I smiled and shook my head. In one marriage and three or four serious relationships the subject had never come up. That had to mean something. ‘Perhaps you can tell me why you’re here, Mr Jacobs.’

‘Don’t you want to know how I can afford to pay you?’

I shrugged, ‘Your suit says you can. My guess is you got a good redundancy package. Good luck to you.’

He snorted. ‘You’d be wrong. I worked till the day I turned sixty-five. I got a decent super but nothing special. No, mate, the reason I can sit here with my cheque book in the pocket of a tailored suit and listen to you talk about a hundred and twenty bucks a day is that I won the Lotto a couple of weeks after I retired. Over a million.’

‘That’s terrific,’ I said. ‘You look to be in good health, your family sounds OK. I can’t see that you should have a problem in the world.’

‘I wouldn’t, if the bloody coppers and other pen pushers’d do their jobs. But they just reckon I’m old and rich and crazy and tell me to piss off.’

We were getting to it now. Some kind of bureaucratic bungle to do with the earthquake. Horrie was a miner. Maybe he knew there was a shaft under the Workers’ Club that had collapsed and killed ten or so pensioners. That’d be interesting but a bit out of my line. Ombudsman territory.

I must have looked dubious because Horrie’s voice took on a pleading note. ‘I need your help, Mr Hardy. I was put onto you by someone from the radio in Kempsey’

I was getting ready to doodle again but what he said made me grip the pencil so hard I almost snapped it. ‘Who?’

‘Woman named Helen Broadway. See, I got desperate when no-one in Newcastle’d listen to me and I started ringing the radio stations trying to get on air. Well, I got nowhere. But this Broadway woman gave me the time of day. She said she couldn’t put me on the air but she advised me to get in touch with you. I told her that I wasn’t short of a bob, see?’