Lettie was a beautiful woman with a light brown skin, black hair and slanted eyes. Her ancestry could have been Aboriginal, Polynesian, African or Asian or a mixture of any or all. Lettie didn’t know or care. She’d been abandoned in a taxi hours after being born and had been raised in institutions and foster homes. She was intelligent and athletic, did well at school and stayed out of trouble until she was twenty and had almost finished her nursing course. She met Royce Brown and that was the end of the straight life for Lettie. Brown had been dead for five years when I met Lettie but she had photographs of him and you could see what he had on offer-incredible goods looks, a fine physique and a smile to make their knees knock. He was also a heroin addict and a sociopath.

Lettie stuck with Brown for ten years-most of which he spent in gaol-had a child by him, used smack with him, turned tricks for him, did anything. She was arrested for this and that, served some time. When Brown OD’d she fell apart for a while, then got herself back together, got her nursing qualification and worked as a drug counsellor. We had a brief, intense affair and although I hadn’t treated her well we stayed friends afterwards. We’d lost touch though and Oldcastle said she’d taken up with Lance Christenson and was deeply involved in his operations-providing girls, entertaining contacts, laundering money.

‘What’s he look like, this Christenson?’ I asked.

‘He looks like Errol Flynn, and acts like him.’ That made sense. Lettie had made fun of my battered face, claimed to appreciate ‘pretty’ men and lamented that they were in short supply- at least the kind that liked women. I still had a load of guilt about Lettie. I didn’t exactly blame myself if she’d drifted back under the influence of a handsome bad man, but I felt I owed it to her to find out how deeply she was implicated in Christenson’s activities. The way Oldcastle told it, she’d take a long fall with him when he told all he knew. There was too much that was good and strong in Lettie for me to allow that to happen without at least giving her a warning. Big problem of the semi-professional-conflict of interest.