The building that went by the name of the Greenwich Apartments was a small block of flats, six two-bedroomers on three storeys, in behind a lively section of Bayswater Road, Kings Cross. To get to the flats I’d passed a brasserie and a restaurant and a wine bar. It was 9 p.m. and all three places were full. Someone had told me once which was the most trendy and hardest to get a table at, which was the next most desirable and which finished third, but I couldn’t remember the sequence. Beside the entrances to the building that weren’t places to eat and drink at, there were a couple of medicos’ nameplates, discreet neon signs advertising massage, and even a plaque for a fellow practitioner-Terry Stafford, Private Inquiries. Never heard of him.

The traffic was heavy and the area was parked solid. There were cars in ‘No Standing’ zones and across driveways. It was as if everybody in Sydney wanted to pack into this couple of acres. I walked up a lane into a bricked courtyard in front of the flats. Light-coloured brick with dark trim around the windows; decent-sized balconies on the second and third levels. Ivy or something like it crawled up the front of the building and had got a grip on a couple of the balconies. It snaked up a drainpipe towards the roof. No graffiti, no broken windows. A nice place.

The courtyard was boxed in on all sides; lights showed in the other apartment buildings on two sides. The wall behind me was blank-back of a hotel, possibly. No lights showed in the Greenwich Apartments. I stood in approximately the spot where Carmel Wise had been shot dead ten days before.

Here and there bricks were missing or had crumbled and some weeds had sprouted. There were plane trees for shade and a bench to sit on; there was a drinking fountain and a bicycle rack. There was a low pedestal in the middle of the square where a plastic and glass illuminated sign carrying the name of the place had been mounted. It was taken away after the bullets that hadn’t hit Carmel Wise had smashed it. Maybe some of the bullets had hit the girl and the sign; I hadn’t mastered all the exact details yet because Leo Wise had only hired me a few hours before. Leo Wise was Carmel’s father. He also owned the block of flats.