The woman, wearing a white sweatshirt and black trousers, looked like a two-tone bowling ball. “Isn’t there a bus or a streetcar?”

I shook my head. “Better to walk. The buses are full of muggers.” I nodded, stepped onto the road to get around them and headed towards the police building. I regretted being a smartarse before I got there and turned around to make amends, but they were getting into a cab, him in front, her in the back. I made a mental note to be nice to the next tourist I met.

From a distance, the Sydney Police Centre looks all right-a combination of grey shapes, more or less inoffensive. Up close the slim pillars and the boxy structures behind them look like a house of cards propped up by king-size cigarettes. The architects have inserted grass and bricks everywhere grass and bricks can go, and haven’t stinted on polished marble and automatic doors. I went into the lobby, which looks like a cross between a bank, heavy on the bulletproof glass, and a five-star hotel, heavy on the pile carpet and rounded edges. The place bristles with pamphlets emphasising community policing, and the lighting is soft to suggest that harmony and under-standing begin here. The only thing to suggest that crime is being fought here too is that the cops in the glass and aluminium bunkers wear their caps.

I presented my credentials to a series of interceptors who made phone calls and ran metal detectors over me. A young constable escorted me silently up two flights of stairs and along a corridor to Frank Parker’s office. We stood outside the door and I looked at the cop.

“Am I allowed to knock or do you have to do it?”

“You can knock, sir.”

“Thank you.”

I knocked and I heard Frank say, “Yes.”

“What now?”

The constable opened the door. “Mr Hardy to see you, sir.”