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me the third time. She actually took a photograph of the woman.’
    ‘She happened to have a camera?’
    ‘She always has a camera.’
    ‘Has Sophie been questioned?’
    ‘She was at a party. She has about fifty alibi witnesses.’
    ‘Tell me about the break-in.’
    Sarah put out a hand and picked up a watch, a cheap digital item on a plastic strap. ‘Jesus,’ she said. She stood up fluidly without using her arms. ‘Can we carry on tomorrow? I’ve got to get home and clean up, I’m meeting my father at six.’
    I got up too, not fluidly, I didn’t know how to exit a 1950s Swedish Modern chair with grace. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow night,’ I said. ‘We can find a time that suits you.’
    I gave her my card and said goodbye, walked back the way I had come, around the downed knight in his pool of harsh light, around the steel scrapheap, between the execution and the crawling, panting pack of dog-humans. Finally, I passed by the witches preparing to cook a small creature and came to the sliding door and opened it to the dripping world beyond.

Upstairs at the old boot factory, home, I put on lights, heating, walked around, drew in the dust on the mantelpiece. I looked out of the window at the pencil lines of rain across the streetlight, moved books from one pile to another, washed the breakfast things, turned on the radio, the television, switched them off, got Schubert going:
Winterreise
.
    The music soothed places in the mind. I poured a whisky and soda, sank into an old leather armchair, the repaired survivor of a bomb blast that disintegrated its two companions and a sofa, bought long ago at the Old Colonists’ Club dispersal. Isabel had done the bidding, she had the ability to wait, to move in the smallest increments, to reveal nothing. That was the side of her that made her good at the law, at poker. Her other side cared nothing for calculation, for economy. Without reserve, that side gave away money, time, attention, love. She ministered to her clients, to her untidy siblings, to total strangers. Once a week, she drove across the city to take a steak and onion pie to an old man met at a tramstop who had trouble remembering her name.
    This wasn’t the time to think about Isabel. Food, I would think about food. I got up and went to the kitchen to studyLinda’s donation. Meat, vegetables, cheese. At the Victoria Market, she always bought indiscriminately and extravagantly. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ she once said. ‘The vegie man says he loves me, I’m radio spunk number one, bugger the Italian woman on ABC drivetime. Do I say, Thanks, Giorgio, all I want is a big red pepper?’
    ‘A big red pepper, no,’ I’d said. ‘You don’t want to inflame them further. Better to buy a dozen flaccid cabbages.’
    Thinking about Linda, I lost interest in cooking and went back to the sitting room. The phone rang.
    ‘Ah, for once found without twenty attempts.’
    Cyril Wootton, the plummy tones, made plummier at this hour by his refreshment stop at the Windsor Hotel.
    ‘Is this a business call?’ I said. ‘My office hours are nine to five.’
    ‘Hah hah,’ said Wootton, unamused. ‘You’re easier to find at that scungepit pub you frequent than you are at the hole you call your office.’
    ‘That’s pretty comprehensive, Cyril,’ I said. ‘In one sentence, you’ve insulted two of the things I hold most dear.’
    ‘Moving on,’ said Wootton, ‘I gather Greer’s coached you on the project’s parameters.’
    I sighed. ‘Cyril, the management seminars in Mount Eliza. You promised to stop.’
    In the background, I heard Mrs Wootton shouting something, not the dulcet tones of a loving spouse calling her partner to the candlelit dinner table. I thought I heard the words ‘little prick’.
    Cyril coughed. ‘Prelim scan in forty-eight, that’s from twelve today,’ he said. ‘Updates every twenty-four. Face-to-face. We have a high confidentiality threshold.’
    ‘You have something,’ I said.