It’s a fair step from Goulburn Street to the bottom of Glebe Point Road and the walk, plus the food, wine and brandy gave me a good night’s sleep. I woke up late with bright light all around the edges of the window and a bladder crying for relief. But I lay there a while, thinking. It was perverse of me, but the fact that someone had followed Charlie and Colin from the meeting, and that I’d picked up a tail as well, intrigued me and made me more interested in what was going on with Sentinel.

By the time I’d got up, pissed, showered, shaved, dressed and eaten breakfast the post had arrived. An overdue rates notice reminding me of the interest accruing, an uncomfortably large credit card bill, car registration papers and an invoice for my gym fees amounted to shovels digging me in a deeper financial hole. The only other letter was hand-addressed in unfamiliar writing. Bad-temperedly, I ripped it open.

Dear Cliff

Funny way to address your father but I can’t think of anything better. I don’t like to ask you for money but I’m going to anyway. I know it wasn’t your fault you didn’t contribute anything to my first twenty years of life and you probably squared up by getting me out of the shit I was in but… I can’t think of a way to finish that sentence.

I’ve got a scholarship to study acting in New York. They tell me I can get work there waitressing or hooking (joke), but I need the fare. Hope you can help, love (yeah?)

Megan

It rocked me. When my ex-wife Cyn was dying she told me about the child she’d had. I was the father. The child had been adopted but had come looking for her mother. I’d extricated Megan from some dangerous company and we had had a wary, distant relationship in the two years since. She’d never asked me for anything before. I put the letter down with the unpaid bills and felt myself leaning towards what I’d come to think of as the Sentinel proposal. It was mostly the money but partly the interest generated by differences I’d observed between di Maggio and the others and the tails I’d spotted last night.