“I’m not going.”

     Alex was sitting at her dressing table looking for the right lipstick to compliment her new black dress, the left arm sleeveless, the right, a long flowing sleeve wide enough to reveal a rich silk burgundy lining. She stared at Denham in the oval D’Este mirror, her searching hand suddenly still. “What?”

     “I am not going.”

     “Why?”

     “Hugh and Vanessa. Chances are they’ll be there,” he said.

     Alex turned toward him. “Denham, what am I hearing? As if they would be there while …” Her voice became low, careful. “I mean, they’d hardly be celebrating. Anyway you have to go, it’s Sol’s birthday. It took him nine weeks to get this reservation.”

     “That restaurant is ludicrous.”

     Alex attempted to sound breezy. “No, not this one, darling, it’s cuisine art.”

     “Yeah, cuisine art. I’d prefer to stay home with you and have a pizza. You know what they’ll be talking about all evening. It will be hell for both of us.”

     There was an extended silence which Alex finally broke with a forced laugh. “Come on, Denham, Sol managed to get a private room. We’ll be OK. We’ll drink the best champagne and Sol’s paying.”

 

Denham and Alex are the last guests to arrive. They walk across the black and white tiled floor of a spacious Italianate foyer to a rosewood antique desk. They are greeted by the maitre d’, a man in a grey Armani suit who looks like Ricky Gervais, only fatter. He leads them to a private room with mirrored walls and mellow gold lighting where the rest of the party are already seated, drinking. Sol rises, kisses Alex on the cheek. “God, you look fabulous,” he tells her. “What an amazing dress.”

     She manages a half-smile. “Thank you.”

     The maitre d’ describes the entrée with his eyes closed. “A garden of baby vegetables including champagne carrots in a sauce of orange butter, served with olive oil from the Peloponnese, wild fennel, oregano, rosemary, pimentos slightly charred for extra flavour and marinated courgettes.”

     The waiters, dressed in brown satin vests and black trousers, bring in each dish held high in one hand. “What a circus,” Denham mutters. He is tense, waiting for the first problematic and obvious remark. Alex wonders if he will become defensive and sarcastic. He usually leaves that to her but tonight it seems it could be the other way around.

     Sensing the tension, Sol looks doubtfully from Alex to Denham and he wonders if the evening will be successful. The drink waiter uncorks more bottles of Taittinger and the fixed smiles around the table relax a little. They drink a toast to Sol on his fortieth birthday. Denham, his mind elsewhere, does not raise his glass. Sol’s wife, Phillipa notices this and is surprised. She considers Denham a distinguished looking man and usually charming, usually so polite.

     Alex apologises for him. “He didn’t hear what Robert said.”

     “That’s true. I’m sorry,” Denham nods, now raising his glass. He has trouble following Robert’s fly buzz boring speech.

     A little later Phillipa raises her glass. “To Sol again, to all our dear friends here tonight and let’s not forget our children.” Denham stiffens. Alex places her hand in his. He remembers this time to raise his glass.

     “We are all defenceless when it comes to our kids,” Robert’s wife sighs.

     Here it comes, stupid fucking bitch. Of course Denham would never say that to her. Didn’t he have the reputation of being Mr Nice Guy? Wanting to keep it that way, he left it to his wife to be the snarky one. A moment ago he’d scowled but now he smiles apologetically.

     Predictably they begin to talk about Hugh and Vanessa Rhoddas’ missing son, six year old Justin. No word for two weeks now. “Imagine the boy vanishing like that, without a trace. No leads, nothing,” Phillipa remarks. “Apparently the Rhoddas have offered a big reward.”

     After this, nobody talks about anything else and the fourteen guests contemplate their own death, how they will die. The maitre d’ gives a lengthy description of the main course. “Creamed onions and goat’s cheese in a nest of Japanese mushrooms garnished with young spring roots from our own garden, served with roasted beets, purple radish, smoked salmon and radicchio sprinkled with sweetened lemon flowers.”

     Surprisingly it is Alex who pushes her plate away. She can no longer eat. She drains her glass, holds it out for another. “It’s extraordinary,” Phillipa continues, “that this has happened to people we know.” Someone is playing an Erik Satie piece on piano.

 

Denham had been in movies, none of them great. He retired in his mid-thirties to write a novel which, to use his own words, was a load of crap but highly successful, an unlikely pastiche of the Hollywood glitterati and a band of terrorists. For some reason the novel put him on the world literary map but he had not taken it seriously and was not interested in writing another. When they moved to a new house, Spanish hacienda style, he spent most of his time working in the large surrounding garden, adding new features, a glasshouse for orchids, ornate bird baths, rockeries, imported plants and other rare flowers. He added rooms with glass walls to the back of the house overlooking the heated pool. He loved working outdoors. There was only one drawback. God knows why because he hated kids, but that snivelling Rhodda brat had taken a liking to him. The Rhoddas lived a few doors up. Justin peddled down on his kiddy bike nearly every day after school and followed Denham around.

     The child irritated the hell out of him but characteristically Denham didn’t like to tell him to go away. He had asked Alex several times to say something to Vanessa. Alex just laughed. “You always push me into doing your dirty work.”

     “That’s OK,” he said. “I love it when you’re bitchy. You have a reputation. People expect it of you.”

     Yet it seemed Alex never said anything to Vanessa or her husband, Hugh. Justin continued to turn up on his bike in his black plastic helmet and Pokémon t-shirt, talking non-stop, wheeling around Denham and getting in his way. The kid had pale expressionless eyes and Denham could not deny that he found him repulsive, even disturbing in some way. And that ceaseless prattle. “Why are you digging a hole, Mr Leeman? We’ve got yellow flowers like that in our garden. A man comes to do our garden. Why do you do all the work yourself? How many birds in that tree? We got a cat that chases birds.”

     Sometimes he would throw his bike down on the very spot where Denham was attempting to work, wander off and scramble through the rockery. Then Denham would have to stop what he was doing to keep an eye on him, to make sure he didn’t hurt himself. If he had been a sadistic man he might have put his hands tight around the brat’s scrawny neck. How he would love to do that. Instead he forced himself to smile, to humour this child he wished to strangle.

     “There’s something wrong with that kid,” he told Alex. “I mean doesn’t he have kids his own age to play with?”

     “Probably other kids don’t like him any more than you do,” she shrugged.

     “Why don’t you do me a favour and strangle him?” Denham asked in a jokey voice. “No-one would suspect you. In spite of what you think, you’ve always been fairly tolerant of him and you’re best friends with his mother.”

     Although Alex knew he was joking, she wondered playfully, if it could be done. Could I do it? Could he actually talk me into it? Of course that was ridiculous; he encouraged her to be outrageous but never physically harmful.

     So the kid continued to unnerve him with his unstoppable babble, getting underfoot and when Denham tried to ignore him, clutching and pulling at his clothes. Anybody else would have slapped him, sent him home. Denham just imagined different ways of murdering him, his thoughts becoming more and more bizarre.

     He continued to smile stupidly at the child.

 

It was midsummer and very hot. The Rhoddas had invited the Leemans for afternoon drinks. Vanessa Rhodda was tall with high cheekbones and short black silky hair. She greeted her guests in a loose white shirt and cream Oscar de la Renta slacks, slurring her words. Denham looked around the living area. He found the interior of their house crass with its zebra skin rugs on black polished floorboards and those fur-covered armchairs.

     Hugh poured a Puligny Montrachet into tall glasses and they took their drinks onto the terrace. They talked for a while about how hot the day was. They showed one another photos on their phones. Justin was riding up and down the side of the house, singing something unintelligible in a high irritating voice. Denham and Alex exchanged glances.

     “OK,” Alex sighed. She turned to Vanessa. “Couldn’t Justin piss off somewhere so we can’t hear him?”

     Hugh leapt to his feet. “Justin,” he yelled. “Go ride your bike around the front garden.” Vanessa closed her eyes, smiling.

     “Now we can all relax,” Hugh said. He produced some cigarette papers. The dope was sitting on the table in a Chinese porcelain bowl.

     “I’ve already started,” Vanessa confessed. “But I could go another.” Everyone laughed.

     “This is good shit,” Denham remarked after a couple of draws. Everyone laughed again and he passed it on to Alex.

     “Jesus,” she said, after a deep draw. When it was her turn again she said, “I’m stoned already.”

     “Yeah, it doesn’t take much with you,” Denham laughed.

     “What?” she asked.

     “Nothing, honey.” Everyone was amused.

     They started on a second bottle of the Montrachet and Vanessa was trying to tell the guests about her new business adventure, a palatial florist shop with marble walls and piped music, two rooms crowded with spectacular flowers. ‘The Pleasure Garden’ she called it, complete with a perfumery section. “Perfumes … scents of diff flowers.” She had trouble getting her words out and kept on laughing.

     Their eldest son, Archer, sixteen, appeared on the terrace. He sniffed the air and grinned as he greeted the Leemans. He was tall and graceful, what Alex called a beautiful boy. If he allowed that wild brown hair which stood up from his scalp to grow longer and not wear those absurd glasses, she thought, he would look like a pretty girl. “Off out, me,” he said.

     “Where going?” Vanessa slurred.

     “Just hanging with the guys.”

     She kissed him on the cheek. “OK sweetheart. Call if going be late.”

     “Yeah, I’ll phone. Could be a party later.”

     “Oh and Archer, check on Justin will you. He’s out front,” Hugh added.

     “Yeah, sure.” He sloped off through the gate, thinking about the rave party that might happen later, wondering if that girl would be there. He couldn’t remember her name but she had big black eyes and a slow dreamy way of speaking.

     A moment later his thoughts were interrupted by another voice. “Wait for me,” Justin whined.

     Archer spun around. “Hey, scram, go back inside. I’m off to the city.” He shook his head and went on his way without looking back.

     Justin sat on his bike, a blank expression on his pale face as he watched his brother turn the corner. But he noticed that the Leeman’s front gate had been left open. He rode in and peddled down their driveway to the garden at the rear of the house.

     In summer wild ducks sometimes flew up from the river in pairs, landing in the swimming pool. Often Denham tried to shoo them off because they had a habit of shitting everywhere. Justin leaned forward off the bike seat, his feet touching the stone path that led to the pool. There were two beautiful ducks on the water. They had brown necks and shiny green patches on their wings. He jumped off his bike, leaned it against the glass wall of the house, pulled off his helmet.

     It was against council regulations but Denham had not bothered to build a fence around the pool. It ruined the view, he said. Regulations required that there not only be a fence but the gate needed to be secured with a safety lock. Alex had warned Denham many times that if a council inspector ever came onto their property to check it out they would be prosecuted. It was a deep pool and yet no child-proof fence. The ducks were swimming around in the deepest end.

     Hugh had been attempting to train Justin to swim. So far the boy could barely dog paddle but he thought that was the same as swimming and he wanted one of those pretty ducks. He wanted to take it home, keep it as a pet. He lay down on his stomach over the surrounding tiled ledge and reached out for the duck with two hands. The duck swam off a short distance away, then perhaps curious about the little figure watching it, swam back again to the low  ledge. Justin reached out for it a second time. Once more the bird glided away.

     “I’ll get you,” Justin shouted. He jumped into the deep water, making a loud splash, this time completely scaring the ducks. They flew off.

     For several minutes Justin floundered and kicked in the water, trying to get back to the ledge. It was out of reach. He floundered and kicked again, but not for long. He sank to the bottom of the pool.

 

The cat came onto the Rhoddas’ terrace. There were four people drinking, smoking and laughing. At 5pm Denham stood up unsteadily and slurred, “We’d better go. Wash a great afternoon.”

     “I think we’re going shome movie tonight, aren’t we?” Alex asked him.

     “Maybe. Can’t remember what …” He laughed. “Good luck with your new, you know, new biz thing, Van,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll …”

     “We have to go,” Alex told him. She remained sitting in the chaise longue.

     “Yeah, have to go,” Denham laughed. He put his hands under his wife’s elbows and pulled her up onto her feet. She swayed into him.

     “Thanksh sho much,” she said to Vanessa and Hugh. They all embraced one another.

     “It wash celebration actually for Van’s new …” Hugh told them, speaking very slowly.

     “New thing,” Denham nodded, grinning. “Don’t get up. We’ll see ourshelves out.” He and Alex staggered off arm in arm.

     Hugh and Vanessa drank some more. The cat sat blinking at them on the terrace.

     Half an hour later Hugh remembered to call Justin.

     “I’ll have to get him shomething to eat,” Vanessa said with her eyes closed, not moving. Hugh weaved out into the front garden and called his son.

     A few minutes later, suddenly sober, he walked back to the terrace. “Where is he?” he asked.

     Vanessa opened her eyes. “He wash in the front garden. I checked on him earlier and then Arch …”

     “Front garden? Not there now.”

     When Denham and Alex were resting in the upstairs bedroom, Denham’s mobile rang. It was Hugh. “Hey did you see Justin anywhere on your way home?”

     Denham answered in a slightly irritable tone. “No, we’re resting. We’re supposed to go to this movie tonight.”

     “OK, if you see him Den, please tell him to come home.”

     “Yeah, will do.”

     Hugh roamed the house, upstairs and down, went through the garden again, calling for his son.

 

They slept until after 8pm, too late for the movie. Denham thought he’d heard his phone a couple of times but had not answered it. It was just growing dark when they got out of bed and went down into the kitchen. Denham checked his phone for unanswered calls. There were two more from Hugh. He had not left messages.

     When Alex switched on the pool lights she noticed something, an odd shape, floating in the water. She was still a little sleepy and could not make out what it was. She turned back toward the house to call Denham. Then she saw the small bike leaning against the glass and froze.

     This time it was her phone that was ringing. She started, swore in a panic, but did not pick it up. Denham walked out to the pool. Alex, deathly pale, pointed to the shape in the water.

     As they dragged the small corpse from the pool, Alex could hear her heart beating.

     “We’d better think of something pretty quick,” Denham said in a strange detached voice. “The cops will be searching for him before the night is through.” But they stood looking at it without doing anything.

     Alex suddenly reached for her phone. “Jesus, shit. I’m going to have to call Vanessa.”

     Denham surprised her by lunging at her, grabbing the phone. “Are you out of your mind?” he hissed. “That’s the last thing we want to do.”

     She gaped at him, wide-eyed with shock. “What do you mean?”

     “Wake up. You know bloody well what I mean. We’ll be in big trouble with the law. No kid-proof fence around the pool and …”

     “But for heaven’s sake, we can’t not report it. We will have to tell them straight away. I mean, Christ, we’re just standing here. Vanessa, Hugh, even Archer, they …”

     “We can’t report it,” he snapped. “We’ll be sued big time, arrested on the grounds of negligence.”

     Her voice went up an octave higher. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Anyway in that case we get lawyers. The best.”

     “Look, this is tough. More problematic than you realize. You have your future to think about, Alex. The both of us do. Let me handle it.”

     She looked down disbelievingly at the little body at her feet. Then she gave Denham a look he couldn’t understand. “You hated that kid. You had fantasies about murdering him.”

     He felt like slapping her then. He raised his voice. “They were only stupid fantasies. I would never.”

     She could laugh or sob. She clenched her teeth to prevent herself from doing either. “Of course you wouldn’t. Not my husband, the man who is pathetically afraid of being disliked.”

     He glared at her, shaking with anger. “What the hell did you say?”

     Instead of answering, she turned, about to walk inside.

     “I’ll take care of this,” was all he said, a threatening sound to his voice.

     She turned back to face him. “Oh? How?”

     “Nobody will ever find out as long as we don’t slip up.”

     “Are you fucking kidding?” she almost shrieked.

     “Alex, calm down. The neighbours. Lower your voice. I have it under control.”

     “Do you?” Her voice still at high-level panic.

     “Listen, you’re over-reacting. It’s not as if we did anything wrong. We’re good people. Everyone knows that.”

     “Oh God, is this insane or what?”

     “No, it’s not insane. Now shut up for once in your life and listen. There was an accident. His parents should have been looking after him, but because they weren’t we have to take matters into our own hands.”

     “OK, I won’t call Vanessa. I’ll contact the police and let them handle it.”

     He grabbed her and in desperation shook her violently. “Alex, we won’t go near the police. I don’t think you get it.”

     “Denham, let me go,” she cried. “You’re hurting me.”

     He let his arms drop to his sides, breathing heavily. She walked into the kitchen and with trembling hands, poured herself a whisky, drained the glass, poured another. Denham switched off the pool lights, went into his tool shed, then Alex saw the beam of a torch at the far end of the garden.

     By the time he had finished digging, the hole was deep. He placed the boy’s helmet on his head and buried him. He backed the car out of the garage, put the bike in the boot.

     “I’ve got this under control,” he repeated. “But I have to go out for a while.”

     She stared at him impassively. “It’s a wonder you don’t want me to do it,” she said quietly.

     It was several hours before he returned. “Nothing to worry about. The bike is far away, hidden in the scrub. I cleaned off the finger prints. With a bit of luck some kid might find it and keep it.”

     Alex said nothing but was beginning to wonder if he was possibly right. She had to admit there was something she hadn’t considered. If the news got out that they were being sued for negligence or even something worse, her career as a journalist could be finished. She wrote a regular article, “People and Places” for Vogue Aust. She would hate to lose that money spinner. She took a deep breath. Perhaps she had been mildly hysterical and hadn’t thought things through. Yes, maybe he was right after all. If they were sued they could end up bankrupt and lose their home, not to mention being convicted.

     In the morning Denham returned Hugh’s call. Fortunately there was no reply and his message went to voice mail. “Sorry Hugh, didn’t check my calls till this morning. Asleep before eight last night. Didn’t even make the movie. Hope Justin has turned up and everything is OK.”

     A police helicopter had been circling the area since the early hours and it was not long before a search team with sniffer dogs was working its way along the river.

     At ten there was a knock on the door. It was Vanessa, red-eyed, wearing a heavy coat. Although the morning was warm she was shivering.

     “Vanessa, are you OK? You look like …” Alex stared at her in panic, knowing what she was about to hear.

     “Can I come in?” Vanessa asked, almost in a whisper, lips trembling.

     Alex took hold of her cold hand. “Of course. Can I get you something?”

     Vanessa shook her head. “I can’t stay. We’ve been up all night. Justin is … gone, missing. We don’t know where …the police are looking everywhere, combing the countryside. Hugh has been knocking on every door in the street.” She choked back a frightened sob.

     Although Alex knew it would happen this way, she was still unprepared, did not know what to say. She continued to hold her friend’s hand.

     The press were onto it in a matter of hours. The next day a photo of Justin appeared in several tabloids and on Sky News. The headlines, “Six year old boy missing. Parents  assisting police in search, offering a reward.” Two detectives questioned a distressed Archer who was presumably the last person to see his missing brother. Neighbours, including the Leemans told police they had not seen anything suspicious.

                                                                           *

Denham has planted palm trees around the pool. He has created a rockery above the small grave, planted spiky pink bromeliads and cacti between the rocks.

     A year has passed and the Rhoddas have done something which has puzzled and angered their neighbours. They have built a third storey onto their house, a corrugated iron structure which overshadows all the surrounding houses. Its floor to ceiling windows look out over everyone’s private gardens. People describe it as a monstrosity. The general opinion is that since the absence of their younger son, the couple have become impossible. Neighbours prefer to avoid them these days. In spite of local opinions, the florist shop is a success and friends always tell Vanessa she looks great; although they see a vague fear in her eyes.

     At night Denham and Alex sit drinking by their floodlit pool. They don’t go out so much anymore and they are careful what they say to one another. Denham keeps the pool excessively clean. But it’s funny, Alex thinks, in years to come perhaps they won’t even remember the dead boy’s face. It all happened twelve months ago and she wants to believe they are the same people they always were. Nothing could now threaten their ideal life. Not for a while anyway.

     They sit without speaking, mesmerised by the flickering lights on the water.