Nicholas Hogg - Show Me the Sky

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.

D ead or alive, I have the job of finding him, Billy K, the singer who vanished into thin air on a Cornish cliff top. But Im not another crazed fan, one of the worshipping millions burning candles beneath his poster, singing his songs like a chant or prayer.

No. Im James Dent. People who dont 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 doesnt ask why Im 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 Im gone.

Im 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 Ive 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. Ill dream his face for ever if I dont track him down.

And this is why Im walking from an airport with just the clothes on my back. Because the only officer who pulls me from the investigation is this one.

S ydney is beautiful, what with the bridge and the harbour, all that glittering sea. Winter feels like a rumour, a myth from other climates. But Im 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. Theres 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 eyes, and picture him giving my description to an Australian police officer: Scruffy, even though he was in a jacket and dark jeans. Looked liked hed not slept or shaved for a few days. Tall, over six foot, medium build. Once upon a time an athlete, but losing it around the middle. And no luggage, nothing. Id even say he was sleeping rough if there hadnt been wads of cash spilling from his wallet.

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 Im 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 caf 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 caf 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 whos 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 isnt her Ive walked away from.

When I said I missed the connecting flight back to London because Im a policeman, I was fooling myself. Dont get me wrong, I want Billy K found, beating heart alive, or washed up bloated on a Cornish beach. Either way its 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 mothers. And so was Gemma. Im leaving before shes old enoughto realise youre 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.

Ive 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 didnt 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, whos 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 barman. Both podgy, redhaired, flashing glasses from hand to hand, and sharp to realise I need no more than a refill, and to be left alone reading the Billy K file.

When not buried in the pages of interviews and evidence, I stare blankly at the walls. Like a patient sitting in the corner of a hospital day room.

But Im only policing. Einstein carried out thought experiments, peered into the workings of the universe via his mind. Im staring at walls conducting thought investigations, peering into the mind of Billy K, why he might run, who with, and where. The reasons hed dive into a spring tide with his precious guitar.

Im now also one of the 200,000 who vanish each year. An official missing person with a last known sighting. And of that staggering number I plan to be one of the majority, part of the 99 per cent found, like the senile wandering from their houses, catching the bus to the coast in a dressing gown and slippers. Or the office workers who have upped and run, leaving a pristine desk and crowded inbox, simply to start a new job without giving notice. Too well I know the anguish of families left in limbo, the fathers who quit jobs to walk the streets with photos of a runaway child, the mothers afraid to leave home in case they miss a call.