30

THERE’D STILL BEEN no word from Melodie by the time Adam Garrett crawled into bed Saturday night, which probably accounted for another restless sleep, dreaming of lost keys, dead phones, cars with flat batteries, hands that slipped from his grasp.

And nothing when he checked his phone on Sunday morning. He called and texted her again. Waited. No reply.

He felt twitchy as he showered and shaved in the bathroom at the end of the corridor. It didn’t ease as he dressed in his poky room and downed coffee and toast in the downstairs kitchen he shared with a bunch of students. She’s pissed off with me, he thought. She’s not stupid. She’ll have twigged that I tipped off the police about the Calnan kid, and she’s probably cooking up something special for me. Would she tell Ivan Varga? What would she tell him?

Garrett’s jitters grew. There was only one thing to combat that: face it full on. Returning to his room, he put on a hi-vis jacket and bike helmet and slid one of his most useful props, a clipboard, into a pannier. Opened his door; checked both ways along the corridor. Sunday morning in a boarding house: the old place slumbered, the air suggestive of the lentil soups and curries of the Asian and Middle Eastern kids who lived in the other rooms. He wheeled his bike to the head of the stairs and carried it down, every step creaking beneath his weight. Past the kitchen and laundry, before pausing at the back door. The vast yard, still partly in shadow. The landlord’s spotless Renault van marked Saggio Smallgoods, and the old coach house he lived in. Three small lemon trees; casuarinas; a crumpling incinerator; a tattered trampoline from when the Saggio kids were little. And the laneway gate, closed.

Garrett left the house and crossed the yard, badly spooked. Opened the gate, checked the lane, wheeled his bucking bike over the cobblestones to the end. Then around to Studland Street, where he paused again. He recognised almost all of the cars. And the remainder seemed innocuous, no heads showing, no exhaust smoke, no unmarked vans or brutal black Range Rovers.

Thirty minutes later he was in Tusmore, making a quick pass along Melodie’s street before dismounting at the far end as if to adjust his chain. The area seemed peaceful, just another mix of home units, small tan-brick blocks of flats and older 1930s bungalows morosely shadowed by oleanders and stubby bullnose verandas. None of the cars spiked his interest and there were no pedestrians, so he got back on his bike and coasted down to number 16.

Clipboard in hand, he knocked on Melodie’s door. Waited. Nothing altered. The air remained dappled and mild, no nearby curtains twitched, no one attended to the lawn sprinkler ticking in a garden across the street. Checking that he was unobserved, Garrett walked along the side wall of the house, peering into dark rooms, before pausing at the corner to survey the yard. No one waited or gardened there, no one was escaping over a fence, no one had bled out among the tomatoes.

He drew on thin latex gloves. The first thing he’d done when he’d come into Melodie’s clutches was look for her spare key one day, when she was out on a case. Now, using the copy he’d made, he let himself into her house. Listened. Let his ears and nostrils test the atmosphere.

Her bed hadn’t been slept in. The shower base was dry. The kettle was cold, the sink and benches wiped clean.

She had a home office. He went through her drawers and files, checking for anything that referred to him or the cases he’d worked for her. Everything he found related to her domestic life: home and car insurance papers; electricity invoices; a receipt for a new refrigerator; a birthday card from a niece in Sydney.

Then, in a bottom drawer, an A4 envelope marked ‘Elite’. Inside it, a sheaf of business registration papers. The proprietor of Elite Investigations was one Adam Garrett of 44 Studland Street, North Adelaide, 5006.

Fucking old cow.

Fired up now, Garrett searched again, more closely this time. Nothing. He took the envelope to the kitchen sink, opened the back door and a window and made a little bonfire of the business papers. Ran the tap for several minutes. Flapped a bone-dry dishcloth to clear the smoke.

Ten minutes later he was chaining his bike to a rack outside a newsagency on Norwood Parade.

Melodie was on the floor behind her desk, the chair at a crazy angle three metres behind her, as though propelled there when she jack-knifed in death. The blood pooling beneath her torso was not large, it didn’t glisten, it looked old and dry—but he itched to remove one of his gloves and touch it. He didn’t want to touch her.

Otherwise, her office had been torn apart, a mess of upended drawers, jemmied-open cabinets and scattered files. Garrett stepped back to the hallway door and listened. The only other business on the first floor was an immigration agency. He’d never met, seen or heard the woman who ran it. The ground-floor businesses—a dental lab and a marine insurance broker—didn’t operate on weekends.

No one to hear a shot. Or the damage as the place was roughly searched. Or to see strangers coming and going.

Closing the door again, he began his own search for records relating to his work for Elite Investigations. Melodie had always paid him in cash, either literally or by reducing his debt. But she’d surely need some records for the tax office—his travel expenses, for example. Insurance. And he’d submitted quite a few surveillance reports with his name on them. Not to mention glossy photographs with his prints on them. He’d worked for her since February. One job a month, on average, most of them genuine tailing assignments—husbands, wives, druggie kids.

These files were still intact, either on the floor or in the damaged filing cabinet. He crammed them into a bin bag that had lined the office wastepaper basket and left it by the door, then started the hunt for official paperwork related to his employee status. There was none. Either Melodie had never kept any or it had been nicked. Nothing related to his grey work, either: the ‘retrieval’ of Craig Tolhurst’s son, for example; the Calnan surveillance. No surprise there.

Just then Garrett felt the tug of the CCTV camera Melodie had mounted at ceiling height in the far corner of the room. It wasn’t top of the line—it recorded to a hard drive under her desk, not the cloud. He crouched to look. The drive had been removed.

Time to leave. He wiped everything he could remember ever touching, grabbed the bin bag and checked the corridor again. Quiet, empty. He headed downstairs, knowing how futile his actions had been. The police had other ways to identify him. A digital record connecting him to the business. Melodie’s phone records. CCTV footage from other businesses along the block. But it could be days before her body was discovered. He’d be long gone by then. If he was cornered in the next thirty minutes, he could flash his one set of fake but solid ID and claim to be a client, looking for the mother who’d abandoned him.

Reaching the back door, he paused. Went back upstairs and pocketed Melodie’s phone and purse. $260. Every little helped, and she had no further use for it. He tried to summon some regret or sadness. The truth was, she was an awful person who’d screwed him over on every job he did for her. The main thing was: he wouldn’t have to pay the rest of the money he owed.

Feeling again that he was being watched, Garrett pedalled back across town to the boarding house. At the entrance to Studland Street, he dismounted as if to adjust the height of his saddle. Only one alteration in the meantime, a little rental Kia parked outside the psychotherapist’s consulting room next door to the boarding house. Remounting, he spurted to the end of Studland, checking the Kia and the front yard of number 44, then headed around to the laneway, walking his bike over the cobbles. The back gate was open. Not unusual: it meant Mr Saggio had gone to the market.

But Adam Garrett paused a while, his bike propped against the sagging yard fence. A wisp of smoke from the incinerator. Again, not unusual. Mr Saggio was yet to embrace the concept of recycling, and his tenants knew not to hang their washing out on weekends.

The rear of the old house looked tranquil. Everyone still in bed. So Garrett wheeled his bike in through the gate and, with one eye on the back door, started feeding his surveillance files into the incinerator. Mr Saggio’s smouldering egg and milk cartons loved it. They popped and snapped hungrily and the smoke surged up into Garrett’s eyes so that he coughed and jerked his head away, and that was what saved his life.