My filing system has never been well organised and, what with moving office a couple of times and a spell of working from home, it’d become a bit chaotic. So it took me more than an hour and another drink to track down Ray Frost. It was twenty-five years ago. All it took was a glance at one of the notes I’d made to bring the whole thing back to me.

Frost had been in gaol, on remand for involvement in an armed robbery.

‘He’s innocent,’ Frost’s lawyer, Charles Bickford, had told me. ‘I want you to prove it.’

It was a bit unusual for a lawyer to be so adamant about the innocence of a client and I asked Bickford why he thought so.

‘The police have it in for him. He’s been in trouble before and he’s a maverick sort of character. Won’t take shit from anyone, including me. I can’t help liking him.’

I’d dealt with Bickford before and more or less trusted his judgement, so I took his money and the case. Three men had robbed an armoured car delivery to a business in the CBD very early in the morning. They’d been masked and were efficient. They didn’t injure the guards and got away with about sixty thousand dollars-probably less than they’d expected. A witness said the mask on one of the robbers had slipped and he identified Frost in a lineup. I went to see Frost in Long Bay.

‘It’s bullshit,’ he said. ‘I was at home asleep. I’ve never worn a mask in my life.’

‘How do you figure it, then?’

Frost was a big, solid man, handsome in a rugged way. He was very calm, which isn’t easy to be when you’re on remand facing a serious charge. I knew because I’d been there. He didn’t fidget or avoid my eyes. He smoked, as so many did back then, including me, but not compulsively.

‘Must’ve been someone who looked like me. Plenty do.’

That was true enough. He said he was alone in the house at the time of the robbery. His wife had just had a premature baby and was still in the hospital with it. He’d been awake for two days through the crisis and was grabbing some sleep.