Not that I let myself into people’s places on a regular basis. Usually it was the other way around. I’d given a spare key to my place to Faye in case Red ever needed to get in while I was at work and occasionally I’d come home to find she’d left something exotic in the fridge. But this was something new. Just thought I should make the point.
The flat was exactly as I had last seen it. Same Bauhaus chairs, same boxy sofa, same honey-coloured dining table, same pornographic portrait. Out the uncurtained window, the roof of the CMA was just visible between the trees. If Fiona decided to pop home across the greensward, I’d see her coming through the trees.
The object of my search was vague. Anything to corroborate Lambert’s association with the bogus CUSS collection. Anything to connect her with Marcus Taylor, to help clarify the mutually contradictory information I had about their relationship. Had Taylor hated her as the woman who stole his birthright? Or was he providing fake artworks for her Austral Fine Art operation? Was it possible that she had the missing version of Our Home? Given what I now knew, Eastlake’s line about it being a student copy of a masterwork had taken on a decidedly hollow ring.
The small study opening off the lounge room was the logical place to start. A strictly utilitarian space. Walls bare except for a row of tiny canvases, each no more than four inches square, each a different shade of blue. A ladder-frame bookcase filled with art magazines. A chrome-inlaid Aero desk, tres chic, with matching stainless-steel waste paper basket, empty. A cardboard box containing several dozen brand-new copies of A Fierce Vision. A two-drawer filing cabinet. Bottom drawer, stationery supplies. Top drawer, domestic appliance warranties.
On the desk, an Apple computer with a plastic cover. Must learn to use. Postcards. Someone called Vicki saying Budapest was fab. Invitations to exhibition openings. Bills. Gas, electricity, phone. Very ordinary. Visa, Mastercard, Amex. Denting the plastic to the tune of about twenty-two hundred a month. Clothes and restaurants mainly. Mortgage statement. Nine hundred a month, $86,000 left to pay.
On a salary of, what, sixty grand? Fiona Lambert was living beyond her means. Extravagant but, so far, nothing illegal. Nothing relating to Austral Fine Art. Not so much as a sheet of letterhead. Must keep all that over at the CMA.
Scanning the view out the window on my way, I went up the hall to the bedroom.
Heavy drapes, open a chink. Window overlooking a small courtyard. Enough light to see by. Big contrast to the Vogue casualness of the living room. Queen-size bed, black sheets smoothed tight. Cotton. Satin would be tacky. Many big plush pillows, red. Pale carpet, low nap, soft like felt. On the wall above the bed was one huge painting. Not Szabo. Thickly laid-on acrylic paint, high texture, chopped like the waves of a starlit sea. Abstract, tactile, sensual. I could smell clean linen and Oil of Ulan. Red lacquer chest of drawers, antique Japanese. Rice-paper lamps. The whole room reflected back on itself from a mirrored wardrobe occupying entire side wall.
An intensely private atmosphere, redolent of the mysterious feminine. Then again, maybe it was just that I hadn’t been in a woman’s bedroom for quite some time.
I slid open the mirror-fronted wardrobe and saw a great quantity of clothes, all of them either red, white or black. Enough shoes to make Imelda Marcos’s mouth water. About a dozen men’s business shirts. Top brands. Ironed. No half million dollars. No Certificate of Incorporation for Austral Fine Art.
Nothing for me on the rack. I looked in the Japanese chest. For a moment longer than absolutely necessary, I stood staring down at a girl called Fiona’s collection of investment-quality lingerie. Nothing tarty. No reds or blacks here. Shell-pink, ivory, cream. Resisting the temptation to touch, I knelt on the floor and looked under the bed. Nothing, not even dust.
Straight across the hall was the bathroom. The chunky vanity basin was littered with toning lotions and night creams. Princess Marcella Borghese Face Mud. A cupboard held thick towels, folded and stacked. A cane laundry basket contained damp towels and a white t-shirt with two interlocked Cs in gold on the front.
The kitchen was expensively spartan: Alessi kettle, Moulinex, crystal wineglasses, stainless steel Poggenpohl appliances. Japanese crackers on an empty bench-top.
By now I was hyperventilating. ‘Right,’ I said, out loud. Time to go. If Fiona Lambert was up to no good, the evidence of it wasn’t here.
One last getaway glance out the window. Fiona Lambert was crossing a sunlit patch of lawn between two pines, headed for home. She was, perhaps, two minutes away. At the far side of the courtyard were rubbish bins, a rear exit to the flats. I opened the door a notch to reconnoitre my getaway and heard footfalls coming briskly up the stairs towards me, a heavy male tread.
Whoever he was, he’d be on the landing in a matter of seconds. His destination must be the flat opposite. Fiona was still ninety seconds away. It would be close, but an undetected departure was still possible. Closing the door and pressing my back to it, I listened for the man to go into the other flat.
The footsteps came closer. My hearing, all my senses, felt preternaturally heightened. A radio somewhere was broadcasting talkback. Out on Domain Road, a tram clattered by. Somebody’s muffler was due for replacement. The footsteps reached the landing. I waited for the jingle of keys or a rapping on the knocker opposite. All I heard was breathing, the wheezing of an unfit man who had just climbed a flight of stairs on a summer day and was pausing to catch his breath. I strained to hear movement, my heart drumming in my ears.
Distantly, the rhythmic click of a woman’s heels rapidly ascended the concrete stairs.
The tattoo beat of my pulse became a surf-roar of panic.
The door was about to fly open. My idiotic spur-of-the-moment impulse was about to backfire horribly, to result in my discovery and disgrace. What possible pretext could I find for being in a woman’s flat in this way? What would it look like? I’d be taken for a panty sniffer or a petty thief. A pervert, a psycho. How had I got myself into this position? To what idiot impulse had I surrendered my common sense? What outlandish excuse could I invent? I had to think of something and think of it fast.
I did. I hid.
I hid in the first place I found, a louvre-fronted closet beside the entrance to the living room. I took it for a coat closet but found it held brooms and mops and a vacuum cleaner. Shouldering my way between the broom handles, I swung the slatted door shut behind me just as a key snicked into the front-door lock.
A feather duster tickled the back of my neck. The handle of a broom toppled to rest against my cheek. The metal nozzle of the vacuum cleaner was jammed up my posterior crotch. Standing to rigid attention in claustrophobic darkness, I held my breath and awaited the humiliation of discovery.
‘Did you bring it?’ Fiona Lambert opened her front door and stepped through.
Two silhouettes passed before the downward sloping slats of the louvred panel. Just as they did so, I realised that the closet door had not swung completely shut behind me. A chink perhaps a centimetre wide remained open. From where I was standing, it looked as vast as the Grand Canyon.
‘You have the delivery docket?’ said a male voice, a deep rumble.
My senses were so acute that I could feel the hair standing up on the nape of my neck, taste the dust molecules in the air, smell the residues of floor wax clinging to the broom bristles. A spider in the dark behind me exuded the glutinous thread of its web. Heat radiated from my body. Sweat gushed from every pore, cascading down my skin and dripping into my eyes. My heart belted against my ribs like the bass riff from a Maxine Nightingale disco hit. The saliva had dried in my mouth and, when I tried to swallow it, crackled like a sheet of cellophane being rolled into a ball. I felt as if I was about to burst into flames.