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 younger fry say.
I found the pub, ordered a light beer and a sandwich and phoned the head office of the bank. Mr Carstairs would see me at 3 p.m. I ate and drank; I knew what Uncle Neil would think of the light beer-he’d cut railway sleepers for a living during the Depression and managed municipal swimming pools after the war. He probably wouldn’t think much of Mr Carstairs either.
I put the Falcon in a car park in Kent Street and walked the couple of blocks to Martin Place. I had a newspaper clipping pinned up on a board at home that showed the route of the proposed monorail to run people between the Darling Harbour development and the city. I tried to imagine it, thin and noiseless on its slender pillars above Pitt Street, and I couldn’t. I also couldn’t decide whether I was for or against it. Not that it mattered; if the people who liked phrases such as ‘high speed people mover’ got their way we’d get the monorail and the citizens would just have to live with it. Like always.
I’d kept Leo Wise’s cheque, drawn on the Federation Bank although not the head office, for just this purpose. Mr Carstairs of Customer Services looked at it and then at me with a fraction more interest. He was a thin, dark man who looked a lot like photographs of the young T. S. Eliot in a biography Helen was presently reading.
‘Making inquiries for Mr Wise. Yes, I see.’
I read the number of the account from my notes and looked inquiringly at Mr Carstairs, who looked inquiringly back. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘What exactly are you asking?’
‘Whose account is this?’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that.’ He took off his gold-rimmed spectacles and massaged the place on his nose where they sat. I wondered if T. S. Eliot did the same in between stanzas of The Wasteland.
‘Why is that? We’re talking about a few hundred dollars a month,’ I said.
‘Yes. Over several years, I understand. That is a considerable sum of money.’
Bankers are selective about what constitutes a considerable sum of money-they never use it when it’s yours-say, when they make an accounting error. I held up Wise’s cheque. ‘It goes to Mr Wise eventually, surely as his agent…’
He shook his head. ‘The bank cannot reveal such details.’
‘What would it take to get them?’
‘A Federal policeman might gain access with the right court order. Might.’
Suddenly, I got angry. Maybe it was the dreams, maybe the phony Swedish decor, maybe my dislike of T. S. Eliot. ‘Look,’ I said sharply. ‘Did you know Mr Wise’s daughter was gunned down in Kings Cross a couple of days ago?’
He looked shocked. ‘No.’
‘Yes. He’d be a big customer of yours, wouldn’t he-Wise? I’ve seen his office. It’s a bloody sight more impressive than this.’
‘There’s no need to be offensive.’
‘Yes, there is. A twenty-year-old girl is dead and her father wants to know why. He’s upset, understand? He wants to cut corners. He’s not in a mood to be pissed around.’
Mr Carstairs arranged paper clips in front of him on his spotless white blotter. ‘I see.’
‘You’re good at seeing. How are you at doing?’ I read out the number again. ‘Whose account is that?’
‘I’d have to ask
‘Don’t ask anyone. Do something off your own bat for once.’ I had him wavering and it was time to sweeten the pill. ‘Look, Mr Carstairs, Leo Wise probably has lunch with some of your directors at City Tatts. If you help me I’ll see that those directors learn from a satisfied customer that you’re a man of judgement.’
His eyes slid sideways to his desk computer. ‘What was that number again?’
I told him and he pressed keys. He watched the screen, rapt. I speculated on whether I should press my luck by coming around the desk to take a look. Decided against. ‘Well?’ I said.
‘Joseph Agnew.’
I let out a long, slow breath. ‘Ah hah.’
‘Is that what you wanted to hear?’
‘Maybe. Branch?’
He hit some keys. ‘Newport Beach.’
I wrote it down so as to look keen. ‘And do we have an address for Mr Agnew?’
He looked alarmed and took his hands away from the keyboard as if the fingers might go into business for themselves. ‘I can’t.’
‘City Tatts,’ I said. I mimed lifting a glass. ‘Bright chap that Carstairs at Martin Place…”
Clickety, click. ‘2 Bougainville Street, Shetland Island.’
‘Thank you, Mr Carstairs.’