‘I’m doing this because I think you’re crazy,’ she’d said.

I was in the seminary at the time, so it wasn’t like she was the only person saying so. Plenty of the blokes I’d gone to school with were saying much the same. It was ‘the celibacy bullshit’ – that’s how Ruth put it – that she didn’t understand; the idea that anyone would willingly go their whole life without having any sex was, to her, bonkers.

She said, ‘I’m leaving you the flat in case you change your mind.’

She’d lived in it alone for lots of years, having inherited it from her husband. He’d been killed in a workplace accident – something to do with a horizontal saw – when Ruth was still fairly young herself. She never got married again. She had no children, either. She smoked instead, and drank, and enjoyed her parties, gambled on the horses, and said things like, ‘I had a husband once, and once was enough.’

For a long time after Ruth died I didn’t really use the flat, mostly because by then I’d become a priest, attached to various parishes, and when you’re the local parish priest, you have to live in the house they give you, whether you like it or not. It was only in 2005, when I quit being a parish priest and became a chaplain, that I moved into the flat. Chaplains don’t get a house.

Living alone didn’t come easily: for the first time in my life I didn’t have a housekeeper. I had to keep reminding myself to run the vacuum cleaner around. I probably still don’t keep the flat as clean as my mother would like but my mother’s never going to know that, just like she’s never going to know that I’ve now left the priesthood. She’s 100 years old, and thinks she’s twenty-one.

In any case, Ruth’s old flat – my flat – is on the fourth floor of a five-storey building with no lift, which means that when I’m in a hurry I’ve got to run up and down the stairs. I don’t mind; keeping fit is something I’ve always liked to do.

I appreciate that not everybody knows what a police chaplain does. They might see one at the scene of a car accident and assume we are there to counsel the public. In reality, we’re there for the police.

The fact that Wolf had called me out to Surf City suggested to me that he thought police might get hurt at Surf City that day or that they’d be traumatised by what they might see.

I took the stairs two at a time, muttering a bit as I went because it was raining harder than it had in months. I hadn’t bothered to pick up an umbrella, mainly because the last umbrella I bought – a cheap one – was last seen in the bin, nose down with bent arms.

I was also trying to remember where I’d parked the car. Ruth’s flat – I’m sorry, I’ve never been able to stop calling it that – doesn’t come with a car space – probably because, when it was built, Bondi had trams. A car space in Bondi is today like gold. I remember once telling Wolf that after I knocked off from serving soup to street kids at 6 am, I’d have to drive home and circle the streets of the neighbourhood, trying to find a parking space.