‘Thanks, Dot.’ He pushed a cup towards me and rummaged in a drawer of the desk. He pulled out some tin foil wrapped pills, released two and washed them down with a swill of coffee. If it’d been me with that load of worry on I’d have had the bottle out lacing up the coffee, but that wasn’t Terry. But then, pills weren’t Terry either. I took a sip of the coffee and was surprised that it was good espresso.

‘I seem to remember that you wanted my mother’s maiden name and references from three clergymen before you let me take out one of your cars.’ I drank some more coffee and tried to remember the procedure. ‘Driver’s licence, plastic… what else?’

‘All that, but it didn’t do us any good in these cases, or at least in the couple I checked on-all faked. I don’t have the time to follow up on all these and I’m rusty. I wouldn’t know how to go about it now probably.’

‘It hasn’t changed much,’ I said, ‘footslogging, eyestrain…’

‘Eyestrain I know about. Look, Cliff, I’m a desk walloper.’ He snorted derisively and opened a drawer. ‘I made you up a list. I’m good at making up lists.’

He brought out a manila folder, extracted two sheets of paper and pushed them across to me. The first sheet contained five blocks of type, each recording a name, address, licence number, credit card details and information on the car hired: vehicle make and model, mileage recorded, period of hiring etc. There were three Holdens, a Fiat and a Ford Laser. The second sheet carried photostat copies of one personal and one company cheque and three credit card debit slips.

Terry finished his coffee, crumpled the cup and dropped it into his wastepaper bin. ‘I checked on the first two- Majors and Stanford, both Holdens. Phoney as a three dollar note-bodgie addresses, crook licences, no money in the bloody accounts. That’s about twenty thousand bucks worth of car gone west.’