Mr. Laurie admitted to having a bad temper, but he denied any involvement, turning the court’s attention back to where Mr. Moriarty was last seen: The Pink Panther. 
 
 Mr. Simpson no longer works at the pub. Mr. Sharpe said he was fired a week before the coroner’s inquest — a few days before I arrived to find his room there a mess of dirty clothes and empty beer cans. 
 
 He appeared to have moved on and has since been replaced by someone else, keeping Larrimah’s population steady at 11. It used to be 12. 
 
 Around the bar, patrons still talk about Mr. Moriarty’s disappearance. 
 
 “Church” on Sundays has resumed, but without the charm Mr. Moriarty used to bring to it. Because he had no family in Australia, the public trustee now controls his property. To keep an eye on anything that might look suspicious, his home has been fitted with security cameras, and it’s flanked by a large missing person sign. 
 
 It includes a picture of Mr. Moriarty, smiling, with a question many in town are still asking: “What happened to Paddy?” ||||| Paddy Moriarty inquest: Larrimah local told 'don't do anything stupid' after argument 
 
 Updated 
 
 Fran Hodgetts, owner of the Larrimah tea house, has told an inquest into the disappearance of Paddy Moriarty that she told a companion "not to do anything stupid" after he had an argument with Mr Moriarty days before his disappearance. 
 
 Mr Moriarty, 70, was last seen leaving the local pub on December 16, 2017. 
 
 Yesterday, an inquest into his suspected death heard Mr Moriarty was a happy-go-lucky man but he had an ongoing dispute with Ms Hodgetts, whose tea house was across from Mr Moriarty's property on the Stuart Highway. 
 
 Witnesses told yesterday's hearing the pair detested each other, and would frequently hurl abuse at one another. 
 
 On Friday she told the inquest the pair had been "neighbourly", but things turned sour when Mr Moriarty stole her sun umbrella in 2010, although police did not find evidence that this happened. 
 
 'He was angry' 
 
 Ms Hodgetts said Mr Moriarty then began to scare her customers away from the tea house. 
 
 "He started abusing my customers, threatening tourists and scaring them away from [my] business," she said. 
 
 Ms Hodgetts testified that "she'd been to hell and back" over the next 10 years, with a series of accusations of property damage and theft. 
 
 "I've never abused him and I've done nothing for what he did to me… Years ago I went crook at him, once," she said. 
 
 Four days before Mr Moriarty's disappearance, Ms Hodgetts accused him of dragging a dead kangaroo over to her property, but denied she retaliated. 
 
 "I swear to god, I never, I couldn't move a kangaroo," she said. 
 
 The following day, the inquest heard her companion, Owen Laurie, got into an argument with Mr Moriarty over their dogs. 
 
 "I told him 'don't do anything stupid'," Ms Hodgetts told the inquest. 
 
 "Yeah he was angry, because of the things that have happened in the past." 
 
 She told the court Mr Laurie had said "there's going to be trouble" on the day of the argument about the dogs. 
 
 "And I said, 'don't do anything stupid … I don't want to come back and see you in jail'," she said. 
 
 Mr Laurie has denied the argument was aggressive on either side and described Ms Hodgetts' account as "embellishment". 
 
 "I wasn't angry or aggressive about it," he told the inquest. 
 
 Mr Laurie told the inquest he was joking when had earlier told Ms Hodgetts "if anyone touches my plants, it'll be the first murder in Larrimah". 
 
 "I had no intention of murdering anyone over a garden," he told coroner Greg Cavanagh. 
 
 "People have been murdered for a lot less, sir," Mr Cavanagh said. 
 
 Mr Moriarty was last seen on his quad bike, leaving the Pink Panther about 6:00pm, and half an hour later Mr Laurie made two phone calls from a public phone box, the inquest heard. 
 
 Counsel assisting the coroner, Kelvin Currie, suggested to Mr Laurie that must have seen Mr Moriarty on his quad bike from the phone box, but Mr Laurie denied he saw him. 
 
 Ms Hodgetts broke down in the witness box when denying she was lying about her testimony, and said neither she nor Mr Laurie knew anything about Mr Moriarty's disappearance. 
 
 The inquest was told Mr Moriarty was a creature of habit, and when he did not turn up at the pub one day, and his home appeared as though he had never left it, virtually everybody in the community thought something was amiss. 
 
 An extensive search has failed to uncover any sign of Mr Moriarty's whereabouts, or that of his dog. 
 
 Almost the entire population of Larrimah, which has around 12 residents, were called as witnesses at the inquest. 
 
 The inquest was due to finish on Friday but has now been adjourned to a later date. 
 
 Topics: missing-person, community-and-society, police, law-crime-and-justice, katherine-0850 
 
 First posted ||||| Paddy Moriarty vanished in December from Larrimah. Now the tiny town’s sharp divisions are in the nation’s spotlight 
 
 It was an appallingly hot October day in 2016 when I stood in Larrimah’s small bush cemetery with Paddy Moriarty. The temperature was stretching for 40C and the flies were inexhaustible. I was marinating in my sweat as Paddy and his mate of 15 years, Barry Sharpe, erected a tombstone on the grave of another friend, the writer Andrew McMillan. There were just four graves there then: Andrew’s, a couple of station owners and an Overland Telegraph worker who died in 1899. None of us could have known that Paddy’s grave would be the next to join them. That is, it will be if his body is ever found. 
 
 Missing German tourist: second body found in remote Northern Territory Read more 
 
 Paddy, a 70-year-old smiley moustachioed fellow, disappeared from the red dusty no-horse town of Larrimah in the Northern Territory on 16 December 2017. That day he’d been drinking at the Pink Panther hotel before heading home for dinner. Police say his house was in order, the date crossed off the calendar, his bed made and his dinner on the table ready to be heated up. His signature hat, which he was never without, was on the table, alongside his keycard and his reading glasses. His kelpie cross Kellie is also missing. 
 
 Detective Sergeant Matt Allen, who is in charge of the case, says extensive land and air searches of the area have uncovered nothing, the timeframe for survival has expired and Paddy’s disappearance is being treated as suspicious. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paddy Moriarty and Barry Sharpe at the grave of writer Andrew McMillan at a little bush cemetery in Larrimah. Photograph: Kylie Stevenson for the Guardian 
 
 “We don’t expect Paddy will be found alive,” he says. 
 
 Unusual is often the usual in Larrimah. It’s the kind of place where you might find a wild donkey at your back door or a death adder in your bed. A place where neighbourhood disputes sometimes result in a wallaby carcass being thrown into a person’s front yard or one’s pet peacocks being fed to the resident croc. 
 
 So when I first heard one of the town’s handful of residents was missing, it struck me as strange, but not entirely out of the realm of normal for that odd little outback town where I once spent two weeks trying to bash out a novel. When I heard the missing person was Paddy, and a week later he still hadn’t been found, it was a little more disquieting. 
 
 I had a drink with Paddy most days during my time in Larrimah. We chatted about his freezing cold, poverty-stricken life in Ireland, about how he came to Australia on the Fairstar as a young fellow and went to work on stations across the north. His 16-year-old border collie Rover was always by his side – the pair of them appeared on the cover of the book Every Man and His Dog. I heard his beloved pet passed away a few months after I left. 
 
 Paddy was a creature of habit. He’d turn up at the pub in the morning to help out around the premises, cleaning the toilet block or mowing the lawns before melting into a bar stool where he’d drink eight XXXX Golds, then hoist Rover on to his quad bike and head home. 
 
 Sunday was “church”, where he and publican Barry Sharpe would sit silently in front of the television, sipping beer, catching up on the latest in rural news. “Church” is ABC’s Landline. 
 
 “That was our little ritual of a Sunday,” says Barry. “We’d get here before Landline and the hymns would be on, so we called it church. It was our little joke.” 
 
 Karen Rayner managed the pub for two years and saw Paddy almost every day. They’d watch cooking shows together and whenever she responded to any of his yarns with incredulity he’d reply “true word”. 
 
 He was a neat and tidy person, she says. He was honest, pedantic about paying his bills on time, and if he planned on going somewhere, he’d let them know, often months in advance. 
 
 “I want people to know he was a good bloke,” she says. 
 
 Barry describes him as a gentleman, “always cheerful and laughing”. 
 
 “He was the type of bloke you wouldn’t think would have an enemy in the world,” he says. 
 
 But both Karen and Barry admit that while most people did love Paddy, he wasn’t without detractors. In fact, no one in Larrimah is universally liked by the rest of the town’s residents. 
 
 The population hovers around 10, and that small number is split into factions. Some neighbours have ignored one another for more than a decade, others occasionally yell abuse at each other. 
 
 At the height of Larrimah’s long-running civil war, two rival progress associations existed, a fight erupted over stolen recipes for buffalo pie and yes, Barry confirms, those peacocks were fed to the pet croc in an act of revenge. 
 
 “There have been a lot of problems in that community and people who don’t speak to each other,” Allen says. “But just because people argue doesn’t mean they’ve gone out and killed him.” 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Larrimah Pink Panther Hotel. Photograph: Kylie Stevenson for the Guardian 
 
 And even though the town’s history doesn’t paint Larrimah as a glowing civic example, Paddy’s disappearance has showed that strong mateship sits alongside the animosity. In a big city would anyone notice if a 70-year-old man wasn’t seen for a few days? Here, Barry noticed his absence immediately when he failed to turn up to “church”. 
 
 “I thought he might be crook so I went to check on him, and when he wasn’t there I thought maybe he’d gone to a mate’s place for the day,” Barry says. “But when he didn’t turn up the day after that, I went and reported it to police.” 
 
 Although he doesn’t expect Paddy is still alive, Allen says they haven’t given up. Police are still appealing for any passersby who might have seen anything and have put a call out for anyone who might have come across Paddy’s dog, Kellie. 
 
 “We’re never going to stop looking for Paddy and Kellie,” he says. “However long it takes, whatever it takes.” 
 
 And what happens when such a small town is down one man? How do the other residents get on with life? 
 
 Body found of US tourist who went missing on Larapinta Trail Read more 
 
 Karen says Paddy’s disappearance has left “an awkward hole here”; Barry describes it as “a big vacuum in our lives”. 
 
 They can’t entirely ignore the flecks of hope that Paddy and Kellie might one day emerge from the red dust, but they know in all likelihood they’ll be back at the little bush cemetery to farewell him. 
 
 “Of course we have hope he might be alive,” Karen said. “We don’t want to have a service just in case. We can’t say goodbye to Paddy, we can’t give him a service. We are stuck in the middle.” 
 
 • Kylie Stevenson was the recipient of the inaugural Andrew McMillan Writers’ Retreat held in Larrimah 
 
 • On 8 February 2017, this article was amended to correct the year the author was in Larrimah
– Everyone in the town of Larrimah is under investigation for the disappearance of Paddy Moriarty—and that means all 11 people. Authorities are poking around this dusty Australian pitstop after Moriarty, a day laborer, vanished along with his dog one night last December, the New York Times reports. Top suspects in the presumed homicide include a pie-maker Moriarty hated, a gardener he argued with, and a bartender with a nasty tongue. "He started abusing my customers, threatening tourists and scaring them away from [my] business," said meat-pie cook Fran Hodgetts at an inquest last month, per ABC News Australia. Moriarty, 70, lived across from her Tea House eatery and got upset when her customers parked on his land. Like all players in this drama, 75-year-old Hodgetts denies guilt—but says she warned her burly gardener, Owen Laurie, "not to do anything stupid" after he argued with Moriarty about his barking dog three days before the disappearance. Laurie, 71, warned Moriarity to quiet the dog "or I'll shut it up for you," per inquest testimony. Then there's former bartender Richard Simpson, one of the last residents to see Moriarty, who criticized the man but calls people who suspect Simpson "goddamn fools." Jokes are circulating about Moriarty ending up in Hodgetts' meat pies, or fed to a hefty crocodile kept in town, but so far investigators appear stumped. "There have been a lot of problems in that community," the detective in charge tells the Guardian. "But just because people argue doesn't mean they've gone out and killed him."