It — the grey Land Rover — has been parked at the back of the apartment for days. As vehicles go, it’s an everyday object. Cars are parked everywhere, cars are commonplace. People have been walking past this particular car without a second glance, even looking out of their apartment windows and vaguely noticing its presence but that’s all.
Mrs Alessandro, who has a Maltese background, claims she was among the earliest to spot its presence.
“My kitchen window looks over that area and I’m always gazing out every morning waiting for the microwave to warm my bowl of muesli. One day it was just there,” she says, then prodding her memory a bit she adds, “I thought it was a young man that got out of the car. It must belong to him.”
Try as she might, however, Mrs Alessandro’s memory couldn’t recall what the ‘young man’ looked like, or what type of attire he may have been wearing at the time. How long did it actually take before the car was spotted?
Eight days.
And that too only because a tennis ball happened to smack into its rear, driven uppishly by a youngster playing backyard cricket — or in this case, more appropriately, back alley cricket.
One of the young lads, Jos Stanley, who went to fetch the tennis ball, noticed the first worrying sign: The vehicle had no licence plates. He mentioned this to his parents at dinner that same night. His father, Gordon Stanley, took a quiet perambulation of the vehicle under cover of darkness, being careful not to touch any part of it, his suspicions heightened already. After walking around it about three times and arriving at no particular conclusion, he decided to do a spot of neighourly door-to-door knocking.
In this way, everybody in the 12 apartments first disclaimed any knowledge of the vehicle and secondly became hyper-focused on its presence in their midst.
Shooting in the dark
Speculation began to run rife at about this time possibly just because there were now more minds thinking about it, each with an opinion to offer.
“It’s probably stolen.”
This was the angle of Mrs Alessandro’s Czech neighbour, Nicolas Novak, who in introducing himself, explained his surname was a rough equivalent of the English for Newman. Novak and his roommate Tomas Zahradnik, both mature-aged students, are on a two year scholarship to learn English. “Australian English,” they added, jokingly, “We love Australian English, how it is spoken.”
Had they noticed anything about the car in question? Not really, they said in unison, except it had to be stolen or why would its licence plates be missing?
The Stanley apartment suddenly became an agreed meeting place. Residents they’d only encountered in passing before now knocked, entered, introduced themselves and joined the discussion.
Two of the young wanna-be cricketers thought they discerned a bad smell emanating from the vehicle. This was quickly quashed by sniggering elders who pointed to the covered drain that ran not far from the parked car.
“Let’s not all get jittery,” said one lady resident at last, in a tense voice, “Let’s just call the police and leave the matter in their hands. There’s only so much we can do with our limited expertise. And it doesn’t help our nerves to keep speculating as to what this is all about.”
Around about then, in the sudden silence when everyone was looking at everyone else — a common moment in crowds — to decide who would make the first move to take out their phone and place the call, voices were heard outside the window. A song was starting up. It sounded like a minor celebration. The strains of ‘Happy Birthday dear Josie,’ filtered through.
It transpired later that Doug Manners, a resident two blocks away had bought the car for his daughter’s 18th birthday and had used what he felt was a safe distance to park the car out of sight until the event.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
