*
The Palace looms in the darkness, a crumbling three-story edifice. The electricity has been cut off for years, the owners waiting to see which happens first: a property developer with an impressively bulging wallet turning up to make the right offer, or one of the itinerants who drift in and out of the place falling asleep with a half-finished joint and burning the decaying structure down.
Across the road in a park, a swing moves gently in the rain. In Stan’s car, Hana plays the video again, the image zooming in on one particular rusting iron balcony. The last flat on the second floor.
Stan retrieves flashlights from the trunk and they head for the entrance.
Hana hauls aside the CONDEMNED notice tacked across the front door, shines her torch into the darkness beyond, picking out the shapes of a couple of homeless covered in cardboard. Slurs of protest greet the dazzling police flashlights. ‘Just passing through, fellas, don’t mind us,’ Hana soothes as the two cops pick their way past.
She leads the way up a graffitied stairwell, most of the handrails broken. ‘Jesus. Smell this place,’ says Stan, as they head towards the farthest door on the second level, muffled noises coming from around the building.
Hana knocks on the last door in the hallway. ‘Hello. Hello. Police.’ No response.
Stan pushes the door. It swings open. Unlocked.
The beams of the two torches pick their way around the flat. It’s one room, consisting of a bedroom slash kitchen area. The place has long since been gutted of anything that could be sold or slept on or burned for warmth.
There’s a door to the outside balcony with its rusty railings, Hana forces it open. There’s nothing to be seen on the rain-soaked platform. Looking through what remains of the cupboards and wardrobe, Stan says, ‘Nothing here. Take you home, D Senior.’
It’s raining harder now. Back in the car, Stan hits the wipers, starts the engine, and as he pulls away, Hana looks back at the Palace for a final time. Each of the poky apartments is laid out identically, she can see from this angle: the balcony, the windows.
The windows.
‘Stop,’ she says, urgent. Stan pulls over, perplexed. ‘They all have a window to the side of the balcony. Every flat.’
Stan looks out through the rain. He can see that Hana’s right: in each apartment there is an external window located away from the door to the balcony. But he has no idea why she’s suddenly interested in boarding house design.
‘If there’s a window,’ she tells him, ‘there must be a room.’
‘There was a room,’ he points out. ‘There was nothing in it.’ His mind is on the last two episodes of the Netflix series he wants to watch tonight, if he ever actually gets home. He’s suddenly aware of the look on Hana’s face. A look he’s familiar with. Hana in mentor mode, forever prodding the more junior detective towards pushing himself harder, thinking through every angle, looking at a problem from every side, always giving himself the best chance of reaching the right answer.
‘Boss?’
‘That’s a second window,’ she says. ‘Means there’s a second room.’
It takes a moment for Stan to twig. Shit.
‘There was no second room . . .’
*
Stan, a few inches taller than Hana, climbs up onto the railing of the balcony outside the flat. Hana grasps him by the belt in case he slips. The rain is really coming down, and as he stretches, a cold stream of water plummeting from a rusted gutter somehow manages to aim its way straight down his collar. He gets his hand on the sill of the window, but it’s just too far for him to see inside.
Hana helps him clamber down.
Inside the apartment, tap tap tap. Hana uses the rubber end of her flashlight, tapping her way along the wall behind which the missing room should logically be. At a certain point, the sound changes, tap tap thud. Where the wall is thinner, where it’s hollow behind. She taps around the space, finding the perimeter of the hollow area.
‘About the size of a door,’ Stan suggests. A door that’s been sealed over.
Hana sounds out the hollow space, finding the middle point. She draws the flashlight back half a metre and . . . She slams the end of the flashlight into the wall. It goes straight through. She scrapes away plaster, points the beam through the fist-sized hole, searching the dark room beyond.
The beam falls on something inside. But the hole in the wall is too small to see clearly what it is.
Hana steps back. She kicks at the wall, hard. The newly plastered-over section caves in, leaving an opening the size of a fireplace. Stan grimaces. ‘Oh God.’ His hand goes to his nose at a rush of rank air.
Lit by the beams of the two torches is a body. A rope is noosed around its neck. The body is suspended from a rafter.
It sways gently. It’s a man. Late twenties. Naked. He’s dead. The beam of Hana’s flashlight picks out his arms. His hands are bound in front of his torso, the feet tied at the ankle.
She studies the strange scene in the hidden room. Outside, the rain keeps falling.
Grove Press
Atlantic Monthly Press
