escape as they were driven like a royal couple further and further from Sydney, further from his clinging mother, the dead father who’d left him behind, and far from anyone who might recognise him and burst this bubble of new reality. Le Théâtre des Horreurs was on the move, their tour taking them to Brisbane where they would perform their final Australian show at the Powerhouse Theatre. And he was with them. He was part of it.

The tour bus moved ahead of them, filled with the rest of the troupe and their sets, their props, their costumes, while Adam and his lover luxuriated in style: special, different, cocooned amongst plush silk cushions on a double bed, just as he believed stars of another era would have been. Bijou insisted on having a caravan for herself when she toured, and
would not perform without it. He understood her needs. A refined woman, a
queen
, she needed her comforts and privacy.

And she was satisfied with his company.
His company.

She was nothing like Patrice. She did not criticise him, belittle him, tell him he was immature.

‘
Mon ami
, fetch me a soda, yes?’ his queen murmured, and Adam sprang up from her side to get her a drink from the minibar-sized fridge. He opened it for her and she took a sip. ‘
Chaud, non
? Hot.’

The skies outside were clear and blue, and the temperature had risen as they neared Queensland. It was indeed a hot day. She leaned against the open window, her ebony hair and diamond drop earrings blowing back in the breeze. He drank in the sight of her sophisticated beauty with a fresh excitement. She was stunning, exotic. Her acceptance transformed him. He was a man.

For the past five hours, he and Bijou had been able to spend time together uninterrupted by the rest of the troupe. A relief. Despite the giddy happiness he revelled in, the new landscape of feelings, there were problems. Adam felt uncomfortable with the others, particularly the illusionist—or was it the contortionist?—who was strange and seemed always to stare at him a little too long. There was a look in the man’s eye that Adam did not recognise. He found it odd, unsettling. Was it curiosity? Hatred? Was he being measured up? Perhaps it was just a culture clash. The man was a foreigner, after all. Adam now tried to avoid him, but naturally they were in close proximity day and night, such was the nature of a troupe on the road. At least the actor, Michel, had exchanged a few brief, friendly words with him before their departure from Sydney. Apart from that brief dialogue, and
Bijou’s loving words, Adam had not conversed in his native language for seven days. Perhaps it was that which had begun to give him an aching longing for the familiar, and encouraged a vague feeling of indefinable dread that lurked just beneath the surface of his bliss.

But for now, with the trailer softly bumping along the freeway in the sunshine, and his lover in his arms, it seemed the world had opened to him. Loneliness was impossible. Dread was far behind.

He was finally free, just as he had always wished. He was Kerouac, an adventurer, living his dreams. ‘
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies
,’ Kerouac wrote.

These are the days that make you a man, Adam thought.

A man.

At three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, the self-made billionaire Jack Cavanagh sat in his opulent fourteenth-floor office, leaning back from his mahogany desk, his arms folded.

Cobwebs.

Through pale eyes he stared out floor-to-ceiling windows at the picture postcard view. The Sydney skies were sunbaked blue, charcoal clouds looming in the far distance. By evening there would be rain. Despite its changing colours, the view had become a thing of routine. It no longer impressed him. Very little did impress him, he realised. He felt removed from every triumph, viewing his domain of success through a narrow aperture, a child looking through a tiny pinhole in a cardboard box so he would not burn his eyes in the fire of an eclipse.

Cobwebs and tar.

In his quieter moments, Jack had begun to sense that his heart was slowly filling with cobwebs and tar, and that it would soon stop functioning completely.

A man known for his drive and business sense, Jack found
these intimations of fragility terrifying. He didn’t know what to do about them, or about the fact that the past year seemed to have aged him ten. No one but his personal physician dared to voice the obvious, but the stress was showing. Jack had dark circles under his eyes that no longer disappeared by mid-morning, or even midafternoon. He had lost more hair than he should, more than his father had at his age. He had lost fitness, strength, energy, sexdrive. His penis hung limply between his legs, as useless as an unintended extension of skin. His wife said nothing. He sometimes seemed almost catatonic, his mind too occupied to allow him either rest or activity. Dr Harris had warned him about his stress levels, blood pressure, cholesterol. He had not yet told his wife, Beverley, about the Cipramil he had to take each morning—
take it on time, don’t miss a dose
. He kept the antidepressant drugs and their prescription in a locked office drawer, where they would never have to concern her. He didn’t like the idea of the pills, and in a fit of defiance he had gone cold turkey two months earlier, throwing them out completely. He had been hit with a frightening combination of sleep terrors and three days of unrelenting light-headedness—the world moving, moving, and after each turn his body stopping while his brain still travelled—before getting the prescription filled again in a blind panic. He had since given in to the drug with a sense of defeat hitherto foreign to him. He had not told Dr Harris about his sensation of cobwebs and tar. It made no sense, and would make even less sense if voiced and acknowledged. Nonetheless, there it was. A sensation as real as any other he had known.

The fingers of Jack’s right hand touched the shirt pocket over his heart, absent-mindedly.

It was barely three o’clock, and already he felt something like a heavy sleep weighing against his bones. Forty-eight hours earlier, he had still been at his Palm Beach abode, where he and Beverley had spent an extended weekend relaxing in the shade of palms, enjoying fresh seafood prepared by their chef, not needing to say anything, not needing to discuss the problems of their world. He had felt momentarily refreshed by these snippets of life reminding him what it must have once been like to feel something that approximated peace. Jack longed to return to those moments. It was unfathomable to him now, but there had been a time when his Sunday evenings had seen him race back from Palm Beach to this very office to get a head start on the week. Now he wondered where he had found the energy or drive. He wondered how everything could have changed so deeply.

There was a knock.

‘Yes?’ Jack replied firmly, sitting up.

Joy entered. ‘Mr Cavanagh, it’s Mr White on line one. Will you take the call?’

Jack closed his eyes for a moment, a renewed heaviness descending on him at the mention of the name. Perhaps he had felt Mr White’s proximity before the call had even been made.

‘Thank you, Joy,’ he said to his loyal secretary without looking at her. He never kept eye contact with Joy when The American was mentioned.

‘Thank you, Mr Cavanagh. I’ll put him through right away,’ he heard her say. Her footsteps retreated, and gently the door of his office was shut. He was alone.

The American.

Bob White was a former head of FBI headquarters in California, and since retiring had worked in the private sector.
He had been on retainer with Jack for the past seven years, since Cavanagh Incorporated had been threatened by the kidnapping of a top-level executive in the Middle East. He was a confidential asset to the company. If Mr White was involved, things were serious. It had not been a good twelve months for the Cavanagh family, so Mr White,
The American
, had been busy.

A red light flashed for line one. Jack took a breath and picked up the receiver.

‘Bob.’

‘Good day, Jack.’ The American was one of the few people who called Jack by his first name. Perhaps it was due to the intimacy of their dealings that this seemed natural. ‘I have news on the matter from last year.’

Jack felt the tightness in his chest increase a fraction. Cobwebs. Tar.

Damien.

‘Go ahead,’ Jack told him.

‘Our security discovered a motorcyclist idling outside the gates of your Darling Point home on Sunday night,’ The American began. ‘It seemed suspicious, so they took down the registration plate number as a precaution. It was an ACT registration, in the name of Makedde Vanderwall.’

Vanderwall.

‘The private investigator woman?’ he blurted with indignation. Jack knew her well, although they had never met. She had nearly been the cause of his son’s complete, irrevocable downfall, and the ruination of the Cavanagh name. He had been relieved when she had moved away from Sydney. It was a great disappointment to discover that her relocation might have been temporary.

‘Should I be concerned?’ he asked. ‘What was she doing there?’

‘The motorcyclist parked across the street for a time, looking at the house. That was it. She did not approach. We have no reason to believe that there’s anything to be concerned about at this stage, but if it was indeed Vanderwall, then why she would be hanging around your street on her motorcycle, I couldn’t say.’

Jack remembered her motorcycle crash the year before. He’d have thought she’d have given that up by now. He couldn’t figure the woman out. What did she want from him? He couldn’t figure out how to make her go away, without resorting to the types of decisions he was now struggling with. More of the same. More death.

‘This morning Makedde Vanderwall visited the Murphy boy. The one who was released from jail,’ Mr White went on.

Jack felt his panic rising. ‘I can’t have her snooping around,’ he said, finding a surprising spark of strength in his anger. A minor return to himself. He was frustrated that she could still cause him trouble, frustrated by what she’d forced him to do.

‘She won’t. We’ll be keeping an eye on this.’

‘Yes,’ Jack said, nodding to himself. ‘We have to. Follow her. You know my concerns about letting this issue grab headlines again.’ There had been a rather embarrassing front page featuring Makedde Vanderwall running barefoot in an evening gown from the Cavanaghs’ palatial home, where his son’s extravagant birthday party was being held. There had been talk that she was running from an attacker, which the family naturally denied by way of their legal counsel.

But the attacker had been real enough.

He was a man who went by the name of Luther Hand. Hand had been employed by The American to clean up some
messy problems for Jack. He had wisely declined to escalate the situation at his client’s property. Nonetheless, it had got out of control, thanks to the photographs taken by paparazzi as Vanderwall fled. The photographers had been there to snap arriving celebrity guests and dignitaries, and they instead ended up with a surprise front-page story. The whole incident was a disaster. It had taken some time to get things to die down. But they had. Jack had made sure there were no repeats of the dangerous party antics that had started the debacle in the first place. He had done what had to be done, and for a while it looked like things might eventually return to normal. But nothing was normal. Not for Jack, anyway.

This news of the woman’s return to Sydney was alarming. This was unfinished business.

‘Bob, I don’t want any trouble from her,’ Jack reiterated, again finding some minor rekindling of his old spark. ‘What can we do about her?’

‘So long as she’s in Australia we’re limited. Anything that happens to her could easily arouse suspicion.’

Makedde had become publicly linked with the Cavanaghs’ troubles. She was bad publicity for the Cavanaghs and their businesses. It would certainly not look good if something happened to her. It was still too soon after the events, still too high-profile. The American was right.

‘No, we can’t have that,’ Jack agreed. ‘What are our options? Can we scare her back to Canada, or out of the state?’

‘Leave it with me,’ White said.

‘We can’t have any unwanted attention right now, Bob. I thought you said you had a contact in the police force keeping an eye on her?’

‘We do. We’ll make sure she stays away,’ White assured him. ‘Jack, we can handle this. We’ll protect against the possibility of any interest in the press.’

‘You have my faith, Bob.’

Jack paid The American an enormous sum to look after his interests, and to protect him from the knowledge of the grim specifics that task sometimes entailed. Legally, the less he knew the better. Over the years and through a number of crises, there had been very few occasions when Jack had been disappointed with The American’s work. He was exceptionally experienced and well connected. Jack knew of no one better qualified.

‘I can’t afford to have bad press right now,’ he reiterated. ‘The merger is nearly signed off.’ Mr White would already know this.

The conversation complete, Jack Cavanagh hung up the receiver and looked out at the blue sky once more. It had not regained any of its wonder in the interim.

Cobwebs and tar.

Cobwebs and tar.