Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [0]
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