‘Are you a real estate agent?’ he asked.
‘No, I’m not. Can you tell me who you are?’
‘My card. I came to ask you what you were doing here.’
He was a short man, a little overweight, bright-eyed and balding, casually dressed in expensive clothes.
‘Pleased to meet you, Adrian,’ Harrigan said, reading from the card that announced the bearer, an Adrian Mellish, to be a financial consultant. He offered his own card. ‘Paul Harrigan. Can I ask you why you have an interest in this place?’
‘Your name’s familiar,’ Mellish replied. ‘Weren’t you once a policeman? I seem to remember reading in the newspapers…Aren’t you a private investigator now?’
‘Not exactly. I’m a security consultant. If you want to know more about me, you can check my website. You didn’t answer my question.’
‘Our interest is that we live across the road,’ Mellish said. ‘We’ve been wishing ever since Amelie retired that this property would be sold and someone would do something with it. It’s been empty for at least fifteen years. One or two people have been looking at it lately. We were hoping that something might actually be happening.’
‘Do you know who these people were?’
‘No, not at all. You’re the first one I’ve spoken to.’
‘This was Dr Amelie Santos’s surgery, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. Did you know her?’
‘Only by reputation,’ Harrigan said. ‘It seems an out of the way place for a doctor’s surgery. Can you tell me anything about her?’
‘Actually Amelie was very successful. People trusted her and they came to her. We used to go to her and take our children. She was quite wonderful with children. But she was a very private woman. We always invited her over for Christmas drinks but she didn’t always come. I know she died about four years ago. There was an obituary in the paper. But still nothing’s happened.’
‘You’ve been here for a while,’ Harrigan said.
‘Helen and I moved into this street when we were first married. Best thing we ever did.’
‘How long has the fence been here?’
‘A long time. It went up when Amelie retired.’
‘She put the fence up?’
‘Oh, yes. She came and saw us. Apologised for the inconvenience, that sort of thing. At the time, she said it was just temporary. She didn’t want the place vandalised while it was empty. But once she retired, she never came back here. I don’t think she could bear to sell it. She’d spent so much of her life here. She left it in limbo and it’s been that way ever since.’
‘Addie.’
Across the road, Harrigan saw a thin middle-aged woman dressed in white. She was waving to her husband.
‘Have to go,’ he said. ‘A grandchild’s birthday party.’
‘Have a nice time,’ Harrigan said.
Mellish hesitated. ‘What
‘Just looking the place over.’
He glanced at the backpack Harrigan had over his shoulder. ‘You know, Helen and I…we’ve lived here for a long time. It’s a lovely suburb, really.’
‘Yes.’
‘But once or twice we’ve wondered if there’ve been people over here. At night.’
‘Did you ever report anything?’ Harrigan asked.
‘I did once. Just a month ago. We heard a scream, or we thought we did. I suppose it could have been in the park. I rang the police the next day but they just sent their community liaison officer around to patronise us.’ He looked at Harrigan, an odd expression on his face. ‘We’ve both really grown to wish this building wasn’t here. Most of the time, we ignore it. I don’t think anything would make
Harrigan watched them back out of the driveway in a Volvo. Mellish leaned out of the window to call to him. ‘We’ll be gone for a while. You can park your car in our driveway if you like. Get you off the street.’ They both gave him a wave and drove away.
Harrigan decided he would move his car, and parked it in the Mellishes’ lengthy driveway, which was overhung with exotic trees, their leaves turning gold in the autumn. A pervasive sense of solitude settled on the street. He walked down to the furthest end of the cyclone fence and saw a track leading into the national park. He followed it down to the park boundary and looked along the line of the fence. Judging by the state of the vegetation, few people walked along here. About halfway along, he found what Mellish had sent him to find: a makeshift if secure gate cut into the fence. He took bolt cutters out of his backpack and went to work.
Eventually, he had the gate open. When he left he could put it back in place without it appearing to have been damaged. Before he went inside, he turned to look at what was behind him. There was no path as such down into the national park, just a curtain of trees. Looking in the direction of the road, the house stood as a barrier. No one would see what was going on down here from up there.
He climbed through the gateway and walked around to the front of the house, startling two white-cheeked eastern rosellas that flew up out of the long grass. The exterior was a dirty white stucco with columns on either side of the front door. The windows were dirty and cracked, the window frames rotten. The paint on the front door was peeling. Although the lock was broken, the door itself seemed secure. He shook it; most likely it had been nailed shut on the inside.
There was a separate garage facing a concreted parking area where the grass had grown up through the cracks. The roller door opened for him but there was nothing inside other than the usual rubbish found in most abandoned garages. He looked up at the road. The trees surrounding the property provided a screen from the other houses in the street. This and the fall of the land deepened his sense of isolation.
He walked around to the back of the house again. The building was more compact than it had first appeared. Two rusted metal rubbish bins stood by the back door. He checked them and found they were empty. He was still armed; he took his gun out of its holster and looked behind him. No one was there. He tried the back door. It was locked. He looked around in the intense quiet and then shot out the lock. The cracks brought a deeper silence, a cessation of bird calls. They would echo across the suburb and those who heard them would wonder where they had come from. Let’s see if they bring anyone here.
He pushed the door open. It wedged at an angle against the floor. He stood on the threshold, looking both forward and back. Outside, there was no one but him; looking inside, the room was dark. He took his torch out of his backpack, illuminating what had once been a simple kitchen. The floor and all the surfaces were thickly covered with dirt, the ceiling corners heavy with cobwebs. There was no sign that anyone was there. He stepped inside. It was warm and the air smelled strongly of mould and decay. Following the powerful beam of his torch, he walked past rooms that opened on either side of the hallway. One had been a bathroom, another possibly a dispensary. The floorboards were shaky under his feet and there were signs of water damage where the rain had got in. In any number of places, the plaster had fallen from the ceiling to the floor to lie in heaps on rotting carpet. The whole house was derelict.
He reached what had been the waiting room, revealed under his torch beam. Chairs sat in a line in front of a window covered by net curtains so thick with dirt they were black. Insect nests appeared as dark clumps in the rotting fabric. In the bright afternoon sun, the room was in darkness. His eyes were growing used to his surroundings but in the mass of shadows, he still needed the torch to see the detail of what was around him. The sound of something scrabbling startled him. He looked around quickly but the torchlight revealed only a possum. In what was otherwise silence, he felt certain there was no other living person here besides himself.
On the opposite wall the torch beam showed a long, narrow, aged photographic print that might have come from Amelie Santos’s long-ago university days:
