that. She’s a funny sort of blackie anyway, not an Abo’, comes from some funny place, New… somethin’, saw the stamp.”
The gin had hit her, she was coming apart and I pressed in for just this last scrap.
“New Guinea?” I prompted.
“No, I heard of New Guinea, Bert was there in the war. Never heard of this place, New…”
“Hebrides?”
“No, don’t think so.”
“Caledonia?”
“Yeah, that’s it, New Caledonia. Where’s that?”
I told her, thanked her for the drink and eased my way out. She slumped down in her chair muttering about a cruise.
Strictly speaking, it was a little too late for me to be making another call. I’d meant to give the Pali flat a quick once-over and be on my way, not get stuck drinking gin with a lady whose best days were behind her. Still, I’d learned a bit and this encouraged me to stick to my schedule and tackle Haines next. The traffic would hold him away from home for at least an hour after office hours, if he observed them. If he didn’t, then one time was about as good as another for what I had to do. It was a short drive but my shirt was sticking to my back and my throat was oily with the humidity and the almost neat gin when I turned into Haines’ street. It was a migrant and black neighbourhood which surprised me a little from what I’d heard of Haines, but perhaps he liked slumming. His flat was in a big Victorian town house, free standing with massive bay windows on both levels. Someone enterprising had made the building over into flats about thirty years ago and it was now in a fair way to return a thousand dollars a month. There was a small overgrown garden in front of the house and a narrow strip of bricked walkway down each side. At the back the yard had been whittled away to nothing to allow four cars to cuddle up against each other under a flat roofed carport. There were no cars at home.
I took this in from a slow cruise around the block formed by the street onto which the house fronted, two side streets and a lane at the back. I parked across the street and a hundred yards down, took the Smith amp; Wesson from its clip, dropped the keys under the driver’s seat and walked up towards the house. My car blended in nicely with the other bombs parked around it. Two black kids were thumping a tennis ball against a brick wall. I gave them a grin and they waited sceptically for me to pass. The iron gate was off its hinges and leaning against the fence just inside the garden. I went in and took the left hand path to the back of the house. It turned out to be the correct side; a set of concrete steps ran up to a landing and an art nouveau door with slanted wooden strips across it and a swan etched into the ripple glass. I coaxed the door open with a pick lock and slid inside leaving the door slightly ajar.
It was what the advertisements call a studio apartment — one big room with a kitchenette and a small bathroom off to one side. A three-quarter bed was tucked into the bay-window recess, and a couch and a couple of heavy armchairs were lined up against one wall with a big oak wardrobe facing them across the room. A low coffee table and a few cushions filled in some of the space and an old wooden filing cabinet stood in a corner away from the light. The rug left a border of polished wood around the room; it had been good and expensive fifty years ago and still had much of its charm.
In the kitchenette were the usual bachelor things and there was no one dead in the bathroom. There were no papers in the filing cabinet, just socks, underwear and folded shirts, all high quality. The drawers of the wardrobe held tie pins, cuff links, a couple of cigarette lighters and some dusty stationery. I flicked through the suits hanging in the long cupboards, four of them with custom labels, nothing in the pockets. Nothing either in the bathrobe, trench coat, duffel jacket or two sports coats. The shoes were in the bottom of one of the cupboards, formally aligned like waiters at a wedding breakfast. There were no bathing suits, no tennis sneakers, no camera, no records or cassettes. There was a small transistor radio, but no television and there wasn’t a book in the place.
I found the personal papers in a drawer in the base of the bed — on the side turned to the wall. They occupied one large manila envelope and it took me about two seconds to spread them out on the coffee table. They didn’t amount to much: five photographs and five pieces of paper. Unless he carried them around strapped to his thigh, this guy had made a point of not accumulating the usual pieces of plastic and paper that signpost our lives from the cradle to the grave. That in itself was interesting.
If they haven’t been kept with any special care, a collection of photographs is fairly easy to arrange from the earliest to the latest and so it was with this batch. The earliest picture, yellowed and a bit creased, was of a building I’d never seen before to my knowledge — a nasty red brick Victorian affair with a wall around it and the look of a women’s prison. Next oldest was a muzzy snapshot of a woman in the fashions of twenty years before. A young woman with flared skirts and plenty of lipstick — she looked vaguely familiar but it might just have been the clothes; my sister had looked much the same at the time. Number three, according to my layout, was a careful shot, taken with a good camera, of a landscaped garden — a beautiful job with rockeries and tiled paths and garden beds spreading out over what could have been an acre or more. The fourth picture was a booth print, passport size, of Ross Haines taken about five years ago. He had a dark bushy beard and was slimmer than he now looked; he was wearing a department store shirt and tie and a suit which, to judge from the cut of the shoulders and the lapels, had come off a fairly cheap hook. Haines wasn’t smiling or scowling or pulling any kind of face, just presenting his puss neutrally to the camera. The most recent of the photos could have been taken yesterday — it showed Ailsa Bercer Gutteridge, nee Sleeman. She wore light coloured slacks and a denim smock and her eyes were slightly crinkled up against smoke from a cigarette which she was holding rather stiffly in front of her. She looked a bit surprised, a bit off guard, but she wasn’t doing anything she shouldn’t unless you disapprove of smoking.
The documents, all but one, dated themselves. There was an extract of birth to the effect that Ross Haines had been born on 8 May 1953 in Adelaide, South Australia. It was only an extract so no parents’ names appeared. There were two references from employers dated October 1970 and November 1971, both letterheads were of plant nurseries and garden suppliers and landscapes in Adelaide. They established the solid credentials and serviceable talents of Ross Haines in this line of work. The other dated document was a diploma from a Sydney business college. It detailed the creditable performances of Haines at typing, shorthand and commercial principles and practice. A map of the Pacific Ocean completed the personal papers of Ross Haines. It folded four times, down to the size of a ladies’ handkerchief. I opened it out. There were no marks, no circles, no pin-pricks; at that scale most of the islands were dots or straggly shapes like ink-blots in a vast and trackless sea.
I couldn’t make much of this very selective preservation of the past. I studied the photographs of the building and the women closely so as to recognise the originals if I ever saw them and then put the whole lot back in the envelope and the drawer just as I’d found them.
This piece of illegality had taken longer than I’d expected, over half an hour, and I felt an itch at the back of my neck that told me it was high time to go. I went out onto the landing and pulled the door shut behind me. I froze as I heard a car engine being cut under the car port twenty feet away. A door slammed and leather-soled shoes started hitting the bricks. I risked a look down and saw a short, heavy-set man with a head as bald as an egg move briskly down the path and turn into the doorway of the front flat on the ground floor. I let out a stale, sour breath and went down the steps and out through the spaces in the car port. Flat 1’s space was taken up by a red MG sports model with wire wheels and kerb feelers. I sneered at it and walked through the lane and up the street to where the Falcon stood with its rust patches and bald tyres gleaming in the late afternoon light.
I had just enough time to try a long shot which would round off the day’s work. I drove against the flow of traffic, which was thick and moving as slow as a senile snail, across to the University. I arrived when the day students were pulling out and just before the evening sloggers took up all the space. I got a parking place near the east gates and strolled across the lawn to the main library. I had once done a little research into architecture when I was investigating an insurance fraud on a fire in a Victorian hotel and I remembered where the architecture section was in the library. I looked along the rows until I found Chiswick’s two volumes on The Public Buildings of South Australia. The book had been very expensive when it was published thirty years before and the quality of its photographs was excellent. It was meticulously indexed and it only took a few minutes to find out that the building of which Haines had kept a picture wasn’t a prison. Another few minutes showed that it wasn’t a school. Perhaps it was a combination of the two though: I found it on page 215 of the second volume, the picture was taken from a slightly different angle but it was undoubtedly the same forbidding edifice — St Christopher’s Boys Orphanage. The short history of the building wasn’t interesting but I read it through just the same. I put the books back and left the library.
