‘You sure?’ he said.

‘Yeah. Why?’

He shrugged and called the detectives’ room. Parker must have given him the okay because he pointed his thumb suavely at the lifts. I rode up two levels and went along the corridor where the thick clumps of multi-coloured official paper hang off the notice boards like grapes.

I knocked on the door of the room Frank recently acquired when he moved up a grade: he only had to share it with one other detective.

‘Come in, Cliff.’

I pushed at the door which only went halfway before it was stopped by a cardboard box on the floor. Parker was in his shirt sleeves, shovelling papers into another box. There was a bulging green garbag on top of the swept-clean desk. Parker lived and worked in a blizzard of paper; it was his habitat. To see him in a bare, stripped room was a shock.

‘Moving again, Frank?’ I said. ‘You a Deputy Commissioner or something, now?’

He grinned at me and dusted his hands. ‘You’re behind the times, Cliff. You see me at the end of what looks like being my last day in the New South Wales Police Force.’

5

He filled me in at the pub-not the usual copper’s watering hole, but another a few blocks from the station. He made a point of this as we breasted the bar.

‘See, changing the patterns already.’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry about the promotion crack, Frank. Didn’t know anything like this was happening.’

‘No reason you should. They kept it all very dark.’

‘It?’

The beers came and we reached out at the same time. We moved over to a window seat, out of earshot of the other drinkers.

‘It’s simple enough’, Parker said. ‘I’m guilty of taking bribes. That’s what the internal investigation found, and the tribunal believed. I’m suspended-I’ll appeal, but it’ll be confirmed. I creamed off more than fifty grand over the past few years.’