‘Her father sends her a cheque each month-it is almost their only form of communication.’
Something about the way she spoke made me feel as if I’d been dismissed. I got off the desk and put the trusty notebook in my jacket pocket. I was wearing a cord jacket with patch pockets. For once, I even had leather shoes on and pants with a crease. Mrs Tsang ushered me out of the study and closed the door firmly behind us. We went down a passage decked out with things that looked Chinese to me but probably weren’t. The decor of the sitting room she left me in while she got the address looked Indian but it was probably Nepalese.
She came back quickly and handed me a folded piece of paper. I left the house through one of the doors guarded by a burglar alarm that didn’t work. The Jag had gone. I wondered if its alarm worked.
I couldn’t say I felt very hopeful as I went down the path towards the street where I’d left my car. Dr Kangri was like a cryptic crossword with not enough clues, and Mrs Tsang, even if she hadn’t told me all she knew, looked like she could stand a few weeks of torture without squealing. At the gate, I turned and looked back at the house; it was one of those big, solid places with two or three different levels and interesting angles. There were vines growing over some of the white painted brickwork and a big, curved window was reflecting the late afternoon sun. There was not a single Oriental touch on the outside and hardly an Occidental one inside.
With a thick-tipped pen Mrs Tsang had written 48 Royal Street, Darlinghurst. It was a long step from the Kangri mansion with the vines and the park just across the way, and the glittering water beyond the trees and grass. As always when I drive around Sydney, I left the water with some reluctance. There’s nothing much to be said for driving into Darlinghurst at 5 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, especially since they’ve blocked off all the streets so that you can’t get within three blocks of where you want to go. I parked near one of the barriers and walked through a set of narrow lanes to Royal Street. Number 48 was in the middle of a narrow terrace presenting a flat, blank face to the street. It had the standard bars on the windows and the standard bluestone front step worn concave by more than a hundred years of feet.
I knocked and waited. After a while a young girl in a man’s singlet came to the door and stood there, blinking at the fading light and rubbing her eyes.
‘I’m looking for May Kangri.’
‘Who the fuck is it?’ A man’s voice rumbled in the hall behind her. She didn’t look at me or turn to answer; she just spoke into the void above my head.
‘Some straight lookin’ for May.’
‘Tell him to piss off.’
‘Piss…’ she began, but I shouldered her aside and went through the door. The passage was dark but I could see a large shape at the end of it; as I came closer to the shape I began to smell it.
‘You tell me to piss off,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you try being polite? You might like it.’
He was short and burly with massive stubby arms-not someone to wrestle with. ‘May Kangri; this is the last address I’ve got for her and it’s recent.’
He grunted and tried to kick me in the stomach, I leaned against the wall to make him miss and then felt the breath go out of me and a pain begin in my foot and travel up my leg. He’d turned the missed kick into a stomp faster than the eye could see. I backed off and kept by the wall. He came after me in a fast shuffle and I didn’t know whether to watch his hands or his feet. He lowered his head as if he might try some butting as well and that was a mistake; I used my much longer reach to get a fistful of his thick greasy hair. I yanked it like pulling weeds and he squealed and flailed his clublike arms. I kept clear and bore down hard; it would have scalped him if he hadn’t gone down with the pressure. I got behind him, laced my fingers into the hair and bent him back in a kneeling position so that my knee dug in half way down his spine. I dug in hard and he screamed.
‘Come here!’ The girl jumped as I snapped at her: she looked as if she’d been about to run out the door. ‘Your friend’s in pain,’ I said. ‘Where’s May Kangri?’
‘Heavy,’ she said.
The man on his knees spoke in a voice that sounded like heart-broken sobbing. ‘She’s at Rush-cutters Bay, on a fuckin’ boat. Let the fuck go.’
‘Where at Rushcutters Bay?’
‘Marina, next to the fuckin’ yacht squadron.’
‘Name of boat?’ I eased back on the knee.
‘Poppie, Pansy, somethin’ like that. Shit!’
‘When did she go aboard, Captain?’
‘Yes’d’day.’
I let go the hair and pushed him down flat on his face. He lay there gasping and I stepped over him and round the girl. She was still blinking as if she’d stepped out into the noon sun.
‘Excuse me,’ I opened the door. ‘Polite, see? I’m sure your friend could get the hang of it if he tried.’
‘Piss off,’ she said.
‘What’s the matter with you people? Why’re you so bloody aggressive?’
She sniggered. ‘Wait’ll you meet May.’ Then she slammed the door in my face.
Back to the water I need never have left had I only known. That’s the story of a private eye’s life; as often as not the trail ends where it began, that’s when there turns out to be a trail at all. This sort of thinking occupied me on the trip to Rushcutters Bay and it either made me tired or made me realise that I was tired already. It had been a week of long drives and late nights on matters personal and professional, and if I’d been Nero Wolf or Whimsey or someone like that I wouldn’t have taken Kangri’s job on grounds of exhaustion. But I needed the money.
It was close to 7 o’clock when I arrived, the butt end of a mild March day, and the light was almost spent. Beyond the water the city skyscape rose up, jagged-shaped and erratically lit. A half-turn and I could see clear across the water to North Sydney.
It’s a wonder there isn’t more theft, vandalism and arson on tied-up boats because the security at the average marina is lousy. There was virtually none at Rushcutters Bay. The marina was flanked by closed shops that sold nautical gear, a clubhouse and a slipway with boats drawn up high and dry for servicing or whatever they call it. A weatherbeaten old pipe-smoker leaning against the timber office at the end of the wharf took an uninterested look at me as I stepped over the loose chain and headed for the boats. Maybe it was the patch-pocket jacket that did the trick.
There was only just enough light to read names by; some I had to squint at, a few I had to guess at. There was no Pansy but a Tall Poppy was bobbing near the end of the better lit stretch of wharf-the part which provided light, water, power and would get cable TV when it came.
It was a sleek white boat with two masts, furled sails and a lot of glass and brass and pale yellow rope scattered about. I went to the edge of the planking and called down, feeling slightly silly at talking loudly to a boat. A light came on near the stern and I heard a scuffling noise and a few muffled giggles. A woman’s head appeared through a hole in the deck followed by her upper body and legs. She stood up against the night sky and looked to be about seven feet tall. It was an illusion; as she moved closer I could see that she was only six feet tall-long and willowy with cropped dark hair. She was naked apart from a few gold chains around her neck; the chains glinted in the marina lights and her skin, which was about the same colour, gleamed.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘Are you May Kangri?’
‘Yes. Who’re you?’
‘My name’s Hardy, I’m a private detective, working for your father.’
She was close now, just a few feet below me on the deck; her body was about perfect as six foot, golden female bodies go. She had the slightly flat face of her father but I wouldn’t have taken many points off for that.
‘Who told you I was here?’ Her voice was without warmth, almost hostile.
‘The guy at Royal Street.’
‘Fuck him.’
‘Don’t blame him. He didn’t want to tell me, I had to persuade him.’