The other reason people used to come to Fremantle, Ros said, was to eat fresh fried scallops and chips at the water’s edge. So this we did, sitting on the jetty enjoying the twinkling lights and the view of the berths awaiting the competing boats from overseas. Something well-wrapped up said FRENCH KISS, though whether that was the yacht itself, or just the wherewithal to keep her seaworthy when she arrived, I didn’t know or care. The water lapped against the jetty. Seagulls gathered round, wanting scallops but prepared to make do with chips. Sounds of people enjoying themselves at Lombardo’s and Papa Luigi’s floated over to us. Rage? Here? Then back to Perth and an exploration, in the dark, of some of Ros’s old haunts. The houses of friends. The houses of friends of friends. And finally Ros’s own house, the one she’d lived in until her fifteenth birthday when the family had moved to Melbourne.

‘My father planted twenty-seven fruit trees in that garden,’ she said, as we stood in the street outside, peering over the wall and trying to count. ‘My dog, Nicholas Monsarrat Sadler, is buried under that huge gum tree, there.’

I fought back my irritability at a pet being named after a popular writer I didn’t admire, and went along with the morbidity. ‘How did he die?’ I asked.

‘He went for his first independent walk around the neighbourhood and got run over. My father found him. He wrapped him up in his old leather jacket – the one he’d worn on his motorbike when he took my mother on honeymoon – and then he carried him back, weeping. He buried the dog, still wrapped in the jacket, under that tree. It was a coat actually, not a jacket. A long, World War I pilot’s coat. It was seeing him in that coat that made my mother fall in love with him.’

There’s an argument for never going back to the city you were a child in.

Early the next morning we were out again in our rented Holden Gemini, once more haunting Morbidity Mews. Ros’s house again. The house she’d lived in before that, next door to a girl who really was called Treta Wright, who lived next door to Brian Hayes. The houses of Ros’s parents’ friends. Even the house of Rolf Harris’s mother, in the days when Rolf gave swimming lessons and taught Ros herself how to breathe under water. Then on to SMC – Santa Maria (Ladies) College – where she began her secondary education amid plaster-cast madonnas and ivied cloisters and all the rest of those special effects that Catholic authorities everywhere know the efficacy of subjecting their impressionable charges to.