“Is that it?” Tim asked as I carried it in. He was sitting behind his desk, making paper boats out of pages from the phone book. “A carton of milk?”

“Half a carton,” I replied. “We had the other half for breakfast.” It was true. Half a carton of long-life milk was all that stood between us and starvation. “I’ll get some glasses,” I said.

“Don’t bother.” Tim reached for a cardboard box on the corner of his desk. He turned it upside down. A single straw fell out. “That’s the last straw,” he announced.

I’d been living with my big brother, Herbert Timothy Simple, ever since my parents decided to emigrate to Australia. Herbert called himself Tim Diamond. He also called himself a private detective. Neither was true. He wouldn’t have been able to find a fingerprint on the end of his own finger. Dead bodies made him feel queasy. When it came to pursuing an investigation, he was so hopeless that the investigation usually ended up pursuing him.

I gazed sadly at the milk. “You need a job, Tim,” I said.

“I’ve applied for jobs, Nick,” Tim protested. He slid open a drawer in his desk. It was bulging with letters. “Look! I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs.”

“How many rejections have you had?” I asked.

He scowled. “These are the rejections.” He fumbled in the pile for a minute and pulled one out, his face brightening. “Here’s one I haven’t heard from yet,” he said.

“Maybe your application got lost in the mail.”

Tim opened the letter and spread it out in front of him. “Head of security at the Canadian Bank in Pall Mall,” he read out. “Forty thousand dollars a year plus lunch vouchers and car. In other words, meals and wheels.”

“When will you hear?” I asked.

“Don’t worry. The phone’ll ring . . .”

“We don’t have a phone,” I reminded him. “We got cut off.”

Tim’s face fell. He folded the letter and put it back in the drawer.

“Things aren’t so bad,” he muttered. “I’ll get a case sooner or later. I bet you any day now somebody’s going to knock on the door.”

Somebody knocked on the door.

Tim gulped like he’d just swallowed a chicken bone. He looked around him. What with the lunch tray on the desk, the paper boats, and everything else, the office hardly looked like the headquarters of a successful private eye. And here was a potential client knocking at the door! For a moment he froze. Then we both went into action.