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you?’
    ‘Is this just an expensive personal health inquiry, Will?’
    I pretended I thought this was funny and laughed.
    ‘And how’s the Company? How are they getting on?’
    ‘Since you left? Never better, Will. Never better.’
    ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s drop the pretence that this is a social call.’
    ‘No pretence at this end, Will. I imagine you want something.’
    ‘I need your help,’ I said, and let this startling admission sink in.
    ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but the only reason I’m listening is that you’re two thousand miles away. So whatever it is, I won’t be tempted to thump you.’
    ‘It’s about my brother Brian,’ I said, and told him all that had happened. He wasn’t in any way censorious about Brian’s having had an affair, but he said Sarah Goodenough wasn’t the ideal choice of mistress.
    ‘Given who he’s related to, that’s hardly a surprise though, is it?’ he said.
    He told me that Sarah Goodenough was known to the Maryborough police, although she had never been charged with anything. The owner of the Royal Hotel had had suspicions that she had been using her room there as a brothel. It was true that she entertained a lot of men, but there had been no evidence that money had changed hands.
    ‘There’s no law against giving it away for free,’ Topaz said, ‘so you might like to tell your brother that he’d been cultivating a well-ploughed furrow, and that if Sarah Goodenough told him she loved him she was lying.’
    Topaz said he’d do some checking, but that any information would be passed to the Melbourne police, who would, he assumed, be contacting the Maryborough police in due course, if they hadn’t already done so. He would, however, ring later that afternoon and tell me anything he thought was relevant as long as it didn’t compromise the investigation. I gave him Paul Clutterbuck’s number and said that I would be there about 5.00 p.m.
    ‘I liked your brother, Will. I’m doing this to help him. I still think you’re a complete dill.’
    ‘Give my regards to everyone,’ I said.
    ‘Now why would I want to ruin their day?’ he said, and hung up.
    I congratulated myself on not having risen to any of Topaz’s childish taunts, and was pleased to admit a little rush of professional superiority. I felt I had passed some sort of test. Private inquiry agents don’t allow their emotions to run away with them.
    The Leonardo bookshop sat at the eastern end of Little Collins Street in an area that was favoured by a louche crowd who thought themselves modern. Here one could see men in corduroy trousers, (I recalled my mother’s advice that corduroy was always a mistake), and with beards, and with the self-conscious swagger of the determined and committed outsider. Artists and writers and communists gathered here, but I wasn’t interested in what they painted or what they wrote. I am not, I hasten to add, a philistine, but I don’t believe that verses penned by badly dressed, scrofulous comrades pose a serious threat to the sonnets of Mr William Shakespeare. It seemed to me that the only thing these people had in common with the Bard was facial hair.
    I wasn’t entirely comfortable in this part of town but, drawing on my acting skills, I affected an appropriate slouch and entered the bookshop at a quarter to two. It was an odd place. There was no counter at the front. Instead, the man who I took to be the proprietor sat behind a table in a far corner. He nodded when I came in, and went back to reading his book.
    I began browsing casually: there was a table in the centre of the room and I picked up one of the titles that lay upon it. It was a collection of poetry written by someone with an unpronounceable name and translated by someone else with an equally unpronounceable name. I read the opening line of the opening poem and recognised the words as being English, but could force no sense from them. I put it down and browsed through a volume of photographs.