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told him he’d had all the experience he needed—two wives, kids, God knows how many women.’
    I murmured, ‘Fights,’ and she glanced sharply at me.
    ‘I suppose so. He wouldn’t listen. On and on about life and experience. First he drops out of sight and now you turn up. I was worried before, but I’m really worried now.’
    ‘Why? He’s a grown man.’
    ‘It’s this word
experience.
D’you know what kind of stories he wrote? What that novel of his was about?’
    I shook my head.
    ‘Weird stuff. Crime. Horror.’
    ‘I thought it got a good review in
Meanjin?’
    ‘Oh, it had “art” in it as well, but it was
about
what I say.’
    ‘And it still didn’t sell?’
    She shook her head. ‘Bill wouldn’t let me read it. He didn’t keep a copy himself.’
    ‘Maybe it needed more crime and horror.’
    I looked down at her and wondered how old she was. Under thirty, I judged but it was hard to tell. I realised that one of the interesting things about her was that I had no idea what she was going to say next. This time she looked away from me, spoke slowly and suddenly made me wonder how old
I
was.
    ‘That’s not a very bright thing to say,’ she said.
    After that there didn’t seem to be much point in being coy about my enquiry. I told her about the hire car racket and the photograph of Mountain signing out the Audi. She smoked, listened and drank her cold coffee. She didn’t know that Mountain had cut his beard. I showed her the clippings in the bathroom.
    I stood outside the bathroom and watched her look at herself in the mirror and swish at her fringe. She couldn’t see much more than that of her head in the mirror.
    ‘You’re sure?’
    ‘Unless he’s got a twin brother who’s knocked himself about in the same way.’
    She shook her head. ‘The silly bastard.’
    ‘That’s right, he’s going the right way to get experience. He’ll get some courtroom experience and be able to write some good, graphic stuff about life in Long Bay.’
    She pushed past me and got back to the kitchen and her cigarettes. ‘You’ve got no idea where he’d take the car?’ she said gloomily. ‘He didn’t have to say?’
    ‘No. Did he talk to you about this book? I mean, did he give you any idea of what it was about? Where it’s … set? Would he have made a plan?’
    She jumped up from the table. ‘He might have. He made plans for some things.’ I followed her out of the kichen into the workroom. She leafed through and shuffled the papers that were on the desk, those that were lying on top of a drawer that had been pulled out like a tray and all the ones that had fallen on the floor. After a while she looked up at me through the fringe.
    ‘All TV stuff.’
    I nodded and poked around the room. The bookcases lining the walls were crammed full, with the spaces above the upright books occupied by others lying flat. The desk was set to face a wall rather than a window and books stood upright with their spines facing outward along the whole of its length. I glanced idly along the row, noting a few familiar titles, a thesaurus, dictionaries, a dictionaryof quotations, histories and biographies. My eye stopped at a clutch of six paperbacks. Unlike the other books on the desk which were thumbed and battered, these were brand new. I pulled them out.
    ‘What does he read mostly—fiction?’
    She was sitting on a swivel chair that was mounted on runners. She stretched out her leg and pushed off from the desk so that the chair ran back a few feet. The white ski overall was the perfect garment for her; she looked small and tough and smart and ready to be a lot of fun if the right opportunity presented. She’d run out of cigarettes so she stuck her hands inside the bib of the overall, presumably to keep from chewing the nails or doing something worse.
    ‘Fiction? No, not that much. Sometimes, but more biographies, plays ….’
    I held out the paperbacks and let her read the authors’ names and the titles. She shook