4

TEDDY

They were about halfway along the highway towards Cole’s workplace when Art yawned from the passenger seat of Teddy’s Corolla and said, ‘We need to stop for lobster rolls.’

‘What?’

‘You want me to be at my best, right? Sharp, observational? I’m hungry. I haven’t had any breakfast yet.’

‘Goddammit.’ Teddy’s stomach, the traitor, surged at the thought. ‘I want to get this all done today before Alice finishes up and tries to help us.’

‘Okay, I’m sorry. We can just stop for a pie at a Caltex on the way. It’ll be fine.’

Teddy groaned. ‘Why did you say lobster rolls?’

‘It’s just that I know this one place,’ he said.

Snippy’s was by a train station near the bottom of Mount Dandenong: a sea of bright oranges and seaside blues with a vape store on one side and a hairdresser on the other. Art went inside to order and came back out with two bottles of sarsaparilla.

‘They make it in-house,’ he said, handing her a bottle. ‘You’ll love it.’

‘I never do,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have let you order for me.’

He clinked his bottle against hers and smiled. She took a swig, grimaced and said, ‘What makes you like this stuff?’

‘Tastes wrong,’ he said, pleased. ‘In the best kind of way.’

Art had grown up in a nice house with a nice family, and hadn’t done much more than some light shoplifting and less light drug use before Teddy had him hired by Choker. Art barely even needed the money Choker paid him: he’d dropped out of a journalism degree a year ago, but was yet to tell his parents, since as long as he was a student they let him live for free with his sister Nina in a three-bedroom house in Richmond – with a goddamn tennis court out the back, of all things. He had a few minor expenses: bills, a private-school-level surfeit of alcohol, frequent purchases of mirrored sunglasses to replace the ones he broke, and a few debt repayments on behalf of both him and his sister that he didn’t like to talk about, unless he was drunk, which was, thanks to said amount of alcohol, fairly often. Even so, he had just about enough to cover it all, and the reason he needed a job with them – and Alice and Teddy couldn’t fucking believe it, really – was food.

Art never cooked, was friends with every Uber driver in his neighbourhood, and once a week he’d go out to a restaurant with the kind of menu where you’d cry just from reading the price of fish. If he just ate some goddamn cereal sometimes and learned how to make pasta sauce, Alice and Teddy thought, he wouldn’t need a job at all. But here he was, eating lobster rolls for breakfast, because that was his vice.

Teddy said to Art as they waited, ‘I hope we find the kid today.’

‘We won’t,’ Art said. ‘He left on purpose to find a better life.’

‘Huh.’ Teddy got up the picture of Cole on her phone and looked at him. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘That kid’s never smiled about anything.’

Teddy looked through the few pictures of Cole’s face that Rusty had sent them. He was scowling in all of them. Art, in front of her, was always smiling; he had natural good cheer, and was always dressed like he was on the way to do something more fun. Today he was wearing the battered brown leather jacket that was his unofficial, year-round uniform – in summer he sometimes had nothing underneath – along with a striped blue-and-white t-shirt. He looked like a sailor washed ashore from a suburban pond.

Teddy, who dressed in oversized jumpers and jeans in winter and black t-shirts and jean shorts in summer, thought about Cole’s face some more. Eventually, she said, ‘I think he was murdered.’

Art barked out a laugh. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘I don’t think Choker would let you call me up when I’m on leave for a small case like this,’ she said. ‘I think Choker thinks he’s dead too.’

‘That’s bleak,’ Art said, immediately sober. ‘I wish I hadn’t laughed.’

Their lobster rolls, when they came out, were almost too much; small neon claws waving from the buttery grilled potato roll, chives collecting in the pools of sauce.

‘Fuck me,’ Teddy said from the driver’s seat, swallowing a bite.

‘Not such a bad day off, huh?’ Art said, tearing through a claw with his teeth.

Sated, they drove up the highway into the forest, past ferns curling into the rock faces and expansive views over the suburbs. Cole’s work, a tree removalist company called Gorilla & Giraffe, was about halfway up the mountain in Hummingdale, and Teddy slowed as they reached the town, passing a laundromat, a fish and chip joint, a laser clinic, a shop full of crystals, and then the petrol station with the ‘Gorilla & Giraffe’ sign behind it.

‘I’ve gotta pee,’ Art said.

‘Goddammit,’ Teddy said, yanking the brake. ‘Are we ever getting in there?’

Art pulled that face; the one he had been practising ever since his first case with Teddy and Alice. It was somewhere between a sincere apology and a parody of one. He knew how to look like a real asshole to get like-minded men onside; he also knew how to pull an apologetic face to get Teddy and Alice onside. Teddy grunted and told him to hurry the hell up, and that she’d wait for him out front.

Teddy watched the entrance to Gorilla & Giraffe. This was what she knew from Rusty’s notes: it was a tree removalist company, co-owned by a guy named Pete, who looked strong and hairy like a gorilla, and a guy called Witi, who looked tall and long-necked like a giraffe. Cole had worked for them since just before Christmas, sometimes out in the field helping, sometimes here taking calls and selling firewood, sometimes delivering mulch. They’d been the ones to raise the alarm when he didn’t turn up for work.

Nobody went in or out of the building. She waited, bored, until Art came out of the service station with three Milky Ways and a smug expression Teddy recognised.

‘Did you make a new friend in there?’

‘Sure did,’ he said. ‘She was very pleased to have somebody buy something before using the bathroom.’

‘Cheap bribe,’ Teddy said.

‘Yeah, and it paid off,’ he said. ‘Cole goes in there sometimes. She says he buys a can of Monster every morning and doesn’t say thank you. Twice a week they get in pies from a bakery over the hill and he always gets those for lunch until they run out. Otherwise he buys a Twirl.’ He grinned. ‘Put that in your Google Drive and smoke it.’

‘You write it up,’ Teddy said, but she knew she would be the one putting that in later anyway; Art hadn’t contributed anything to their shared file for weeks, since Teddy told him off for posting too many memes and not enough documentation.

They walked into the Gorilla & Giraffe front office, which was empty. Teddy rang a bell, and Art picked up a handful of sawdust from a sack and rubbed it between his fingers.

‘Top-grade stuff,’ he said.

Teddy rolled her eyes. The back door opened and the giraffe – Witi – came through with a wide salesman smile. ‘Well, hello!’

Teddy remembered why they were there and did not smile, but Art did, shaking his hand and beaming back at him. ‘Hi there! It’s a great place you’ve got here.’

It was fairly standard – white dusty walls, metal Ikea desk, framed pictures of trees in pieces or staff abseiling from wires in tall pines – but Witi glowed at the compliment. ‘Yeah, cheers. We’ve put a lot of time into the business. And how can we help you two? Got a tree down?’

‘Actually, we’re here to find Cole,’ Teddy said. ‘I’m Teddy Malloy, and this is my colleague, Arthur Cleven.’

‘Oh, man,’ Witi said, rubbing his hand over his head. ‘Okay. Well, maybe come out back.’

They followed him through the door he’d entered from and found themselves in the lunchroom. It was small: a fridge covered in flat company magnets, a microwave, a table, a calendar with a golden retriever on it from the December before, and folding chairs against the wall that Witi passed over to them. The room smelled strongly of chicken two-minute noodles.

‘I’m Witi, by the way,’ he said as he sat down. ‘Cole’s boss. Well, one of them. You cops?’

Teddy said, ‘Not cops. We’re here privately.’

‘So what do you want to know?’

‘Nobody seemed to notice Cole was missing until you here at Gorilla & Giraffe did,’ she said. ‘Can you tell us what kind of person Cole was, and what made you worried?’

Cole, it turned out, was an average employee. He got the job after his father put the hard word on his indoor soccer teammate – Pete the Gorilla – after Cole unenthusiastically finished Year 12. He turned up on time and complained from clock-on to clock-off about everything, but he followed the safety rules and hadn’t sawn off a hand. He really went on about splinters, though.

‘Did he often miss days?’

‘Only once,’ Witi said. ‘Turned up an hour before our job was finished, hungover and pissed off about it, like him sleeping in had been our fault. We sent him home, told him he’d better pick up his game if he ever wanted to work for us again. We thought it might be good cause to get rid of him and hire somebody less interested in bitching, but he came back the next day with his tail between his legs and, can I say, a really vast amount of beer. Not even the cheap shit. So we forgave him.’

‘And this last time?’

‘Well, that first time was on a Monday too. This time he was supposed to be delivering some wood but never turned up here in the morning. Pete couldn’t get a hold of him and had to shut up the office and do it himself, which, fuck, he went on about the whole day. We waited for him to come in the next day with the beer, like last time, and then he still didn’t, so Pete called his dad to blast him and it turned out nobody had seen him for a while.’

‘What do you think has happened to him?’ Teddy asked.

Witi leaned back on his chair until the back of his head touched the wall. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I am worried. He’s a whiny prick, for sure, but just disappearing – that’s not like him.’

‘Did he have ambitions for another job?’ Art asked. ‘Or was he planning on working with you for the foreseeable?’

‘That’s a good question,’ Witi said. ‘I never asked, but probably because I didn’t really want to hear the answer.’ He picked up a glass from the table and rubbed at a smudge underneath. ‘Maybe he won the lotto and hopped town with the money. I hope that’s what happened – that nothing bad’s happened to him.’

He seemed genuine enough in this moment, his salesman face gone, in its place the face of somebody who wasn’t sure what happened to the annoying kid in his care. Teddy didn’t trust anybody in a case fully, but she believed him now, and her instincts were very rarely wrong. Sometimes she thought they were never wrong at all.

‘Did he – or you – have any problem clients?’ she asked. ‘Anybody who didn’t like the way he did something, complained, any issue?’

Witi thought for a moment. ‘Nothing comes to mind.’ Then, still thinking, he smiled.

Teddy said, ‘What?’

‘He got into trouble once. Mrs Whittaker. He had to go give a quote – his first one on his own – and he came back saying she was crazy. We’d already heard from her by then. She’d called up to say she thought we’d never hire an addict.’

‘He was an addict?’

‘Not in the way she was describing. He told her the weed plant she was growing was very well looked after. We’d told him that complimenting clients is always a good idea. Why he chose that angle, though – fuck me. Not the brightest kid.’

‘She was worried he’d rat on her?’

‘No, she just refused to believe it was marijuana. Insisted it was Japanese Maple. Look, in the pictures Cole took for the quote it’s clear as day she’s unwittingly cultivating a giant batch of mull, but we had to tell him that we were just going to apologise, give her a discount, tell her that he’d been reprimanded, all that.’

Art was suppressing a laugh next to Teddy, who ignored him. ‘And that was it, when it comes to issues?’ she asked.

‘Sure was. He’d be the first person to complain about a bad client, and I can’t think of anything that’s happened that’s made anybody that mad. You think it could be some psycho stalker?’

‘Not really,’ Art said.

They thanked Witi for his help. He said he’d get Pete to call them if he had anything to add.

Back in the car park, Art yawned and stood next to the car, rapidly and methodically eating all three Milky Ways he’d picked up at the service station while Teddy glared impatiently.

He licked his fingers and said, ‘So what now?’

‘Time,’ Teddy said, ‘to go see his mother.’