‘Help!’ he was screaming. ‘Murder! Murder!’
There was only one S. Fleet in the White Pages with a CBD address. Little Lonsdale Street. The western end, down towards the railway yards. Funky. Low rent. About the right place for a loft. Fifteen minutes walk from the Arts Centre. A five-minute drive.
‘Wait here,’ I told Red, parking around the corner. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘Shoosh,’ he said. His head was bent and his thumbs were furiously manipulating the liquid crystal blips of his handheld electronic game. ‘I’m going for the record.’ The stamp album, understandably, had failed to impress. It lay discarded on the back seat.
‘Ten minutes,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll go have some fun, just you and me.’ He didn’t look up.
The Aldershot Building was six floors of faded glory, a Beaux Arts chocolate box dating from the boom of the 1880s. Barristers from the nearby law courts might once have had their chambers here, wool merchants, pastoral companies, shipping agents, stockbrokers. Then the boom had gone bust. The mercantile bourgeoisie moved out and the wholesale jewellers and sheet-music publishers moved in. In time, as the pigeon shit mounted on the curlicued plinths of the facade, these became two-man tailor shops and fishy photographers, doll doctors and dental technicians. Eventually, the strict prescriptions of the fire department had driven away even these modest entrepreneurs.
But the Law of Unintended Consequences supersedes even the Prevention of Fire Act and the tenants squeezed out by the prohibitive cost of overhead sprinklers and CO2 extinguishers had been replaced by bootleg gayboy hairdressers, speakeasy desktop publishers and loft dwellers-all of them on handshake leases with blind-eye clauses. At the Aldershot, no-one was really there and if they were they were just visiting.
Flyers for dance clubs were taped to the wall of the small ground-floor vestibule. Among them, beside the lift, was a much-amended hand-written list of tenants. Salina Fleet was on the sixth floor. I took the lift, a modern job not more than forty years old with cylindrical bakelite buttons that stuck out like the dugs on a black sow. It opened straight onto the corridor. Salina’s was the first door along.
She didn’t answer at first. I knocked, waited, knocked again. A reggae beat was coming from somewhere, emanating from the very bones of the building, dreams of Jamaica. I knocked again and was about to turn away when the door opened a chink and Sal peered tentatively through the gap.
‘Oh, it’s you.’ Her mouth gave me a jumpy, automatic smile and her eyes tried to find their way around me into the hall. They were cold and glistening like she’d just been polishing them and had to put them back in to answer the door and they weren’t warmed up yet. Her once-fruited lips were thin and pasty. Unconsciously raising a little finger to them, she tore off a half moon of nail.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, harmlessly. ‘I haven’t come to take you up on your offer.’
The skin was drawn tight across the bridge of her nose, accentuating the bird-like cast of her face. It was a face about five years older than when I’d first seen it. She didn’t open the door any further and she didn’t invite me in.
‘Sorry to drop by out of the blue,’ I said. ‘But I’ve heard that they’re pretty well decided that Marcus’s death wasn’t suicide. Thought I should let you know.’
She accepted the news as though already reconciled to the possibility. Her neck flexed in a tiny bob, pecking an invisible grain of wheat. ‘Part of me hoped so, in a way. I can’t blame myself for an accident, can I?’
‘I was a bit abrupt yesterday,’ I said. ‘If you’d like to talk about it.’ I looked at the floor. ‘As a friend.’
She reached out through the gap in the door and put her hand softly on my chest. ‘You’re a sweet guy, Murray. Really, you are. But I’d rather be alone.’ She gave me the most bathos-drenched look ever practised in front of a mirror, sighed heavily and stepped back.
She’d tried that one before. Last time, it had nearly worked. Before the door could shut, I had my foot in it. Through the crack, I could see a bed. On the bed was a suitcase. ‘Going somewhere, Sal?’
‘How dare you!’ she spat through the gap, putting her shoulder to the door. ‘You can’t just force your way in.’
My thirty-kilo advantage sat inert against the door. ‘Talk to me,’ I said. ‘Please.’
The pressure on the door diminished somewhat. ‘This official, or what?’
‘Or what,’ I said.
She backed away silently, letting the door fall open. Her lack of pretence at hospitality was refreshingly unrehearsed.
What Salina called her loft was a large high-ceilinged room that might have once been a typing college classroom or the workshop of a manufacturing milliner. Chipboard partitions had been installed to create separate kitchen and bathroom areas, the floor had been sanded back and the place stocked with oddments of retro furniture of the Zsa Zsa Gabor On Safari variety. The wardrobe was a metal shop-display rack on castors, half empty. The bed took up the rest of the space, unmade beneath a scattering of clothes and a small, half-packed suitcase. The ashtray contained about five thousand half-smoked green-tinged butts.
‘Nice,’ I said.
My opinion was a matter of supreme indifference to Salina Fleet. ‘What’s this all about?’ she demanded.
A little of the old Sal had returned. She was wearing Capri pants with a pink gingham shirt knotted at the midriff and hoop earrings. She was still in mourning, though. The Capri pants were black. A bit of bluff might have got me through the door, but it wouldn’t get me any further. She’d backed herself against a window sill and folded her arms tight. She wasn’t going to take any bullying.
I wasn’t going to give her any. By way of emphasising that my intentions were honourable, I turned my back to the bed and perched on the arm of a zebra-patterned sofa. ‘Suicide or accident, Marcus Taylor’s death is a hot story. You’re not the only one the press have been talking to. All sorts of stories are flying around. My job involves keeping one step ahead of the pack.’
That was only part of it, of course. In the final analysis, it wasn’t the Protestant work ethic that was gunning my engine. It was my frail ego. I had the distinct impression that my string was being jerked. By whom and to what end was not yet apparent. But I didn’t like it. Not one little bit. ‘You being on the Visual Arts Advisory Panel, I thought you might be able to advise me.’
‘Stories?’ Feigning nonchalance, she put a cigarette in her mouth and flicked a disposable lighter. ‘What stories?’
‘Let’s start with yesterday first. You went to the YMCA to get a picture, right? But someone had beaten you to it.’ Her lighter wouldn’t fire. She kept flicking the wheel with her thumb. I got out mine, walked over to the window and lit both of us up. ‘Right?’
‘I told you.’ She exhaled Kooly. ‘I went to get some personal things.’
‘Toothbrush? IUD? Little things that slip easily into a folio case.’
‘And to make my private goodbyes to Marcus.’
‘By coming on to me?’
‘I was upset. Vulnerable.’
We wouldn’t get far heading down this track. I took myself back to the zebra. ‘Tell me about Marcus. How did you get involved with him?’
She shrugged. ‘How does anybody? We met last winter. At an exhibition. He tried to lobby me for a grant. He was hopeless-insecure and arrogant at the same time.’ All the things that women can’t resist. ‘I was on the rebound. We ended up in bed. You know how it is.’
I nearly did. ‘And so he got his grant.’
That was below the belt. ‘It was a committee decision, based on artistic merit.’