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grand-nephew repeating her words.
    He said he’d given up the flat he’d been renting and would be looking for something to buy. I offered to let him stay at my place while he looked and he accepted.
    Patrick moved into the spare room with little more than the light luggage he’d taken on the trip, apart from a fiddle he bought in Ireland and the duty-free Jamesons, of course. He said the rest of his possessions were in storage and that he knew what sort of flat he wanted and in what area, so the business wouldn’t take long. I was glad of the company and, as we were both more or less in limbo, I thought us bouncing ideas about our different futures off each other might be useful. Patrick was determined to learn to play the fiddle, but I wasn’t up for that.
    I lent him the Falcon to get around in because most of the places I wanted to go—the gym in Leichhardt, Megan’s place in Newtown, the bookshops and eateries in Glebe and Newtown—I could reach on foot or by bus. After the damp of Ireland it was good to be back in a spell of crisp, dry Sydney winter days—while they lasted. I paid some bills, caught up on some films, visited Frank and Hilde and took my meds. I found life a bit flat, politics boring, and time hanging heavy, but Patrick was amusing and he never scraped away at his fiddle beyond 9 pm.
    I got back from a gym session in the mid-morning, opened the door and knew something was wrong. A smell, a sound, or just a feeling?
    â€˜Pat?’
    There was no answer. Nothing was out of place in the living room or the kitchen. It was moderately untidy like always, but the back door was wide open and the cordite stink was unmistakable. I pushed open the door to the back bathroom and the smell and the sight rocked me back and had me grabbing for the doorjamb for support. Patrick Malloy didn’t look like me anymore. He didn’t look like anyone. Most of his head had been blown away; an arm was hanging by a thread and his chest was a mass of raw meat and splintered bone. He’d been torn apart. The plastic curtain was shredded, and the walls in the shower recess were like a mad abstract painting in red and grey.

I’d shot a man dead in the house many years ago and had been shot there myself quite recently, but those events were nothing like this. The police determined that Patrick had been killed by three blasts of heavy load from an automatic shotgun. The first would have killed him; the others were about something else altogether.
    Chief Inspector Ian Welsh of the City Major Crimes Unit who headed the investigation called me into the Surry Hills Centre for an interview two days after the SOC people had done their work. A folding table had been set up in his office and on it were the things Patrick had in the house at the time of his death, including the fiddle. I’d given permission to the police to take the stuff away on the condition that I watched them pack it up and had an itemised list signed by the detective in charge.
    Welsh, thin, fiftyish, tired-looking, had Patrick’s passport open when I entered the room and he stared at the photo- graph, at me, and back at the photograph, but made no comment.
    The killing had shocked and saddened me and I hadn’t slept well for the last few nights. Patrick was one of those people who filled a room, filled a house, but wasn’t a nuisance. He had a knack of knowing when I might want coffee and when I might want quiet; when I wanted music and when I didn’t. Seeing his fiddle lying on the table like an exhibit broke me up a bit. I sat in the chair Welsh indicated, reached out and picked up the bow.
    Welsh put down the passport and examined a document in front of him. ‘Thanks for coming in, Mr Hardy. I’ve read your statement. You’ve been very cooperative.’
    I fiddled with the bow, nodded, said nothing.
    â€˜You’ve no idea why . . . your cousin—’
    â€˜Second cousin,’ I