‘Flat one’s on the ground, right on ground level. No stairs or anything. You just walk in from the courtyard. Bugger all view, no balcony, smaller than the others if anything.’
He stopped again and it seemed like the time for me to say something. ‘Do the tenants have leases?’
‘What? Oh, no. Month to month. The place’s got a few plumbing problems, roof’s not too good. The rent’s reasonable to take account of that. I wasn’t rushing anybody. When they came vacant I just let them lie. I would’ve made some arrangements for anyone who was left when I wanted to get moving. I’ve got other places. Wouldn’t have been any problem.’
I nodded, but he was going to need prompting. ‘What about flat one, Mr Wise? What’s the story?”
He sighed and stopped looking through the dirty glass. Another sigh and a rub of his hard jaw and he was ready to talk. ‘That’s the one Carmel was using. She had a TV set there and her video collection.’
‘Collection?’
‘Yes. Old movies mostly. Foreign, a lot of them. It was her hobby as well as her work. She had a flat in Randwick but I suppose the videos took up too much space. Look, I’m not saying she was normal, but she wasn’t a freak. She…’
I clicked my tongue the way you do to soothe an angry dog. ‘Okay, okay.’
He fought for control and got it. ‘Right. Anyway, she asked me if she could use the flat and I said okay. Christ, I wish…’
‘I don’t understand. This flat-what about it?’
‘It’s been vacant the whole time I’ve had the building.’
‘Well, no difficulty then.’
‘I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have let her use it and I meant to do something about it. I never did. Busy. You know how it is?’
‘I’m not with you,’ I said. ‘Sounds like you didn’t need the rent.’
‘That’s the point. The rent’s been paid, on the knocker, every fortnight. Regular as clockwork and no-one ever spent a night there. Not for three years.’
2
I crossed the courtyard, ducking my head to avoid a plane tree branch, and pushed open the glass door that led to the small lobby and the stairway of the Greenwich Apartments. The lobby was dark, illuminated only by the light coming in from the courtyard through the door and the big window beside it. The floor was a concrete slab covered with lino tiles; there were no discernible smells. The letterboxes were set under the window. All six had light padlocks on the inside; none carried a name tag. The door to flat one was right in front of me, tucked in below the stairs, and I used the key Leo Wise had given me to open it.
I put my hand on the wall where a light switch should be and found it. The room I was in was small and made smaller by the stacks of video cassettes. They were in tiers on top of the TV set, in and on boxes, spilling over from collapsed piles into jumbled heaps on the carpet. A director’s chair with red canvas seat and backing was lined up in front of the television set. There were cassettes on it as well. A VCR was on the floor beside the TV and a telephone sat on top of a pile of movies next to it.
I skirted around the plastic and cardboard boxes and checked the other rooms-small bedroom, single bed, chest of drawers, built-in wardrobe (empty), more video cassettes, dozens of them, in and out of their boxes, all over the bed and around it on the floor. Kitchen-basic fittings, bar fridge, cupboards empty apart from China tea, coffee (instant) and sugar. Bathroom-no bath, just a shower, hand-basin and toilet. Soap, towel, toilet-paper. No videos in the bathroom or kitchen. There were small windows in each room. Those from the bathroom and kitchen looked out into a kind of well, cluttered with plumbing and ventilation ducts, between this building and the next.
The window in the front room was covered with an old Holland blind. Suddenly, the light bulb hanging from the ceiling blew and the room went dark. I lifted the blind and felt the dry, old fabric crack and tear as it moved. It hadn’t been lifted for a long time. Light from the courtyard where Carmel Wise had died seeped into the room.
I went into the bathroom, removed the bulb from the light fitting there and replaced the blown one in the front room. I took the boxes off the director’s chair and sat down facing the TV. I sniffed the air. Dry, the flat didn’t have any problems with damp which was no doubt good for the videos. No recent cooking or smoking but no recently opened windows either. No radio, no stereo, no old-time dance records. It looked as if all anyone had ever done in this place was watch the box, drink China tea and instant coffee and maybe talk on the telephone. It made no sense, there had to be more.
I got up and checked the rooms again. It was the cassettes that had thrown me off. Bright covers and dull; Gothic script and computer print; VHS, Super, Stereo 2000. They took all the attention. They made the mind wander off onto thoughts of Hollywood and J. Arthur Rank. But under the bed, down there with the dust and fluff, were three large, strapped-up and locked-tight suitcases. I dragged them out.
‘If you’re full of videos,’ I said to them, ‘I’m off the case.’ It was a joke of a sort, better than no joke at all and I sniggered. The place was getting to me; the plastic jumble offended my orderly mind. I liked the suitcases a lot better. I even liked them being locked. Professional skills to be called into play. Hardy earns his dough again.
Two of the suitcases were matched, the third was the odd man out-similar in size, good quality leather, slightly different in style. I started with that. The lock yielded easily to a small blade on my pocket knife. In Beirut you’d have to think about booby traps. This wasn’t Beirut. I flipped open the lid and the mass of clothes and papers and books lifted as the pressure came off. I put the clothes-a man’s jacket, several pairs of trousers, a couple of sweaters and shirts, socks, underwear, sandals and shoes-aside and looked at the other stuff. There were a couple of paper-back novels, some magazines, a pocket-sized spiral-bound notebook like my own, bills and receipts, bus and train tickets, the stubs of movie tickets, supermarket checkout dockets. The detritus of a modern city life but, as far as I could tell from a quick look, nothing with a name on it. There were also two fat manila envelopes, quarto size, filled with black and white photographs and negatives. Another manila envelope bulged with toothpaste, a toothbrush, shaving cream and a couple of disposable razors.
I examined the clothing. It would have fitted a man two inches smaller than me, say around five foot ten, and about a stone lighter, around eleven stone. It was all Off the rack stuff, medium quality, worn but not worn out. There were no name tags, no laundry marks, and there was nothing in any of the pockets.
The matched cases would have been tougher to open; the locks were better made, with tricky sliding covers on them. But the keys were tied to the handles with light string. The first one I opened was full of women’s clothes and shoes; the second contained more clothes plus a couple of handbags and purses. There were toilet articles, makeup, tampons, hairpins and all the other things that make a woman’s bathroom cupboard different from a man’s. The clothes were better quality than the man’s; they had been worn less frequently and were better cared for. They were also more exotic.
I called them Mr and Mrs Greenwich in my imagination. Mr G. had nothing you couldn’t buy and wear in Sydney; Mrs G. had some Thai silk scarves, some embroidered and beaded things that looked foreign, and a pale blue sari.
I got cramped squatting on the floor in the bedroom so I carried the handbags and purses and all the man’s personal things out to the kitchen and put them on the table. The water was running and the gas was connected. Instant coffee, Cliff? Why not? Black? Fine. I sipped the coffee and dumped the contents of the purses out on the table. The woman was Mrs Greenwich no longer. She was Tania Hester Bourke, born Sydney, 6 May 1950, 168 centimetres tall, 55 kilos, brown hair, brown eyes, no visible scars. She had been licensed to drive in the state of New South Wales in 1980, had a Bankcard and an American Express card as befitted an Air Pacific hostess, and went to a dentist in Macquarie Street. All this came from the first and most obvious things I poked through. If I’d really dug I could probably have got to her HSC results and her first Cosmo subscription. There was a passport, cheque books, bank statements, parking tickets, the lot.
The coffee was foul. I emptied it into the sink and spread out a batch of the photographs. About half of the selection showed houses, boats and beaches without people-empty, deserted scenes probably caught in the early
