My mind teemed with them. When had she last seen or heard of Tania Bourke? Where was the photograph taken? Who were the other people? Who was the photographer? ‘Two,’ I said.
‘You promise?’ she breathed, scarcely audibly.
‘Yes.’ Shitty, very shitty.
‘All right.’
‘Who was the photographer?’
‘Joe Agnew took the picture. That’s one.’
‘A-g-n-e-w?’ I spelled the name.
‘Yes.’
‘What’s Darcy afraid of? Why the guy with the keys and the escort home for you and everything.’
‘He’s not afraid. You should be.’
‘What did he say to you after I left?’
‘That’s three.’ The phone clicked in my ear.
It was very late and I was tired. The car was reluctant to start, putting me in a bad temper which wasn’t improved on New South Head Road by the early hours traffic-speeding Alfas and weaving Jags and not a cop in sight. I should have felt better about the night’s work. Darcy was involved in something heavy and there was a connection through him to the Greenwich Apartments via Tania Bourke. Despite my promise, Jackie George could be a useful source of further information. And I had a name. All I had to do now was find what blue-shirted organisation Joe Agnew belonged to and I was on the trail. But the sluggish car and the tiredness and the fear in Jackie’s voice made me sour. It made me think of how many different kinds of people wore blue shirts and how hard it might be to trace the photographer if he’d changed his name from something else, like Spiro did. And that was really depressing-the last I ‘d heard of Spiro Agnew was that he was rich and happy, like his former boss, advising, consulting and not admitting that he’d ever done anything wrong.
10
Home around 3 a.m. The cat was sitting out in front of the house with an accusing look on its face. It stalked into the house ahead of me and went up the stairs. The house was quiet and the only light showing was in the kitchen; an anglepoise lamp burned on the bench and a letter from Helen sat in the circle of light:
Dear Cliff,
Woke up when you left and couldn’t get back to sleep. Great movie- Bermagui, I mean. Gone for a drive and a think. I might drop in on Ruth at Balmoral and have an early breakfast with her at Mischa’s. I will, in fact. At 7.30, say. Might see you? If not, later in the day. love,
Helen
Ruth, a cousin of Helen’s, had a flat overlooking Balmoral Beach. She was a clothes designer and the only woman I’d ever met who liked to drink white wine at breakfast. This was an old habit of mine which I gave up when I found that having a clear head until 6 p.m. wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to you. Breakfast at Mischa’s was one of the good Sydney things to do-I’d only tried it once but I could taste the scrambled eggs and the coffee that came from a bottomless pot. But my chances of making it were zero and I had the feeling that I wasn’t really welcome anyway. I followed the cat upstairs and didn’t even have the strength to kick it off the bed.
I dreamed that Helen took flat one in the Greenwich Apartments. I was on stake-out, camped in a tent in the courtyard around the clock, but couldn’t go inside. Very frustrating. Then she was living in Ruth’s flat at Balmoral. I had to climb hundreds of steps up from the beach and the steps were made of sand and kept crumbling under my feet. Also frustrating, and sweaty besides.
I woke up around eleven when the cat licked my face. I rolled out, fed the cat, cleaned myself up and looked at the morning paper while I drank coffee very inferior to the stuff Helen would have had at Mischa’s. ‘Talking up’ seemed to be the key phrase; everybody was talking up something-the economy, Australian sport, the dollar. Trouble was, nobody seemed to be doing anything, just talking.
The cat wanted to go out; it wouldn’t come back until it wanted more food and somewhere warm to sleep. Great ecological niches, cats have carved out. I got my notebook and looked through my information and expenses so far. That’s one of the rules that has to be observed from time to time-check whether results and expenses are in line. This time, it was hard to say. There were threads hanging off the case. The usual procedure is to pull the threads but this time I had a few too many to pull and I didn’t know which way they’d run. Perhaps I’m getting conservative or maybe it’s just these clear-headed mornings-I decided to try the institutions first.
The real estate agent had been alerted by Wise that I would call, but he wouldn’t say anything over the phone. I drove to Newtown and virtually wasted my time. He wouldn’t say a lot over his desk either, mainly because he didn’t have much to say. Mr Bushell was a bald man with glasses and a stammer. It was hard to imagine him high-pressuring anybody; maybe people bought houses from him because they felt sorry for him. He looked up from the thin file his secretary had brought in.
‘Leased in 1981,’ he said. ‘Ran its course and then she rented month to month.’
‘She?’
‘Ms Tania Bourke,’ he read.
‘One name only? No mention of a tenant, no sublet?’
He shook his head. ‘We don’t allow sub-letting. A boarder would be her business.’
‘And the rent was paid how?’
‘The way it is still being paid, directly from a bank. We’re holding the receipts as we were instructed to do in… ah… 1982.’
‘Must be quite a pile of ‘em’.
He smiled and felt the skin on top of his head. ‘Yes.’
‘Does the money come from Ms Bourke’s account?”
‘I don’t know. The draft we get just has an account number on it.’
‘Which is?’ I had the notebook out.
‘S457L’
‘And the bank?’
‘Federation Bank.’
‘Didn’t you find this rather unusual, Mr Bushell? Two years and no contact between you and the tenant?’
He smiled again but this time he accompanied the smile with an adjustment of the glasses and left his skull alone. ‘I’d call it ideal. No complaints, no requests for renovation, no late payment.’
‘You’re all heart.’
‘It would have been awkward if Mr Wise had increased the rent, but he never did.’
I stood and put the notebook away. I was suddenly glad I was a home owner, after a fashion, and not a renter. He went with me politely to the door. ‘Mr Bushell,’ I said, ‘have you seen a woman named Helen Broadway in the last day or so? Looking for a flat or a small house?’
‘No. To buy?’
‘Could be.’
‘I have a lovely place in Erskineville.’
I’d heard of lovely places in Erskineville-you have to walk along the railway tracks to reach them and use scuba gear to get into the kitchen. ‘Thanks Mr Bushell. I’ll let you know.’
Newtown still has a few pubs that remind me of the old days, when people weren’t looking forward to the production of the cholesterol self-monitoring kit and checking the ph level before buying shampoo. As I walked along King Street, looking for one of these pubs, I remembered a Christmas lunch when an uncle of mine, the one who’d made all the money running the two-up at Tobruk, leant back in his chair and said to another uncle, the one who’d told me about getting orders to put Mills bombs in the pockets of German prisoners and refusing to do it: ‘Great smoke, Neil, and a good beer.’ They were both still alive, thanks to pacemakers and bypasses, while my teetotal father who’d worked in a munitions factory for most of the war, was long dead. ‘Them’s the skids’, as the
