‘David Archer? I took him to court, if you want to be technically correct.’

‘Yeah, Archer David!’ The joint hadn’t done much to dampen Dog’s natural excitability. Gordon sometimes wondered if cannabis was so woven into the fabric of Dog’s metabolism that he didn’t get stoned anymore. He practised law, he’d kept his marriage together miraculously, he played passable golf, he surfed most days—there were few of the obvious harms associated with thirty-five years of daily smoking, so maybe there were equally few of the benefits. Maybe he smoked to maintain a steady state, and it had no more psychoactive effect than a cigarette. Exasperatingly, he always came back from his health checks with a clean bill.

‘Archer David’s involved with my client, who let slip that our old mate’s quietly put his place on the market.’

‘I doubt it. He hasn’t finished his renovations.’

‘Well that’s the thing: he’s not going to finish. He’s having to sell quickly because he’s going to be implicated in this action. And he’s having trouble finding a buyer.’

‘I suppose that can happen when they do it quietly. But they eventually get what they want.’

‘You’re an incurable optimist,’ Dog said without irony, ‘but you’re wrong. The market’s tanked. Have you noticed Ken Grainger’s listings round Bluebird?’

‘No.’

‘That’s because there aren’t any. Nothing’s selling. They’re either taking places off the market or doing private off-market deals that they’re not talking about because the prices are rock bottom. Something weird’s going on in China. The moneymen know something. Shoe factory output numbers—I’m not sure what it is but it’s set off a fucken real estate Armageddon.’

‘I haven’t heard anything.’

‘That’s because you wait till it’s on TV, which means you’re hearing about it six months after the fact. Which is why you were such a shit journo.’

‘I was a popular journo.’

‘Exactly. If you were better, nobody would have liked you.’

Gordon had to give Dog that point. Whenever Gordon got near a genuine news story, he considered who it might hurt. His reflex response had been to forget what he’d heard, or tip off one of his colleagues, even a rival newspaper. Gordon had no competitiveness, only a fail-safe instinct for the quiet life.

‘Anyway,’ Dog went on, ‘if you listened, you’d hear the screams of chickens running around with their heads cut off. Old mate next door is going to cop a million-buck hit.’

‘I thought he ran a successful multinational business. T-shirts or something.’

‘Yeah, right. Successful fraud.’