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very nice man visits me regularly and we enjoy ourselves— well, I certainly do.’
    â€˜I’m glad to hear it. Tell me about Dr Lubeck—Karl.
    German, I suppose.’
    â€˜Originally, I’m sure. But he had no accent. He was as Australian as you and I with our standard names. I must admit I knew very little about him. The affair only lasted a few weeks.’
    â€˜You don’t have a photograph?’
    â€˜I did, but I tore it up in pique. I’m sorry. He was tall, like you, and dark like you. But more heavily built and with much less hair. Very little, in fact. I’ve never found baldness unattractive, which men don’t understand.’
    â€˜They say bald men have more testosterone.’
    She smiled. ‘Well, he certainly had his share. What else? I got the impression he was a contemporary of Dr Heysen and Dr Bellamy and had qualified at Sydney University. I mean contemporary as a graduate—Karl was a few years older.’
    â€˜Family?’
    â€˜Never mentioned. D’you mean did he have a wife? After what happened, I wouldn’t be surprised. Shouldn’t you be making notes?’
    â€˜Later. Habits? Sports? Interests?’
    â€˜Mr Hardy, I was head over heels in blind love. I’d be inventing if I said that from my point of view the answer to your questions was anything but sex, sex, sex.’

8
    I went to the outdoor coffee area where Burton Street hits Crown, ordered a flat white and sat down with my notebook to make my usual squiggles, arrows and dotted lines. They’re supposed to help me make connections and to inspire questions and speculations. Sometimes they do, and once or twice the process has led me definitively through a maze in the right direction. Mostly, they just help to make the maze clearer.
    Roma Brown was a fresh source, virtually untapped by the police. If Wain or one of the other PEAs had talked to her she certainly would have mentioned it. A fresh source when investigating an old matter on which the dust has settled is pure gold. She’d given me things to think about. If she was right about Heysen doing makeovers of some sort for shady customers, it could explain why he had the substantial equity Simmonds had mentioned. Equally, it could have put him in danger if one of his clients was either dissatisfied or took it into his head to take the doctor out of circulation. The possibilities were many.
    A complication to this line of thinking was the evidence that Heysen was strapped for cash at the time of Bellamy’s death. Had the makeover business dried up? And if so, why? Was he being blackmailed? And if so, by whom?
    All that was assuming that someone had framed Heysen for Bellamy’s murder. But what if Bellamy had found out about his partner’s illicit activities and had hired Padrone to silence him and been outbid by Heysen? Guilty as charged, but a tangled and very speculative web. If Cassidy and Wain had known about Heysen’s sideline and hushed it up, what might’ve followed from that? Getting to be too much to hold in my head. I drank the coffee and sketched out the various scenarios as a series of questions. One course of action was clear—find Karl Lubeck, the medical Lothario.
    The coffee tables and umbrellas were located in a space dropped down below the level of Crown Street that’s reached by a set of sandstone steps. A bit of old Sydney town preserved—something I always like to see. A much-touted vegetarian restaurant is opposite, along with boutiques and minute art galleries. There are plenty of sex shops around selling what they sell, and I suppose people seeing Roma Brown in her wheelchair would think they were irrelevant to her. They’d be dead wrong, I thought, and good on her.
    Back in the Mitchell Library, and I set about the task of tracking Dr Karl methodically, consulting first the telephone directories in all the capital cities, knowing the reluctance of doctors to