Peter Corris - The Empty Beach

‘So they do,’ I said. ‘And blood is red.’

‘You are a poet. I will repeat that to our spiritual leader when he visits us next year.’

The comment had the soft phoniness peculiar to the religious conman. On the whole, I prefer the spiel of the oil share sellers and real estate crooks.

‘Feel free,’ I said.

It was late in the afternoon and the rain had eased to a drizzle that looked like settling in for the night. I gave the street a careful once over before going across to my car. Freddy Ward didn’t seem like the sort of man to call it all square, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if Rex decided to go freelance for a night. I deeply suspected Rex of being vindictive. But I couldn’t see any watchers and cruisers and they stand out plainly in the rain when honest folk are inside or going about their business fast.

My Gregorys showed Monk Lane to be a little trickle of a thoroughfare in Clovelly near the boundary with Randwick. Leon had had a long beat. I drove down to the beach and sat and sorted out my thoughts on the matter or matters before me. It was smoking time again, moody time with the light rain rinsing the air and turning the sand grey. My first impulse was to front up to the house and compare my photographs with the faces of all the old jokers there. Against that were Henneberry’s guts on the carpet and all Leon’s broken bones. Maybe I needed reinforcements. More than that, I needed information; walking up to that house to knock on the front door could be like walking up to the Lubianka. The only person I could think of with the kind of street knowledge I needed was Ann Winter. A flock of seagulls landed on the sand and began to walk down towards the water as if they knew what they were doing. I started the car and drove to Manny’s.

There was a sprinkle of people in the coffee bar but no sign of the proprietor. A thin blonde was doing the honours in a lackadaisical way, as if her body was somewhere else as well as her mind. I bought a coffee and asked if Ann had been in recently.

‘Yeah, she was. Said she’d be back later.’

‘When?’

She shrugged.

‘Mind if I use the tape machine?’

She shrugged again.

I picked out a blank tape, slipped it into the slot and recited: ‘Ann, Cliff Hardy. I’m sorry about the other night. I didn’t dump you. I ran into some trouble, very heavy stuff. Now I’m going to number ten Monk Lane, Clovelly. Looks like the lead Bruce and Leon had. I’m going for a look-see but maybe you know something about the place. I’ll wait outside for an hour. It’s six-fifteen now. If you hear this before seven-thirty come on over. I’ll pay for the cab. Thought you’d want to see this through’. I wrote ‘For Ann Winter’ on the cassette label and asked the girl to give it to Ann if she came in.

‘You haven’t drunk your coffee,’ she said.

I swilled it down, wishing it had a touch of Manny’s grappa in it and went back out into the rain. The roads were greasy and treacherous as I wound up through the cutting to Clovelly. It was steep going and I wondered how many times Leon had hoofed it in all the years he’d bummed around this district. With some derelicts, the walking is what keeps them alive. It strikes a balance with the sugar and alcohol in their systems and they stay thin and hard like a tree that’s rotting inside but still standing. Eventually the rot wins.

Clovelly is a headland tucked in south of Bronte and east of Randwick. It’s a bit like those two suburbs, but down market on both of them. The flats are a bit meaner, the house fronts and the streets narrower. Monk Lane was thin, twisted and a dead end. It held a mixture of faded, tired-looking flats and houses. Number ten was at the end of the street with a vacant block on one side and a crumbling, roofless cottage on the other. A sheer rock wall with some creeper clinging to it rose up behind the house, which was three storeys high, heavy and ungracious. It had the unmistakable look of a building divided into flats and single rooms.

It was a forbidding pile. There was a narrow cement walkway down one side and it was a fair bet that the skimpy backyard would be a jungle of privet and castor oil trees. It differed from most other places in that the backyard had privacy; around here the terrain is such that every block is fully visible from some higher elevation. Not here, but there was a good chance of getting rubbish thrown down into the back from the top of the rock.

I sat in the car and looked at it, giving Ann time to show up. She didn’t. I had no good ideas on how to tackle the place, so I got my gun out again and stuck it in my belt. That sometimes helps, as I get to thinking of ways to avoid having to use it, but this time nothing helpful came. I hunted out the most anonymous card in my collection, which read, ‘Brian Harrison-independent systems’. It had been left under my door and I never found out who Brian was or what an independent system might be. I put the card in my pocket and stuck my hand out of the window. The rain had stopped; no excuses. There was no activity in the street. One of the lights had blown and it was dark so I took a torch with me.

I walked down the side of the building, scouting. There were a couple of broken windows boarded up at the back where the outside plumbing rusted and dripped. I skidded or. some rubbish on the path and crashed into a couple of battered garbage bins. One went over and spilled a cascade of pet food tins that bounced and rattled over the concrete to meet a pile of flagons, some broken.

I scooted back up the path to the building’s entrance, which was a sort of porch with a low rail stuck to the side like an afterthought. There were buttons numbered one to ten beside the door; I pushed number one and heard it ring inside, close by. While I waited, I pressed a few other buttons and heard nothing.

The door in front of me opened inwards, and from long habit I moved forward and put my foot up on the step.

‘Yes?’ He looked as if he got more practice at saying no, although not necessarily in English. He was small and dark with a sallow, pocked complexion and a mouth that turned down sourly. His forehead was high and deeply creased with frown marks. He wore dirty boots, jeans and a loose sports shirt outside the jeans. I’d have put his age at around thirty. His forearms were sinewy with dark, downy hair; his biceps looked as if they would bunch up like cricket balls. He pulled a grubby handkerchief from a back pocket and wiped his nose.

‘Er, Mr…?’ He didn’t say anything and I had to take the plunge. I handed him the card. ‘I have to check the foundations-main roads and council job. They’ll be working in the area soon, blasting and tunnelling, so we need to know how sound the buildings in the area are.’ I took two steps back and glanced around. ‘Looks okay, but I’ve got to check.’

He came forward and put the card on the railing. I couldn’t tell whether he’d read it or not, or whether he could read it.

‘Very late,’ he said. The voice was light, almost singsong. There was an accent, not Greek, but like it.

‘I’m sorry, but I must look.’

‘Inside or outside?’

‘Oh, outside, mostly, have to look at any basements or cellars. Just that, unless there’s any major cracks.’ I’d already noticed a big crack that ran raggedly up at the back.

‘Council?’

‘And the Department of Main Roads.’ I tried to give the words all the weight I could, and thought some jargon might help. ‘There’s the flight path to consider, too. Decibels. I won’t be long, it’s miserable out.’

He tapped the breast pocket of his shirt. Keys clinked and there seemed to be some muscular development up there too. He pulled the door closed behind him.