This is not the response I had expected. I am tempted to inform her how ignorant and incompetent she must be, and that she has just passed on the tip-off of a lifetime. ‘You sound sceptical?’

‘Mr Martin, it is very difficult to get cocaine into Australia. It still gets in, though. There is huge demand. My question would be, if a drug smuggler has managed to get cocaine here at an enormous profit, why would he turn it into something else? I can see why you’d do it to get the cocaine into the country, but doing it when it is already here seems a bit unlikely.’

The logic of her statement is enough to slap me down. I don’t have a response, but she has more: ‘And, anyway, the detectives had the crockery tested for everything you can think of.’

I end the phone call quickly and politely.

I wander around the garden trying to make my brain go in a useful direction. It refuses to. Instead it notices without emotion that the garden is in transition. The deciduous trees are losing their leaves after their colourful showing on the autumn stage. It is the time for the native trees to take back the limelight. The lemon-scented gums and the pink-flowering ironbarks are in rude, leafy health that I’m sure is intended to embarrass their foreign counterparts. King parrots still race between the trees as currawongs call out their beautiful threat to every other bird in the garden. I hear and see it all, but it doesn’t register as anything more than the clatter of a life that I’m only just involved in. It could be traffic noise from a suburban street.

For some reason my mailman is sharing information about my mail. I don’t know why he would do that, and I don’t trust him. If Mrs Crowther was still my mail lady and Elaine asked her what was in my mail, I’m sure Elaine would have received a curt ‘None of your business’. The mailman is involved in what is going on, but I don’t know how. The thing is, when he is coming from the post office he has to come past Elaine’s place to get to mine. So if he has boxes, she’s going to know before me, and if she’s giving the boxes to him, she can do it without me knowing.