Year of the Talking Dog: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 2) Read Free Page B

lift and take the nine flights of steps back down the stairs, carefully not looking at how high up I am and not thinking about falling or jumping. I look down at my feet and run my hands along the chipped walls on either side of me to steady myself. Back through the smells of mould, through the fried eggs.
    But what is there downstairs? The caretaker’s office. I’d never seen it open and today, as usual, a grey curtain conceals the glass window. In the corner there’s a faded plastic sign written in kanji and hiragana. I don’t know what it says, but I can guess. Not here. With a telephone number. I take a picture of the sign. It might come in handy later.  
    The lift doors whisk open behind me, and the old man comes out. He’s carrying a white plastic bag tied at the top and a bundle of newspapers. He bows to me and indicates with a jerk of his head that I should follow him. We walk around the side. Out on the pavement against the rear of the building are stacks of newspapers, plastic bags, old clothes, cans, bottles and broken electric fans. It must be unburnable day today. He tips his head at the piles of clothes and adds his plastic bag to the pile of other bags, then leaves me alone with the rubbish.
    Has he been trying to tell me something? I look at the clothes. Paint-splattered and worn out. Like something Steve would wear even out on the town. In fact, this is exactly what Steve would wear. I pick up the bundle. It’s tied with plastic cord in perfect 50cm cubes, just like you are supposed to do, but something Steve would never do, being allergic to exactness, he would say. So it couldn’t be his clothes. But I look at the label sewn into the back of a worn-out shirt. “George” it says. Could be British but could just as easily be from one of the Shibuya boutiques eager to sound foreign.  
    Under a pile of newspapers where the old man had put his pile are sketchbooks. My heart starts beating faster and my hands grow clammy. I pull the newspaper bundles aside and there I see watercolours. Stacks and stacks of his work. I open some at random. Landscapes of Tokyo. Sketches of penguins walking over Shibuya crossing. I remember the day we sat in the coffee shop overlooking the scramble. Hundreds of thousands of people waiting to cross the zebra crossing by the Hachiko exit. I’d said they looked like ants, Steve had laughed and said no, penguins.  
    How could he throw it away? I look around at the rubbish. A coffee pot that was the same as Steve’s. An old futon mattress. A box of mugs and wine glasses still smeared with the different colours of paints. Cadmium yellow, orange and red, the colours Steve mixes to create the sunset pictures that he waits all day to capture from his apartment in the quarter of an hour when he comes alive, splashing water over a giant piece of paper, swirling paint around in the wine glasses throwing yellows down over everything, then splashes of blue, where they meet, they bleed together to make new colours, and just when you think the scene is impossibly bright, one devastating sweep of his brush and there is a purple horizon with all the skyscrapers of Tokyo. I leaf through the sketchbook in my hand. Pages of views of the Tokyo Skytree, only in some it’s tall and straight, in others it’s bent and the colours bleeding. I met him there at the base — he knew better than to invite me to the top—and we had considered eating out if it wasn’t so expensive. Then more pictures of moving figures, men and women.
    I have to find one sketchbook. The one with the drawings he’d made of me while I was sleeping. No one had ever wanted to do that to me, to picture me and when he showed me the sketches, I cried. They were so beautiful, nothing like me. A tan cover tied with brown ribbons. Identical to the one I can see in the pile of books in front of me. I push the other papers aside and grab it. On the cover is a company name, Holbein Drawing Book F4. And in a single brushstroke