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out on a pool in a garden bright with camellias and azaleas. The room was carpeted and furnished with cushioned cane furniture; the whole house, Malone had noted with his quick eye for furnishings, was comfortable. But there was little, if any, comfort in this house this morning.
    Rose Cadogan brought coffee and biscuits. “I’ll leave you alone,” she said with more diplomacy than her mother had shown and went back to the front of the house.
    â€œOlive, I won’t go over what you told me last night,” said Malone, taking the coffee Angela Bodalle had poured for him. “But I’d like you to tell me—did Will have time to argue with whoever shot him?”
    Olive, refusing coffee, said, “I don’t think so. It was all so quick.”
    â€œI’m trying to establish if it was someone attempting a robbery, shoving the gun at Will and demanding money and then panicking when Will tried to push him away. Was there time for that?”
    Olive looked at Angela, who sat down on the cane couch beside her, then she looked back at Malone. “No, I’m sure there wasn’t. I—”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œI—I’ve been wondering—could he have been waiting for someone else, he made a mistake and shot Will instead?”
    â€œHe could have been. But yours was the only silver Volvo in the car park. There might’ve been other Volvos, but yours was the only silver one.”
    â€œThen who could it have been?” said Angela. “Some psychopath, out to kill anyone, the first person who presented himself? There seems to be a plague of them at the moment.”
    Malone nodded, but made no comment. Yesterday afternoon, out at Haberfield, an armed robber, holding up a liquor store, had paused, unprovoked, to put his gun at the head of a customer lying as commanded on the floor and had blown his brains out. The previous Saturday a man had run amok in Strathfield, a middle-class suburb, with a semi-automatic rifle and killed seven people in a shopping mall before shooting himself. All the past week the air had been thick with the clamour for stricter gun laws, a demand Malone totally supported, but the politicians, more afraid of losing votes in the rural electorates than of being hit by a bullet in the cities (who would waste bullets on a politician?) were shilly-shallying about what should be done. The incidence of killing by guns in Australia was infinitesimal compared with that in the United States, but that was like saying a house siege was not a war. Someone still died, one life was no less valuable than a hundred.
    â€œOlive, had Will received any threats from anyone? A client or someone?”
    â€œI don’t think so. He would have told me—well, maybe not. He didn’t tell me much about his practice, what he did, who he acted for.”
    â€œDid he ever refer any clients to you?” Malone looked at Angela Bodalle.
    â€œA couple. One civil suit, I took that as a favour to him, and a criminal charge.”
    Malone waited and, when she did not go on, said, “A murder charge?”
    â€œIt was an assault with intent, a guy named Kelpie Dunne.” She seemed to give the name with some reluctance. “I got him off.”
    â€œI remember him. He tried to kill a security guard down at Randwick racecourse. He’s a bad bugger. Some day he’s going to kill a cop. I hope you won’t try to get him off then.”
    Her gaze was steady. She was not strictly beautiful, her face was too broad to have classical lines, the jaw too square, but the eyes, large and almost black, would always hold a man, would turn him inside out if he were not careful. She raised a hand, large for a woman’s but elegant, and pushed back a loose strand of her thick dark brown hair. Malone felt that, with that look, she would make an imposing, if biased, judge. If ever she made it to the Bench, he was sure her sentences on the convicted would be more