Fabulina was on her last legs. So was her house. I knocked on the door and waited. Somebody was at home, I could hear the tinny sound of a radio playing opera. I stood on the veranda looking at the rampant garden. A towering bamboo hedge separated from the street a waist high proliferation of weeds. A few hibiscus were still fighting for their lives and a blazing bougainvillea had clambered up to the second floor. Its progress had demolished most of the upstairs balustrade and its canopy cast the veranda into a rich twilight. Eventually I heard the rattling of a chain, the rasp of a lock and the door opened. A monkey faced old man stood on the threshold. His scalp was covered with a fine haze of pink frizz. He had a smear of mauve shadow over each eye. It glistened wetly and I had the feeling that it had been especially applied to answer the door.
‘Fabulina?’ I enquired.
‘The mortal remains of,’ she said. ‘Who wants to know?’ She clasped the collar of her sequined blouse to her throat and I saw that her fingers were gnarled and bunched.
‘I’m a friend of Sykes. I wondered if you could help me....’
‘Ah, Sykes. How is the darling boy?’ She smiled fondly, then she looked alarmed. ‘Nothing’s happened to him has it?’
‘That’s just it, I can’t seem to locate him. I need to find him.’ Fabulina gave me the same wise look that Grace had given me the night before.
‘You better come in and have a cup of tea,’ she said.
The hallway was crammed with furniture and boxes and piles of papers. It was dominated by a monstrous Chinese hall-stand, writhing with lacquered dragons and gargoyles. It was hung, like a great Christmas tree, with parasols, masks, jewellery, hats of every description, feather boas, a velvet opera cloak, and home to a congregation of dusty Victorian dolls.
‘Come through, come through,’ called Fabulina, shuffling through the mayhem. ‘Don’t worry, there’s nobody here. Just me. I don’t let rooms any more. Your mother can’t get up and down the stairs like she used to. Not since Arthur jumped her bones. Arthur-itis that is.’
The kitchen was at the dark end of the house. It was illuminated by a vapid bulb swathed in a pink chiffon scarf. Furniture was stacked around the walls. Chairs upon table upon table. A colonnade of Chippendale, Queen Anne and cabriole legs. More boxes. Cobwebs festooned the ceiling. In the corner was a baby grand piano which appeared to double as a kitchen table. Its lid was scarred with cigarette burns and littered with mugs, ashtrays and unopened mail. There was a silver chafing dish and the photograph of Fabulina and Sonja Henie in a tarnished frame. A giant candelabrum dripped stalactites of wax over an Art Deco statuette of a girl walking a whippet.
‘I’ll make us a nice cup of tea,’ Fabulina was scrabbling in the sink, rinsing cups under the tap.