‘In a huff,’ he said. ‘Pauline, his sister, said something to him about the way he treated women and he took it wrong. Well, he took it right, I guess. He’s treated a few girls badly. He stormed off and said he’d never bring a girl home again.’

‘That’ll blow over when he wants a good feed.’

Wesley smiled without humour. ‘He’s a good boy, but he needs to learn something about reliability.’

‘I’m still learning about that myself.’

‘He takes things to heart. He’s fought with everyone in the family at one time or another.’

I didn’t put much store in that. So had I.

A week or so later I rolled in for my massage after upping the weights on the leg press and increasing the reps on the abdominal crunches. I pushed open the door to the massage room, feeling pretty pleased with myself, thinking of investing in new gym gear. The ancient tennis shorts were getting pretty ratty.

‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,’ I intoned. ‘We’ll stop the gap… Hell, what’s the matter, Wes?’

I’d expected to find Wesley flexing his muscles, leering and slapping his oiled hands together with a sound like a thunderclap. But he was sitting, dressed as I’d never seen him, in jeans, shirt and leather shoes, in a chair in a corner of the room. He was forty-four and normally looked ten years younger; now he looked his age and a bit more. His massive shoulders were slumped and his usually taut, noble face was sagging.

‘Hello, Cliff. You look cheerful.’

I eased into the room carefully. ‘Compared to you, Tim Fischer’d look cheerful. What’s up?’

He looked at me but he wasn’t seeing me. His eyes were bloodshot and seemed to be focused on a point far beyond the walls around us. ‘Clinton,’ he said. ‘We haven’t seen or heard from him in three weeks, apart from one phone call to his mother. We don’t know where the fuck he is.’

In our brief acquaintance I’d only known Wesley to swear a few times-when he was really amused, seriously angry or repeating what someone else had said.