‘It has its moments. What’s the phone number here?’

‘It’s disconnected. I mean, it stopped working and I can’t afford to pay for it anyway.’

‘Since when?’

He thought about it. ‘Since just after Clint’s Dad rang.’

All that gave me something to chew on but it didn’t taste good. On the drive to Campbelltown where the main campus of the university was located, I tried to remember what Clinton had been like. Not much stuck in my mind apart from his athleticism and patience with someone in an early stage of decay. Wesley had said the boy had never given him much trouble and certainly hadn’t hinted at mental instability. There was nothing in his background or lifestyle to suggest that. Still, there was the business of his multiple girlfriends, then a serious if somewhat mysterious relationship ending on the woman’s death. Worrying.

I forced myself to stop thinking about the matter while I negotiated the unfamiliar roads in the rain being driven by a gusty wind. One minute the wipers were working overtime, the next it was only a drizzle, then it became fierce again. Difficult conditions and all the other drivers were taking it slow. It was going to be late on a bad afternoon when I arrived-not the best time to be asking questions about a young woman who’d recently died. But there’s no good time for something like that.

I’m not often in Campbelltown, which tends to be serviced for my line of work from Parramatta, and I’d never been to the Southwestern University. The campus was a kilometre from the centre of the town, a collection of low-rise, cement block buildings scattered over what had probably once been orchards or market gardens. I found the campus map, located the sports centre and parked in the visitors’ area. In a small set-up like this, it wasn’t so far from the sports centre. In the bigger universities it either doesn’t exist or is a bus ride from the action. I was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. I exchanged the jacket for a hooded parka and ran through the rain to where the lights had been turned on against the late afternoon gloom.