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not quite right. Okay, talk soon, Jaffa, see ya.’
    ‘Deborah?’ said Angus questioningly after a few moments, but shejust shook her head in a preoccupied way as she left the room. He watched her go. If she had glanced back at him even for a moment, she would have seen the look of desolation on his face.
    He must have slept for a long time. When he finally woke it was with a start, and a sour cottony taste in his mouth, and a bad feeling that he had mucked things up somehow. There was an appointment, wasn’t there? Someone… Olivia! Alex hurried muzzy-headed from his bedroom to the kitchen but there, propped against the teapot in big clear handwriting was a cheery note from his granddaughter.
    Relieved, he wandered out to the backyard. A soft spring twilight was creeping in. Oh, good work! The vegetable garden was completely cleared of weeds. They must’ve gone like the clappers. No tools lying around, yet he couldn’t recall putting them away. Maybe Olivia had. He looked in the shed. Yes, and she’d cleaned the fork and the spade first too, what a dependable girl. A born gardener.
    Sardines on toast and a nice cup of tea, that would do for dinner. His old favourite. Just as well he had a cupboard full!
    ‘That’s got to be a good couple of shoals worth of sardines there!’ he said out loud. Suddenly he wished he had a cat; he could just picture a cat, a black one perhaps, licking the oil out of the bottom of a sardine tin. That tabby pair they’d had when the kids were young, what were their names? Ernie and Tiny Tim, that was it, Ernie the big boofhead puss and Tiny Tim his pop-eyed, nervous brother, streaking from the room at any unexpected noise. Lots of unexpected noises with a house full of kids. Or a dog; you can’t beat a dog for company, no question. And maybe he’d get one again, someday, but for the moment he was still not quite over losing Banjo. What a great dog he’d been, that Banjo. As Alex sat at the kitchen table eating, it almost seemed that the dog was there, at his feet. He even glanced under the table to check, and the pang it gave him to see only chair legs was unexpectedly acute.
    Just as he finished washing up his plate and cutlery, the phone rang. Debbie, his oldest.
    ‘Hello, darling,’ he said cheerfully. There was something she wanted to tell him. Alex reached for one of the little notepads as his daughter spoke. Jean Thornton , he wrote. And then Girlfriend! and then on a third line, Birthday?
    What on earth was she talking about? After they’d finished their conversation he sat down and stared at what he’d written. It didn’t seem to make sense, not to him anyway. But Debbie didn’t get much wrong, heaven knows, sharp as a tack that girl, always had been. Jean Thornton, Jean Thornton. Suddenly inspired, he went and got his old address book down from the shelf above the phone.
    There it was: Jean Thornton, and an address in Balwyn. And a phone number, in fact a couple of phone numbers, one crossed out. Well, why not? See if he couldn’t solve this mystery. Girlfriend , eh?
    ‘You never know your luck in a big city,’ he said, and carefully dialled the number. A lady answered the phone all right, but she didn’t seem to understand him. Didn’t speak English, that seemed to be the problem. He tried to apologise for the wrong number and hang up but suddenly there was someone else on the line, a teenage boy by the sound of it, with just a bit of an accent.
    ‘Hello, can I help you, who is calling?’ the youth asked.
    ‘Oh, good evening. Well, I’m Alex McDonald, and I was hoping to speak to a lady named Jean Thornton.’
    ‘No, sorry. What number do you call?’
    Alex told him the number.
    ‘No, sorry,’ the boy said again. ‘That is the number here, but no lady by that name. This is the Lim family residence.’
    Alex thanked him, and apologised, and said good night. The Lim family residence. Well, well. The mystery remained unsolved. He sat staring at the entry in