Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [1]
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