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Richard McFadden’s love of gambling might be casting a mantle over other vices. I had to be careful, but I needed to whet her appetite as well.
    . . .
    Ivan had a predilection for gadgets, which I was gradually weaning him off, or so I thought. When I first met him, the main room of his house had been converted into a cross between a computer museum and an inner-north Canberra spy station. He also loved playing around with digital images. A message, any message, was improved by pictures. Ivan’s latest, conceived a couple of weeks before he left Australia, was a series of small flags, all variations on the Australian one.
    I noticed one of these flags pulsating in the top left-hand corner of my computer screen, and cursed Ivan under my breath. I couldn’t remember what each of the flags was for. It was like him not to have taken me through them before he left, or to have provided any kind of key. This one was mainly red. I double clicked it. A xylophone played an arthritic ‘Waltzing Matilda’. A message came up on the screen saying that someone had tried to hack into my computer.
    I rang Lucy, who sounded more relaxed than she had the last time, and chuckled when I told her about the flags. Like any business with a clientele to protect, the lobby group had ways of guarding sensitive files. She kept me on the line while she checked their log. There was no record of an attempted break-in over the last forty-eight hours.
    Had my would-be hacker been after the CleanNet material, or was the timing a coincidence? Ivan and I had had our share of snoopers. We were an obvious target. Ivan didn’t mind. It was all part of the game to him.
    I emailed him to let him know what had happened. Because I wasn’t sure what message his notes might contain for a would-be thief, I copied them to a disk which, after thinking about safe places and not-so-safe places, I sticky-taped to the roof of Fred’s kennel. Fred sniffed at it, then, realising that it wasn’t food, showed no more interest. Then I burnt the hard copy, and deleted the file from my computer, thoroughly deleted it, as Ivan had taught me to do.

Three
    In Canberra, prostitution was zoned light industrial, and the zoning system seemed to work. The suburbs of Mitchell, Hume and Fyshwick mixed brothels and X-rated movie rentals with used cars, discounted white goods and shops selling computers. Their streets were deserted after dark, except for a cluster of sex traders, single lines of ant cars heading towards honey, or a corpse.
    I stood at the corner of the street that Eden Carmichael had driven to, parked in, habitually crossed, and squinted at the lines of low-slung, cheap, no-nonsense buildings. White wood swelled in the January heat. Grosvenor Street, Mitchell, looked like the main street of a country town, wide as our local rivers never were, a row of parched eucalypts along one side, stamp-sized shadows underneath the awnings. I smelt raw pine furniture, and felt that deep quiet of a country town in the middle of a summer day, when not much can happen out of doors. A timber yard backed onto paddocks, where sheep and cattle rested behind fences, under the little shade that they could find.
    Inland homogenising light filled every opening. I shaded my eyes and spotted number 23. It was built on the same model as its neighbours, regular and squat, except for a circular neon sign, unlit now, that said Margot’s in a curly script.
    My phone call to Margot Lancaster had been brief. As soon as I’d introduced myself, she’d asked if I knew any journalists. I’d replied that I did. Margot had asked whether any of them would be interested in telling her side of the story. When I’d said I had a friend who might, Margot immediately wanted a name. Realising I had a bargaining chip, perhaps my only one, I’d persuaded her to talk to me first.
    . . .
    Margot’s close-fitting hair was dyed a deep blue-black. The