Horrie butted the cigarette only half-smoked, as before. ‘Me? No. I worked on the Snowy River scheme with blokes from all over the world-Germans, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs, you name it. Good blokes and bastards, same as us. Oscar was a good bloke.’

He reached into the breast pocket of his suit coat and took out a leather wallet. From the wallet he extracted a newspaper clipping. He unfolded it and pushed it across the desk to me. The clipping was from the Newcastle Herald of 3 July. It was a report on the opening of the inquest into the deaths caused by the Newcastle earthquake. The bulk of the report focussed on those killed within seconds of 10.27 a.m., when the quake hit, in the collapse of the Workers’ Club in the city centre. Also under enquiry were the deaths of two men and a woman caused by falling glass and masonry in Hamilton and that of Oscar Bach, forty-eight, who had died when part of a church had fallen on him Mr Bach had been treating the church’s foundations for pest infestation at the time. The bit about Bach had been underlined.

I scanned the clipping quickly. It looked as if a lot of the blame was going to fall on the city fathers who’d put in unstable land fills in the Newcastle area. Safe target. I’d followed the inquest in a random way at the time and remembered these findings. I hadn’t remembered the name of Oscar Bach. If I’d been running a modern, high-tech operation I’d have passed the clipping over to a secretary to run through the Nashua. Not here in St Peters Lane, Darlinghurst. I returned the clipping and was encouraged to see that Horrie had put a cheque book on the desk beside his wallet. ‘That must have been a shock,’ I said. ‘To lose a friend like that.’

‘That’s the point, mate. I didn’t lose him like that. I saw Oscar Bach alive and well at 10.32. That’s five minutes after the bloody earthquake.’