Home Before Night

by J.P. Pomare

Genres: Mystery; Private Investigators; Noir; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Mother's intuition or a deadly guilty conscience? A woman races against time to find her son in this tense and twisty thriller by the Top Ten bestselling author of The Wrong Woman

'J. P. Pomare has once again earned his place on my instant-read list. Home Before Night is twisty and brilliant - a highly addictive thriller!' CHRISTIAN WHITE

'This grabbed me from the opening page and didn't let go' MICHAEL ROBOTHAM

'The thrill and fear arrive early in Home Before Night and doesn't leave until the final pages. J. P. Pomare is the real deal; he has the skill to twist your heart' CANDICE FOX

'A fantastic read, with one of the most satisfying twists I've ever encountered. JP Pomare's characters are true-to-life and compelling. This expertly plotted thriller hurtles along at a dangerous speed from the first page to the last' ROSE CARLYLE

As the third wave of the virus hits, all inhabitants of Melbourne are given until 8 pm to get to their homes. Wherever they are when the curfew begins, they must live for four weeks and stay within five kilometres of. When Lou's son, Samuel, doesn't arrive home by nightfall, she begins to panic.

He doesn't answer his phone. He doesn't message. His social media channels are inactive. Lou is out of her mind with worry, but she can't go to the police, because she has secrets of her own. Secrets that Samuel just can't find out about. Lou must find her son herself and bring him home.

Includes an exclusive extract of the next J.P. Pomare thriller, Seventeen Years Later, publishing in 2024.

Praise for The Wrong Woman:

'Keeps readers on their toes from the opening page. His is a rare talent that continues to turn out crime masterpieces' Herald Sun

'Deftly plotted, pacey and sharply written. Twists come out of nowhere and the high drama of the final few chapters is edge-of-the-seat stuff' New Zealand Women's Weekly

'A twisty small-town mystery with a protagonist I didn't want to let go' IAN RANKIN

'The pay-off is criminally good . . . As always, Pomare keeps the best surprises until last. Prepare for a late night' Sydney Morning Herald

Release date: April 26, 2023

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 304

Sample

YOU MIGHT HAVE hated me at one point in time. Lots of people have. It’s fine, really.

You have to get used to it in that line of work. We were up there with parking wardens, traffic police. The hatred usually only lasted for a minute or two, and by the time people got through to the arrival gate they’d forgotten about me and I’d forgotten about them, but there was always another person ready, passport in hand, dragging their suitcases with dead-eyed, thinly disguised contempt. It was the ones coming home from holidays who were the worst. They should’ve been in a good mood, with their sun tans and Bintang singlets, kids with braided hair, but they were all going back to their nine-to-fives, traffic, cooking their own meals, school.

You might have seen me or perhaps not. People didn’t really see us at the airport, it’s like we’d already been replaced by machines. They sort of looked through us as we probed with questions, watching for tells. If I believed you, you went straight through; if I doubted you or I didn’t like you, you went into the long queue for additional screening. It could be the difference between making a connecting flight, seeing your family for Christmas, or missing out. That’s why people hated me, and I forgave them. Forgave. Past tense now, you know, before all this. When I still had a job. In the pre-virus world. The virus feels like a boundary between the country of the present and the country of the past. Those robotic scanners were sweeping through the terminals anyway, it was only a matter of time before they replaced us. The break in international travel just seemed to accelerate things. With more scanners and fewer people, they could process travellers just as quickly with a lighter wage bill. Machines that read body language and flag travellers exhibiting suspicious behaviour without all the human biases. I did love that job though. The colleagues, the hours, the time between rushes of travellers when I could just stand there and think.

Redundancy was offered after the second wave, then it was mandatory after the third. Six months’ wages paid out after eleven years of hard work, but I can’t complain really. So many others had it so much worse. Now the fourth wave is here. This new vaccine-resistant strain of the virus has arrived, a cluster was detected north of the city. I saw it on the news this afternoon and my first thought was not again. My second was I hope Samuel has seen this.

I’m still thinking about him from where I sit out in the afternoon sun. It’s warm for early spring. I’m in my usual spot, on our balcony overlooking Punt Road, the busiest street in the city, and it’s even busier now with the news of the lockdown. The two outbound lanes are choked up with city dwellers fleeing for their holiday homes in coastal enclaves. No such privilege here.

In lockdown, we’re allowed out to exercise but most of the time I’m happy enough just staying in. I’m at that point in my life when I know I’ll never be in the shape I was in my twenties. I’m hurtling toward menopause and I’ve decided to do what I need to do to keep myself happy. My therapist helped me see that starving myself and resisting the things that make me happy is unhealthy and being a thin, teetotalling, meditation guru seems nice but that’s not me. So, I like to drink the occasional glass of wine and smoke a few cigarettes a day and spend time with my son. If and when a man enters my life it’s usually on my terms. Samuel always comes first.

I go to his bedroom now and check again, as though impossibly he might not be out at all. He could still be there asleep under the covers after a late-night cramming and maybe I’ve just missed him all day. That hope fades instantly. No sign of him, just an unmade bed, sheets tangled, half on the bed, half on the floor. That large poster of Nietzsche on the wall, staring down, mildly judgemental with that bushy moustache and inscrutable gaze. Nietzsche, all the smartest people in history seem to only need one name. Einstein, Da Vinci, Shakespeare. I don’t know a thing about Nietzsche, I just know he was a philosopher and his ideas are much too clever for me. That’s a bit like everything with my Samuel, he has a big brain with bigger ideas and try as I might to keep up, I always fail to really understand. His monitor is in the corner on his desk, but his laptop is gone. The room floods with light when I sweep the curtains open. I see some dirty clothes on the floor, and a hair tie – not his – on the bedstand.

Our bedrooms are side by side and symmetrical. The living room is sizeable for an apartment, although I always had dreams of saving up, buying something bigger, maybe a house with a back yard, but any money I did save went straight back into Samuel’s studies, and without a job it’s unlikely I’ll ever have enough to leave this place. It’s tough as a single mother, it’s tougher still as an unemployed single mother. But that’s okay. We like it here, and one day Samuel is going to make a lot of money. Then he will start his own family on a nice big family block with a two-storey house, a Labrador, maybe even a small pool to cool off in. There will be a granny flat out the back for me and I’ll babysit the kids when he and his wife, whoever she may be, are too busy or need a break. Short of winning the lottery, it’s unlikely I’ll be moving out of this apartment anytime soon, but a woman can dream of the future. Five, ten years, who knows what our lives will look like. So many young people are making so much money these days. And like I said, Samuel’s much, much smarter than me and definitely smarter than Marko.

My husband became a different man the day he decided to get behind the wheel drunk; eventually he’d stop drinking altogether. But things really fell apart for us a year later, that day at the beach with the huge waves. It’s eighteen years ago and Samuel was just a newborn but it’s hard not to view that day as the beginning of the end of our marriage. We were together three more tough years, we tried to make it work, but we were both drifting. During that time I began to realise that I cared much more about Samuel than I did about him. And Marko realised I just wasn’t the type of woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

Marko got what he wanted in the end, a simple normal, easy family. It seemed he’d only been with his new girlfriend ten minutes before they were engaged, and she was swollen with their first kid. When I went into labour, he was working. He turned up halfway through. I suppose it didn’t help that labour started six weeks early. I’m sure he was there for her, his new wife. They probably skipped the years of trying, the miscarriages and desperation.

Like I said, that day at the beach is what ruined things with me and Marko, but it bound me so tightly to Samuel – I never, ever want to go through that again. Anything could have happened. It was the most intense emotional experience, the fear and anxiety, the pure unfiltered relief. I didn’t leave the house at all for weeks after that. I just wanted to spend all my time with him. It wasn’t until he was at school that I started working again, then I saw him a little less. Especially when I had night shifts and he’d stay at his father’s.

Now Marko is Mr Outdoors with those three nauseatingly toothy blonde girls. I guess it’s much easier for men to reinvent themselves, abandon their families and start afresh.

I know I should leave it for him to do, but I make Samuel’s bed, collect the washing from the floor. That’s when I notice something. I stop, stoop down and pick up one of his anthropology textbooks, propping his dirty clothes against my hip. It’s from one of his classes. There’s a bookmark a third of the way through. I also find the empty packaging of a nasal swab. It must be from one of those rapid swab tests. I wonder when he did it?

I take his washing through to the bathroom where the washing machine is. His favourite white shirt is there in the pile. I take it to my nose to check it’s been worn, and I can smell him. I toss the shirt in with the rest and set the washing machine going.

Back outside, I sit with my phone in my hand and begin an afternoon of what I know will be scrolling through social media, tumbling headlong down the infinite rabbit hole. I’ve got a new follower, BlueRazoo11. I never get new followers, maybe it’s an old friend from school, or someone I’d worked with at the airport. I check out their profile, just photos on a farm. Some of dogs, or sheep, an old pond. Mostly animals, in static poses. Their eyes beady with the tell-tale sign of taxidermy.

I feel something brush against my ankle.

‘Hey, Moo,’ I say, looking down at our black and white cat. ‘You hungry?’ I reach and scratch between her ears. Moo laces herself around my legs.

Moo is eleven. Samuel named her. Taking one look when she was a kitten, my ten-year-old son said, ‘Can we call him Cow?’

‘We could. Any other ideas?’

‘Moo?’ he was laughing as he said it, then I started laughing and just like that we had a name.

I eye the time, it’s just after three now as the afternoon sun begins its descent toward the cityscape and the horizon beyond. I call Samuel again, holding the phone between my ear and shoulder as I pour cat biscuits into Moo’s bowl. Third time today I’ve called. This time it goes straight to voicemail.

Today he was going to study at the state library with her, Jessica. Which makes sense, given he took his backpack and his laptop. Then he was heading to see his father this afternoon. Not to stay with him, just to see him. That was the plan, but when I messaged Marko, he’d not heard from him either. There’s a distant alarm sounding, not there out in the city but inside. A hum of anxiety. I push it away but it’s still there throbbing in my chest. Something feels off.

I just wish Marko was more help. When he met Christine, she instantly replaced me, and a few y. . .