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Authors: Vivienne Kelly

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BOOK: Cooee
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‘You can if you like,' he said, laughing. ‘I'll be gone in two minutes, and it'll take them forty to come, minimum. So no harm done. But Matty mightn't like it.'

‘There is no Matty,' I called after him. I followed him up the stairs.

He was a quick mover: he'd already looked in the ensuite. He had returned to the bedroom and was inspecting Max's wardrobe, which was pretty well non-existent: most of what I hadn't packed in the suitcase I'd taken by then to the Salvos.

He turned to me. He looked oddly at a loss. ‘What happened? He's gone. I can tell he's gone. Where did he go?'

‘I don't know,' I said.

We stood there and eyed each other.

‘I'll be on my way,' he said, eventually. ‘But I'll be back. When you hear from Matty, you tell him Colin wants to speak with him. Okay?'

And he was down the stairs and out the front door. I followed him to the landing and called after him, but he'd gone. I looked out the window and saw him get into a nondescript dark blue hatchback and drive off.

I sat down on the bed. My heart's hammering had taken over my body, and I concentrated unsuccessfully on diminishing its force. My legs felt weak. It had happened so quickly. Well, nothing had happened, really, but what might happen? What might not happen, next time? Was I to be perpetually constrained by my guilt from taking action whenever I was threatened? I seemed to visualise a future as in a series of oblique mirrors, a conga line of endless bald-headed little men bursting into my house whenever they felt like it, charging up my stairs, searching my bathroom cupboard and my wardrobe, peering under my bed, through my drawers.

And what did he mean by
Matty
?

I stood up and my legs felt so wobbly that I sat down again, speedily. Eventually I lurched downstairs, gripping the rail, settling both feet firmly on each tread before attempting the next. I reached the kitchen safely, poured myself a slug of brandy in one of Max's elegant Swedish tumblers.

I sat in the kitchen and sipped it until I felt its fire enter me and strengthen me. I'm turning into an old soak, I thought. Off to the brandy bottle every time something goes wrong. It was true: I had been drinking too much. It always seems more, and worse, when you do it on your own; but it does help so.

Then I grabbed the keys and locked the security doors, front and back. Borrow accompanied me, full of benign importance.

‘You weren't any bloody use,' I said to him, bitterly. ‘Call yourself a watchdog?'

He wagged his tail happily and licked my hand.

I went back upstairs. I sat on the bed and opened the drawer in Max's bedside table, where I had kept his wallet, where I had noticed the envelopes. They were still there, four of them, the addresses all handwritten but all in different writing. The address was the same for all: a post-office box in North Ringwood.

Why North Ringwood, God help us? We lived in leafy Hawthorn: why drive out to the godforsaken edge of the city to collect your mail?

Two envelopes were addressed to Max Knight. One was addressed to Martin Ritter. The last was addressed to Matthew Templar. They were all neatly slit open at the top. Max always used a rather evil-looking letter-opener with a sharp curved blade, like a miniature silver scimitar. It was still in the drawer.

I sat and looked at them. Some ancient schoolgirl memory awoke in my brain. I went downstairs, carrying the envelopes gingerly, and found the old German dictionary.

It was as I had remembered, or half-remembered. ‘Ritter' was German for ‘knight'.

Hadn't the Templars been crusaders? Knights?

Max Knight. Martin Ritter. Matthew Templar.

Max Knight. Martin Knight. Matthew Knight.

Oh, Max, Max. If that was your name, which it seems it wasn't. What a wag you were. It would almost have been funny, if it hadn't been so frightening.

I turned the envelopes over in my hands. There was little point now in being prissy about Max's privacy. I opened them one at a time, taking care to keep the contents of each next to its envelope.

Inside the two envelopes addressed to Max Knight there were two cheques, one for twenty thousand dollars and one for thirty-two thousand dollars. They were made out to Max and stamped non-negotiable. The signatures were the same, but illegible.

Inside the envelope addressed to Martin Ritter there were four photographs — black and white, roughly cut at the edges — of the kind you take in passport photo booths. Each was of an Asian girl, head and shoulders. None looked older than fifteen or so. A name was written in black ink, in delicate careful handwriting, on the back of each. There was May, Susie, Kylie and Lindy Lou. All were pretty and smiling. Susie's expression was a trifle forced, but the rest of them beamed at the camera like true professionals. A folded piece of flimsy paper — like old-fashioned airmail paper — was also in the envelope. On it, in Max's unmistakeable spiky writing, was written:
SQ 277, 14.50, 15/7.

In the envelope addressed to Matthew Templar there was some stiff yellow paper with a number typed on it, apparently by an old-fashioned typewriter. At first I thought it might be a telephone number, but it had too many digits. Fourteen digits. It could have been the number of a bank account.

I sat and regarded these things and heard Bea's voice in my head.
What does he do? Where does all the money come from? Tax evasion? Prostitution? Drugs? White slave traffic?
I heard the despairing pitch of her voice.
You know nothing, nothing about him. What in Christ's name are you doing?

I looked at the paper with Max's writing on it.
SQ
? Flight prefix, Singapore Airlines? Yes, I was sure of it. I'd picked Max up at the airport from Singapore Airlines flights.
14.50
— that would be the time.
15/7
— date.

I looked at Lindy Lou and Kylie. I found I didn't want to know anything about them. I didn't like the expression in Kylie's eyes. I fingered the cheques. One of them, I noticed, was from a German bank, although the envelope had been locally posted. I realised I didn't even know what bank Max was with. I'd seen him use ATMs, from time to time, but I'd never seen him walk into a bank.

I went back upstairs and replaced the envelopes in the drawer. I took out the wallet. I'd looked at it briefly, before, but it was time for an exhaustive search.

There was still a thousand dollars, more or less, inside, in crisp hundred-dollar notes. I'd used a lot of the money by this stage: I'd regarded it as a kind of informal banking arrangement, one that hadn't required me to find an ATM or a friendly teller. (People still used tellers, sometimes, in those days; and some of them were friendly.) I hadn't used the credit cards, nor examined the rest of the wallet's compartments. Now, I turned it inside out.

There were five credit cards, one of which was AMEX and the others different versions of Visa and MasterCard. All were gold, or platinum, or whatever signified a VIP cardholder in some way. All bore Max's name except the Visa. That belonged to Matthew Templar.

There was a driving licence. I examined this carefully. It was made out in the name of Maximilian Knight. His date of birth was 4 August, which was when we'd always celebrated his birthday. His age here was consonant with what he'd told me. He'd been fifty-two when he died. I turned it over in my hands, feeling it, weighing it, squinting at it.

I retrieved my own driving licence from my purse and compared the two. If Max's licence had been forged, the forger had been talented. Reliable. Well, Max liked having reliable people working for him. He'd often told me that. When Rain was being built, he'd been angered by unreliability and tardiness. If somebody told him something was going to happen, it had to happen.

It was ridiculous, I thought crossly to myself. Why should I expect Max's driving licence to be forged?

Max Knight. Martin Ritter. Matthew Templar.

I went back to the wallet. His Medicare card. His private health insurance card. Both apparently in order, the name of Maximilian Knight embossed on the plastic.

There was the photograph of me, of course.

There were two receipts. One was for petrol, the other for the dinner we'd eaten at a local restaurant the week before he'd died.

What would happen to the credit cards, I wondered. To the accounts, I mean. Did he use them? Where would the bills be sent? To North Ringwood? They didn't come to Rain, I was sure of that. All the household bills — electricity, telephone, and so forth — came to the house, as well as the MasterCard we shared, but none of these. What would happen when they were not paid? How much was owing on them? Did the banks have Rain's address?

There was nothing else in the wallet. Bare and neat, it gave nothing away.

I wondered if I should go out to the post-office box at North Ringwood and investigate it. What illicit and unwelcome mail might be accumulating behind its small, bland exterior? Would I need to provide identification? I'd never used a post-office box.

What had the little man meant when he said Matty wouldn't like it if I were to call the police? Who had I been living with? Who was this man I had married?

It came to me that post-office boxes were small and black and mounted in rows on walls outside post offices. I'd seen people unlocking them and walking away. You walked up; you unlocked your box; you walked away. Nobody stopped you; nobody asked for ID or anything else. You just turned up.

With a key. You turned up with a key.

I'd put Max's keys in the suitcase in the station locker. I hadn't anticipated needing them. I'd glanced quickly at them: I'd seen the house keys and the car keys, of which naturally I had duplicates. There must have been other keys: the post- office-box key, for example; perhaps the key to a place of business; perhaps the key to a house where Kylie and her friends lived.

I'd never seen Max with other keys, only the bunch I now regretted disposing of. I looked quickly through the other drawers in the bedside table, but there was nothing there apart from a couple of prescriptions, a nail file, a calculator, the vicious little curving letter-opener, a packet of mints: the sorts of innocent items any man might have in his bedside table.

Max had a study, too, of course. I had taken some delight in creating it. It had smoke-grey carpet, burgundy leather chairs, a magnificent mahogany desk, framed Chinese prints on the walls. The furnishings were all dark and sumptuous, but the room itself was bright and light-filled because I had designed it with two huge north-facing windows that looked down over the pool. Where the pool had once been.

Max had always joked that it was the only design fault the house had, that his study window lured him away from his study.

He hadn't spent a great deal of time here. Maybe two or three hours a week. He had always kept it fastidiously tidy — never with piles of papers lying around, never any mess. I'd hardly been in it, since he'd died.

I came in now, looked on the desk, in the desk drawers. Bills, a birthday card I'd given him. Pens, paper. His Mont Blanc fountain pen. The kind of bits and pieces you expect to find in a desk. A folder with some papers in it. House insurance. Car registration. Max had remarkably few papers, all things considered. I was amazed by how little there was.

What on earth had he done with all the paraphernalia of his life, the endless forms and identification papers, the letters and bills and receipts, the shifty bits of paper that flutter through life around us, mapping our lives, exposing our histories, defining our limits, recording our tiniest transactions? If he owned shares or stocks, if he conducted mysterious business through consultancies, if he made money, surely there must be paper trails somewhere, trails that I or the tax man or anyone else could follow?

My own desk, downstairs in a study-cum-sitting room where I very occasionally worked and which we called the studio, was crammed with such extraneous material.

No cheque book, no bank book. No passport. And no keys.

There was a filing cabinet, though. A handsome, shining, black two-drawer filing cabinet. Of course. That was where everything was. But it, too, was locked.

So many keys, I suddenly needed! So many keys, where I had thought none existed. So many locked doors dividing me from the things I needed to know.

There was nothing I could do about the box at North Ringwood — or, at any rate, nothing I could see at that point. But the filing cabinet belonged to me; it was in my house and I had some kind of power over it, control in a zone where control was spinning away from me.

I rang a locksmith the next morning and it took him approximately two and a half minutes to open the filing cabinet. He was a middle-aged chap with grey stubble over his chin, a bag full of tools and a mouth full of chat. I said as languidly as I could manage that I'd lost the keys, such a bore, just couldn't find them.

‘Ah, it's a bugger, isn't it?' he said, settling down to work. ‘You lock something up all safe and sound and you pop away the key in a nice safe place and the next moment you can't remember what you've done with it. A real bugger. And there'll be something in here you need as a matter of urgency, I suppose? There always is.'

BOOK: Cooee
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