‘Not true. I read that Sampras beat Stich in straights in Munich.’

‘So one millionaire pops it over the net a few more times than another millionaire. Who cares? Claudia Fleischman…’

‘I know who she is, Cy. I was having a lend of you. You’re not exposed to enough irony in your trade. You’re rusty, if you get the pun.’

Cy groaned. ‘I wish I hadn’t heard any of that. See you at two, Cliff. Don’t be late.’

Claudia Fleischman was accused of murdering her husband. Julius Fleischman was a mysterious figure, the only absolutely clear thing about him being that he was very rich. Some newspaper accounts had him as English, others as South African. I seemed to remember that there was dispute as to whether he had become a naturalised Australian. He had a big house in Vaucluse and a slightly smaller one with a lot of land around it at Kiama.

His yacht was one of the biggest and best. Among his other toys were a few racehorses, a Lear jet and a vintage Rolls-Royce said to be worth a million dollars. It might as well have been a 1956 Volkswagen for all the good it was to him now. Three months back Fleischman had been shot to death in his bedroom.. I’d followed the case in a desultory fashion. At first there were ‘no suspects’, then ‘investigations were continuing’ and finally Claudia Fleischman, along with one Anton Van Kep, was up for committal, charged with murder. Motive obvious-the dough. Means, well, Van Kep was the means and if a wife doesn’t have an opportunity to murder a man the law doesn’t know who does. Almost nothing was on the record as yet. To judge from a press photo that was published in defiance of the ban, Claudia Fleischman was a spectacularly attractive woman-thirtyish, tall, fashionably slender, dark. Journalists speculated circumspectly about a love triangle, about a purely commercial hit, about a bungled attempt at intimidation. They didn’t know and the public didn’t know.