She was a game, good-humoured woman, so I took the case. Mavis wrote me a cheque for $300 — two days, maybe three at my soft-boiled rate. I had a description of the kid, names and addresses of his mates and the location of the pinball joints and pubs he frequented; this was Sydney’s inner west, and Jason Wishart was nearly fourteen after all.

I spent two days on it, then a third day. I checked on the other kids and the hangouts. With runaways, usually, that’s all it takes-they’re either in the near neighbourhood or they’re long gone. When the names and addresses yielded nothing, I tried the institutions. The patience of Detective Sergeant Hubbard of the Darlington police station was stretched to breaking point by a hundred different frustrations, but he gave me the time of day. He admitted that he’d had a tip-off about Jason Wishart after the fire at the local primary school.

‘When?’ I said.

‘That night.’

‘Isn’t that a bit quick?’

Hubbard sighed and blinked tired eyes. I could guess at the relationship between the eyes and the piles of paper on his desk. ‘Look, Hardy, if you knew someone was screwing your wife and you got a tip it was me, what would you do?’

‘I might make a mental note that she’d dropped her standards. My wife left me years ago. Are you trying to be offensive?’

‘I’m trying to get you to piss off. Georgie Wishart torched schools around here like they were named Guy Fawkes Primary. I’m told he’s in the Navy now. God help them. His brother was and is the chief suspect.’

If that took me into ancient history, the talk with the headmistress of the school took me into politics. Clarissa Fielding was large, grey-haired and imposing. “The fire didn’t help,’ she said. ‘The school’s under threat of closing. I doubt if we’ll get the money to fix the damage.’

I sat in her office, which looked as if it had doubled as a storeroom, and gazed out at the kids playing in the school grounds-if you could call a couple of hundred square metres of unshaded asphalt that. ‘Closing? Why?’