THAT SATURDAY, ADAM Garrett had been called in to the office. Melodie wanted him to ‘sit and look useful’ while she conferred with a client who needed his nephew tailed.
The client, introduced as Ivan, was wearing a suit. On a Saturday? The fabric looked expensive, the shirt crisp, the shoes highly polished, but the hands, resting on solid thighs, were the hacked-about slabs of a labourer, and a smudged, blue-black serpent’s head emerged from the top of one sock when he crossed his legs.
Garrett, sitting in the associate’s chair next to Melodie’s desk, watched and listened, his face and eyes blank. A prison tatt? He couldn’t tell for sure. Mel had said the guy was a developer, so maybe he’d started his adult life as a brickie. And maybe he was meeting clients later in the day. Or maybe he intended to harm the nephew, and thought he’d disarm them by wearing a suit. If so, it was a misfire. The outfit didn’t go with the hands, the face—which was long, narrow, dark, the nose hooked like a raptor’s—or the cold, close-set eyes.
He thought he’d try a little light needling. ‘We don’t often get in-laws requesting this kind of thing. It’s usually the parents. Where do they figure in all this?’
It worked. Ivan gave him a prison-yard stare. But it was there and gone again, replaced by a sharkish smile and a shovelling-gravel voice: ‘It’s only Leigh and his mum—my sister. Been like that for years. She’s worried about her boy, so I’m stepping in.’
‘By having him followed,’ Garrett said flatly.
You could read his tone as doubt, and he felt the force of Melodie’s irritation as she leaned forward to cut across him: ‘What my associate means to say, is, we need to be careful about bona fides. We need to be sure this lad’s going to be okay.’
The lad, Leigh Calnan, was sixteen years old and had been acting out, according to the man named Ivan. Secretive, a bit mouthy, struggling at school and staying out until the early hours.
Ivan shrugged. ‘If you’re worried, call my sister.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ Melodie said, casting Garrett a side glance.
She turned to Ivan again. ‘How many days did you have in mind?’
‘A week? Including a weekend, to get the best idea of his routine.’
‘We can start straight away,’ Melodie said. ‘This afternoon, in fact,’ she added, looking to Garrett for confirmation.
He nodded. ‘What’s he usually do on Saturdays?’
Ivan seemed to search for inspiration. ‘Football. Goes out with his mates later. Movies, Maccas…Look, for all I know he plays snooker. Smokes dope. Deals dope.’
Snooker? thought Garrett. ‘Has your sister tried talking to him?’
Ivan shrugged. ‘You know what teenagers are like.’
‘Well, have you considered that he’s been in contact with his father?’
Garrett saw Ivan think furiously again and eventually say, ‘The cunt’s gone back to Europe.’ Pause. ‘To the…to England.’
Giving Garrett another look, Melodie said, ‘So basically you’d like to know who your nephew sees and what he does when he’s not at home or at school.’
‘Yep.’
‘Photos?’
‘That would be good.’
Garrett said, ‘Have you tried following him yourself?’
Ivan practically snarled, ‘How do you suggest I do that? The kid knows me.’
‘Okay,’ Melodie said briskly. ‘If you could give us all the relevant information? Where he lives, his school, where he plays sport…Do you have a recent photo?’
‘It’s all here,’ Ivan said, excavating an envelope from an inside pocket and tossing it onto the desk.
Garrett found himself trying to spot a handgun holstered under the suitcoat. ‘Would you like regular progress reports as well?’
Ivan was vague. ‘Er, that would be good.’
‘I’ll give you a call every afternoon,’ Melodie said with another glare in Garrett’s direction.
Then the man named Ivan was on his way out the door and Garrett was feigning a dodgy stomach, muttering about the men’s room.
Melodie flipped her hand at him, a twist of distaste on her face, and busied herself with paperwork.
Once he was out in the corridor, Garrett held back. He could hear Ivan trudging down the stairs, and then there was the unmistakeable squeak of the door to the street. He waited for it to close, then raced to the bottom in time to see Ivan trot across the street and into the passenger seat of a black Range Rover. Garrett snapped the rear plates with his phone, then killed a couple of minutes before returning to the office.
Melodie was eyeing her watch impatiently. ‘You need to get going before this kid disappears on you.’
‘Sure,’ Garrett said, adding, ‘Do you know that guy?’
‘What guy?’
‘The client. Ivan.’
‘Of course I don’t know him. What are you on about?’ Garrett shrugged. ‘Nothing. Just wondered.’
An hour later dusk was settling in. Adam Garrett parked his Mazda half a block from a 1930s Californian bungalow on Galway Street in Toorak Gardens, waiting for Leigh Calnan to leave. Or his friends to arrive. Waiting, in fact, for anything at all to happen. And maybe nothing would, maybe the kid’s mother was playing hardball and he’d been grounded for acting out.
Time passed. He fired up his phone and did some light research. There was only Leigh and his mother. She was divorced; her ex lived in Perth now, hadn’t been on the scene for years.
Interesting. Tossing his phone onto the passenger seat, Garrett contemplated the client meeting. The dynamics between Melodie and the man she called Ivan. The body language, the undercurrents. She knows him, he thought. She always knows people—like the guy who sold her my debt, so now I’m doing her shit-work instead of his.
So why the play-acting? Maybe because she knows I didn’t like what we did to the Tolhurst guy. Maybe she thought I’d arc up if I knew the real reason for tailing this kid.
What was the real reason? Garrett didn’t have a clue how he’d find that out. His stomach rumbled. He should have stopped at a drive-through. And sitting for hours always gave him a back ache. He listened to music for a while, then his phone pinged.
Username elbow-grease, one of his Telegram contacts, had just encountered Anita. Except she’s calling herself Grace now.
Adam Garrett felt a tingle of excitement. He started his engine, switched on the headlights, turned the car towards Portrush Road.
If not for one of Melodie’s assignments earlier in the year, he might never have learnt that elbow-grease was a conservator named Gaynor Bernard. The client, a merchant banker embroiled in a bitter property dispute, had been ordered by the court to return a valuable John Peter Russell oil painting, Morning Sea, Morestil, to his ex-wife. Perhaps Melodie could arrange for someone to paint him a perfect copy so he could keep the original? Melodie had given the assignment to one of her many contacts, who did a beautiful job but was worried that it lacked the patina of age. Cue Gaynor Bernard, who’d joked to Garrett that usually she removed the patina of age.
Taking Portrush Road to the M1, he began winding up into the hills. At Crafers he turned onto a series of side roads, eventually reaching the conservator’s house. He parked, got out, peered up the slope. Darkness. He was about to open the gate when nesting birds stirred in the nearby trees and a voice said, ‘I’m here.’
He stiffened. It was Bernard, stepping away from a mess of moon shadows. Even so, he looked both ways along the little-used road, a ghostly ribbon curving around the hillside, and his hand reached automatically for his jacket pocket, which was empty. Habit.
‘Settle down,’ Bernard said. ‘Sorry to startle you.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘Anyway, not much I can tell you. She turned up with an etching in need of a clean, and I recognised her from the photos you posted.’
‘Car?’
‘Didn’t see it. She would’ve parked down here and walked up the driveway.’
‘She say anything? Where she lives, things like that?’
Bernard shook her head. ‘No. Nothing.’
‘Did you get the impression she lives nearby?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘And she called herself Grace?’
‘Correct.’
‘Last name?’
‘She didn’t give it.’
‘Describe her.’
Bernard’s description matched the stamp-expo version of Anita: low-key, modest and conservative. Except that her hair was light brown now.
‘When’s she picking up the picture?’
‘I should have it done by this Friday.’
‘When you know for sure, text me. A couple of hours’ notice if you can.’
‘Sure,’ Bernard said.
Garrett saw curiosity in her face. But they were colleagues—albeit of the online kind—so she didn’t ask questions, and he didn’t expect her to. It was risky enough knowing each other’s names.
He headed back to the Toorak Gardens house. Parked outside it until 11.30, when an Uber pulled up. A teenage boy tumbled out, lanky and awkward, with shaggy hair. Garrett, watching him wave and yell goodbye to his mates in the car, then stroll to his front door, wrote: 11.30 p.m., subject arrived home from seeing a film with two friends his age.
Then he started his car and headed home to his miserable boarding house in North Adelaide.