Usually Cy’s affluence, displayed in the wood panelling of his office and the cut of his suits, amused me; today it got under my skin. I shrugged and plucked at the fabric of the chair I was sitting in. I was pretty sure I could get a finger into the upholstery and do some damage. ‘I’ve got a few problems,’ I said.

‘Women?’

‘No woman. That’s one of the problems.’

‘Money?’

‘Ditto. What’s all this about Todd?’

Sackville fiddled with a file on his desk. ’It’s a bit weird. I got a call from Todd’s solicitor, name of Hickie. One-man show in Bondi Junction. Well, it’s not a bad location for certain kinds of work. Anyway, Hickie got a letter from Todd a couple of days before his death.’

I suppose that’s when I took it in properly- that Barnes Todd was dead. I met him almost twenty years ago when I was happily married and looking for a cheap house. He dabbled in real estate, among a lot of other things. He found the Glebe terrace I still lived in, helped with the finance and a few other problems. I’d seen him perhaps two or three times a year since then- at the pub, in the street or in a restaurant. He was about ten years older than me and he’d served in the Korean war. We used to have a drink and joke about our wars. Mine was the Malayan emergency which had started earlier than Korea and gone on longer, to 1960. I’d been in on the very end of it. The talk drove Cyn, my then wife, nuts. This was years ago, of course. Until recently, war talk has excluded women in our society. Maybe it’s different in the Middle East. Nowadays you can meet female journos and photographers who know a bit about it, but Cyn knew war from books and films, which give you only a shadow of the physical and mental truth. Anyway, I’d liked what I’d seen of Barnes Todd.

The memories didn’t improve my mood. ‘What’s this exchange between legal chaps got to do with me?’

‘You are in a bad way. Have you been playing tennis or doing anything for your body lately?’