Josephine Dart had sat in the room’s easy chair while I made my inspection. ‘Terry was very proud of those,’ she said. ‘He said they stood for aching muscles and gallons of sweat.’
Dart had evidently won a couple of long-distance road races and placed in a few more. ‘He must’ve been good.’
‘Good. Yes, when he was younger, but not at the top level. It didn’t bother him. He was a lovely, calm, kind, considerate man from the day I met him until the morning he rode off. It’s so bloody unfair.’
Something about the room bothered me. I opened the drawers in the desk-printer paper, cheque books, invoices, a postcode book, staples, printer cartridges, expended and new.
‘What?’ Mrs Dart said.
‘Something’s missing.’
She looked carefully. ‘Everything’s as he left it.’
It came to me in a flash. ‘Where’s his briefcase?’
She got up quickly. ‘He kept it tucked down between the desk and the filing cabinet.’
The space, wide enough to hold a sizeable briefcase, was empty.
‘Mrs Dart, have many people been in the flat since your husband died?’
She nodded. ‘We had a wake. . a party. My brother organised it. Terry was an only child. Terry would have liked it-they played some of his favourite music- “Bolero” and “The Ritual Fire Dance” and things from Carmen. There were quite a few people-neighbours and from the CSIRO and the cycling club. I didn’t know them all.’
‘Did anyone comment on McKinley not being there?’
‘Of course,’ she said sadly. ‘It was a talking point.’
I asked her if she’d come with me when I inspected Henry McKinley’s house but she refused.
‘I went there quite often. Sometimes with Terry, sometimes without,’ she said. ‘We had some wonderful times together. I don’t think I could bear to see it all empty and. . dead.’
She produced five keys on a ring. I asked whether she wanted some kind of authorisation from McKinley’s daughter or the private detective she’d hired.
‘I thought you were the private detective.’
That was ticklish, but something I had to get used to. ‘I’m more or less retired. I’m just doing this as a favour to Ms McKinley. She was a nurse in the hospital in California when I had a heart attack.’
‘My goodness! You look fit now.’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
She gave me the keys. ‘I trust you, Mr Hardy.’
You don’t get a lot of that in this business and her remark buoyed me up even though I was sure there were things she wasn’t telling me and that what I was learning added up to bad news for Margaret McKinley.
Henry McKinley’s townhouse was part of a small set of newish places, modelled on the good old Victorian terrace. The architect had done his job well and the houses blended in nicely with the old and new stuff around them. The street was a bit back from New South Head Road and elevated, so that the houses had a view of the water with the trees of the Royal Sydney golf course off to the south. The security wasn’t state of the art but it was adequate. A high, solid wooden gate at street level opened easily with one of the keys on the bunch and there was a security grille over the front door and bars on the windows on the lower level. A balcony ran along the width of the house and I could see greenery hanging down over the rail. The space in front was taken up with the traditional white pebbles and a few largish plants, looking bedraggled, in pots.
Another key opened the grille door and yet another the front door. I waited before going in. I hadn’t been tentative about my approach, but I was prepared to defend it if challenged. No challenge came. The adjoining townhouses were quiet-professionals out earning enough to live there.
Light streamed in from a skylight halfway along the passage that led to a narrow set of stairs. I opened the door to the room immediately on the right. A bedroom. Double bed, neatly made up, the usual fittings, no sign of disturbance. Likewise the sitting room further down. The room suggested a non-fussy person of good taste. The furniture was comfortable rather than stylish. Neither the TV nor the sound system was new and the big, old bookcase with glass doors had the look of something handed down through the family-neither fashionable nor practical, but cherished. Its key stood in the lock. The books inside were a mixture of the very old-a Collins set of Shakespeare’s plays-and the very new-Robert Hughes’s autobiography. There was an emphasis on art and associated subjects-Drawings by Michael Fitzjames, The Paintings of DH Lawrence, a book on nineteenth century photography and three or four studies of Picasso.
The dining room was small but with space enough for a no-nonsense pine table and solid chairs; the kitchen had another skylight and about as much stuff as a single man would need to cook, refrigerate and sit down for a quiet drink. The wine rack held five bottles of red-five more than my ex-wife Cyn had left behind when we split. A door from the kitchen gave out onto a bricked courtyard where everything-flowers, shrubs and herbs-was overgrown. Bird droppings stained the garden setting; leaves had collected around the legs of the chairs and table.
A small aluminium shed occupied a corner of the courtyard. It was padlocked but a smaller key on the ring took care of that. A bicycle was held up on pegs attached to the wall. A heavy plastic cover was draped over it and there were tools I didn’t recognise, cans of oil, jars of something or other arranged neatly on a shelf. Three helmets hung from one peg, three pairs of bike shoes from another. I felt sad about the well-cared-for things a man I didn’t know had left behind him-if that’s what had happened. I re-locked the shed.
I went up the stairs. There was a bathroom with a medium sized spa bath-something you’d need after those bike rides-a shower recess and toilet. At the back was a darkroom, fitted up with the red light, and the printing and developing equipment. The study was in the front. Both of these rooms had been searched, torn apart.
5
No help for it. I sent off a long email to Margaret McKinley bringing her up to date. Impossible to be optimistic. I told her that I’d located the name of her father’s solicitor and his email address in my search of the townhouse, and asked her to contact him with an authorisation to talk to me.
My solicitor, Viv Garner, didn’t think much of this when I told him what I was doing.
‘I doubt he’ll do it on the strength of an email,’ he said. ‘Give me the details and I’ll get in touch and try to square it all away. Of course that’s what you had in mind when you told me all this.’
‘I’m an open book to you, Viv,’ I said. I gave him the name. ‘I want to get a look at McKinley’s mail in his post office box. No way to tell if whoever searched the house found the key. Maybe he kept it on him.’
‘That’s very tricky,’ Viv said. ‘Takes time. You say she’s hired Hank Bachelor to enquire into her father’s disappearance. You’re involved, of course, but you’ve got no status with the police or McKinley’s lawyer or his employer.’
‘Moral authority,’ I said, and I told him about Josephine Dart.
‘Moral authority’s not worth shit. But you’ll do what you want to do, I know that. I’ll try to smooth out some of the snags. Who do I bill for my time and effort?’
I grinned. ‘Who else but Hank?’
I calculated the time difference and rang Margaret McKinley.