“This evening, about seven or eight.”

“Why not this afternoon? What will you be doing then?”

They’re all the same, rich or not rich, when they’re paying for your time they want to see you running. Perhaps he thought I’d spend the day knocking down his retainer in a pub and doctoring the odometer on my car. I had a feeling that there was more to learn from him, perhaps just a point or two but they could be important. To get them I had to sting him.

“I’ll be checking on things,” I told him, “including you. It’s standard procedure. Perhaps you could save me time and you money by telling me some more.”

He bristled. “Like what?”

“Like how do you keep this going? Like what share in it does your sister have? Like where can I find your… stepmother?”

“Her? Why in hell do you want to know?”

“The connections, that’s where they might lead.”

He looked straight at me with all the hardness back in his face. He was a capricious bird, intelligent, resentful of something and charming in a grim way, and these qualities washed across him alternately like intermittent rainstorms across a desert. He held up three skeletal fingers. “I’ll answer your questions. One,” he touched the tip of the first finger to his mouth and pulled it away, “Mark left his money well invested, it brings in now much more than he ever had. I sit on some boards, I own a couple of concerns outright and have interests in quite a few others. Two,” he made the same gesture with the next finger, “Susan’s interests are quite separate from mine. She has business dealings of course, here and in New Zealand and the Pacific. She did a tour of some of the places where her firms operated a couple of years ago. She’s got a good business head, like me. Three,” the finger flicked, “Ailsa lives in Mosman. She sold this house to me and bought one over there. I can give you the address.”

He did and I clinched the arrangement by accepting his cheque for the retainer and three days at the rate I’d quoted.