Free Sensitive New Age Spy by Geoffrey McGeachin

the Nile, but my apartment block was more a 1930s copy of an English seaside hotel. My place was on the top floor, with views stretching from the seawater pool at the Icebergs swimming club right round to the rocks at Ben Buckler Point, but unfortunately no parking.
    It took twenty minutes of cruising the streets before a space big enough for my four-wheel drive opened up. I carefully avoided bumping the kerb, since the Bondi salt air had reduced the old Pathfinder’s body to several small areas of metal held together by paint and rust. Even a decent slamming of the driver’s door had the potential to cause the vehicle’s total disintegration.
    I stopped in at Nirvana Beach Liquor to grab a couple of bottles of red, and on my way out I caught the tempting aroma of drunk noodles coming from Nina’s Ploy Thai round on Wairoa Avenue, but it was a bit too early for dinner, considering I’d just finished lunch.
    Back home, I started rummaging through the kitchen drawer for a corkscrew. Then I remembered the events of the previous night and found it next to my bed. I noticedmy bed had been made, the room straightened up, and my plants watered.
    The only reason I still had any living houseplants was my next-door neighbour, Mrs Templeton, who watered them when I was away on assignment, or busy, or just plain forgot. She also collected my mail and popped the odd shepherd’s pie and tub of homemade soup into my freezer for those times when I needed a bit of comfort food. Mrs T was a pretty dammed good cook when it came to comfort food. Every bloke should have a Mrs T next door.
    She had moved into Luxor Mansions when she arrived from Scotland with her husband in the early 1950s. Mr Templeton was a marine engineer who’d survived three ships being torpedoed out from under him on the Atlantic convoy runs in World War II. He walked away from the chronic unemployment of post-war Glasgow and into a job at the Garden Island dockyard within a week of arriving in Sydney. Mrs T was widowed and still living in the Mansions when I bought the building in the eighties with the profits from the sale of pictures I’d done for WorldPix, well before the smart set discovered Bondi and sent the prices through the roof.
    I kept my ownership quiet and ignored the managing agent when he told me I could turf her out, give the place a splash of paint, whack down some seagrass matting and quadruple the rent. I didn’t need the extra money, and besides, it was nice to drink tea and chat in Mrs T’s sunroom while Dougal, her wheezing and flatulent pug, grunted andsnuffled under my feet like a small black asthmatic vacuum cleaner, sucking up the crumbs of her delicious homemade biscuits.
    I poured a glass of wine and wandered into Mrs T’s flat through the front door I could never persuade her to keep closed. ‘Dougal can protect me,’ she’d say, and given the lethal quality of the little bugger’s farts, she may well have been right. When I walked in the ugly mutt was snoozing on a shawl on her lap and he didn’t even bother to look up. So much for a watchdog.
    The Cooking Channel was on the box and that Scottish chef Nick Nairn was doing something mouthwatering with a whole salmon. I think Mrs T fancied Mr Nairn, but maybe it was just his accent.
    ‘You left early this morning, Alby,’ she said, looking up. ‘And Julie not long after.’ She paused. ‘She’s a lovely wee girl, Alby. Just lovely.’
    Mrs T had plans for Julie and me, but I couldn’t seem to explain to her that Julie wasn’t interested. I’m not too sure she bought my stories of the platonic sleepovers either.
    ‘I had to go and take pictures of the tanker that broke down in the harbour,’ I said.
    ‘Aye,’ she nodded, ‘and all the press photographers were being picked up in police cars this morning, I suppose?’
    Mrs T might have been well into her eighties but she was nobody’s fool. Along with kilted soldiers and ship’s engineers, the Scots had produced more