He shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. She has a car. She comes and goes.’

I poised the pen. ‘And your wife has a car as well of course. Makes and registration numbers please.’

He told me and that was all there was to do. We stood simultaneously and shook hands. His grip was firm but icy cold. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘We’ll see, Mr Price. We’ll see.’

After he left I wandered along the street and banked his cheque. I had a number of small matters on hand, hanging really, needing winding up, and I determined to put in a day at the office to clear them. It’d be phone calls and faxes, invoicing and explaining; not my favourite activities. Price’s problems had got under my skin, partly, I suppose, because my own recently-acquired daughter had had similar problems, and partly because I was sure there was a lot more beneath the surface of the case than Price had told me, possibly more than he knew. That eighteen-year-old Danni had a passport interested me. I wondered when she’d travelled and where. And why would Price, who appeared to be pretty savvy, marry a woman who looked and sounded the reverse? The obvious answer was sex, but, looking the way he did and in the business he was in, Price wouldn’t have been short of that.

It was after ten and the Toxteth Hotel was open but I walked resolutely past. I don’t always keep to my pledge to stay off the grog until six p.m. but mostly I do. The backpackers were swarming on the footpath outside the hostels on the other side of the road — tiny Asian women with packs nearly the size of themselves, pale Poms with wide shorts and skinny legs and huge Scandinavians of both sexes who looked as if they could cross the road in four strides.

Putting off the clerical work, I sat on a bus bench and watched them as they piled into hired Kombi vans and four-wheel drives to take them to Darling Harbour, Bondi, the Blue Mountains, wherever. The Olympic wave, which had turned out to be less than a tsunami, had passed over us and we were into the new millennium for real. The city was back to what it had been — a mostly sun-bathed place where people came to see the sights, rather than for cheap drugs and underage sex. Still the lucky country, just, despite all the economists, wowsers and politicians trying to change it.