Free Siren by Tara Moss

some tea, Macaylay?’
    ‘I’m fine, thank you. Actually, my name is pronounced Ma-kay-dee,’ Mak said, gently correcting her. ‘But you can call me Mak if you prefer.’
    ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
    ‘Please don’t be. I get it all the time. Actually, I don’t know what my parents were thinking, giving me a name like that.’ Mak smiled broadly, which seemed to help her client relax. She took out her notepad and placed it on the coffee table. ‘Glenise…may I call you Glenise?’
    A nod.
    ‘I know you’ve been through a lot in the past week, and you may have gone over most of this with the police already, but it would be very helpful for me to hear your view of what’s happened. Please don’t leave any detail out.’
    Glenise took a breath and sat forward. ‘Well, I guess you know that my son, Adam, has disappeared,’ she began, her voice strained, as if the mere mention of the subject made her throat close up. ‘I don’t know what could have happened. I am really concerned.’
    ‘I understand. Can you tell me a bit about yourself to begin with?’ Mak prodded, encouraging her. This sometimes made for an easier entry than the problem at hand.
    However, her client’s first statement was anything but light.
    ‘My husband, John, was an accountant. He was killed at work. He hailed from London originally…’ The woman spoke in a rush, as if to get her wretched story out of the way as fast as possible.
    Mak’s eyebrows went up. ‘Oh, I am sorry for your loss.’
    ‘You might well ask how an accountant dies at work,’ Glenise continued. ‘Well, he fell thirty-four floors down the elevator shaft. It was stuck between floors for over an hour, and rather than wait he squeezed himself out of a tiny gap and jumped to the lower floor, which would have been fine except that he fell backwards into the shaft, and…’ She trailed off. ‘That was two years ago.’
    ‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ Mak repeated, temporarily stumped. And your son has been acting out since?
    Thinking again of those diamonds, Mak guessed there had been a substantial pay-out.
    Now widowed and single, her son, along with her teaching career, appeared to be Mrs Hart’s whole world. Though an adult at nineteen, Adam was described by her as a ‘good boy’, upstanding and pure. She painted a suspiciously simple picture of an innocent, thoughtful son, inexplicably missing.
    ‘We are very close,’ she insisted. ‘He did not run away. He didn’t,’ she repeated. To her, this seemed to be an important point—that he had not abandoned her. Mak was sure that the police would already have suggested the possibility to her, to be met, no doubt, with the same firm denials. ‘The police said they can’t do much until someone hears something from him, but what if he’s out there somewhere needing my help?’ Her eyes clouded with pain and bewilderment.
    When citizens are not satisfied with what the law is doing, or able to do, private investigation agencies like Marian’s often come into the picture, Mak reflected. The predicament was more common than people realised, until they themselves became somehow embroiled in trauma. Mak knew she would probably do the same were she in this woman’s position. Despite having a respected cop for a father, her faith in the lawwas limited. As it was with many of the police officers she knew. Mak suspected she too would insist that her child was faultless in his or her own disappearance, that everything was utterly normal and harmonious except for this one sudden, unexpected incident, and that the police were not doing enough. None of these assertions was necessarily true, however. And Makedde had to disregard such statements in favour of facts, none of which she had yet ascertained.
    ‘Adam doesn’t drink, smoke or do drugs,’ Glenise said confidently, almost challenging Mak to contradict her.
    A nineteen-year-old who never even drank a beer would indeed be a rare find, Mak thought. She was about to