It's a long time ago, Frank,' I said.

Frank Parker stroked his grey stubble as if to indicate the passage of time. 'Twenty-three years. That's not so long. Seems like yesterday the way time flies now.'

I knew what he meant. When I was a kid the summer school holidays stretched forever, and in winter it seemed as if summer and surfing would never come. I couldn't afford a wetsuit and had to wait at least until late September to hit the water. Now the years dropped away like the calendar leaves in an old Warner Brothers movie. Still, twenty years was a long time to go back digging up an old murder case.

Frank, retired from the police force as a deputy commissioner, and a long time friend married to Hilde, my former tenant and nothing more than a close friend, had asked me to visit him to talk something over. I was surprised to find that Hilde was away for the day attending a social work conference in the Blue Mountains. Frank could have had me over anytime and it seemed that he'd deliberately picked a day when Hilde wasn't there.

'It's niggled at me every day since,' Frank said, working on his second stubbie since I arrived. Two in an hour was fast work for Frank. After some pleasantries and with the first of our beers in hand, he'd said he wanted me to take a look at the Gregory Heysen case. Heysen was a doctor who'd been convicted of hiring a hit man to kill his partner in their Darlinghurst practice.

'I remember the name, but I forget the details, if I ever knew them,' I said. 'You'd better tell me why it's got you so worried. And why do I get the feeling you didn't want Hilde around while we talked about this?'

Frank sighed and looked his age, which was just the other side of sixty. He played tennis, swam, didn't smoke, was a light drinker and both his parents had lived into their nineties. He'd always looked twenty years younger than his age but not now. 'Smart bastard, aren't you?' he said.