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girl stood at rest, arms raised above her head in wait for the next opportunity to dance. ‘Yes, this is Mak.’
    ‘It didn’t quite sound like you,’ the familiar woman’s voice purred.
    Marian Wendell!
    ‘Oh, God, you scared me. How are you? I got in not even…’ she looked at her watch ‘…not even two hours ago.’
    Marian Wendell ran a private investigation agency. Mak had done some PI work for her the previous year, and by the time she’d left there had been a little too much focus in the local papers on one particular investigation of Mak’s. She now wondered if perhaps she had followed Andy Flynn to another city as much to try to save the relationship as to distance herself from the investigation and the controversy it caused.
    ‘I was going to call you tomorrow…’ Mak continued guiltily.
    Marian had a new assignment for her, and right on time, too. Apparently, the client had asked for her specifically.
    Makedde had previously plied her height and natural good looks in the modelling industry, catwalking around the world to pay her way through her PhD in forensic psychology. Now that she finally had her doctorate, she found it ironic that she wasn’t even working in the field, which wasn’t to say that psychology couldn’t be useful in this new trade. Her involvement in private detective work had begun innocuouslyenough, with a bit of banal administrative stuff for Marian’s agency, but the next thing Mak knew she was getting her Certificate III in Investigative Services and becoming one of Marian’s part-time investigators. Every step she took towards starting her psychology practice seemed impeded in some way, yet investigations pulled her in like a magnet. It was not the occupation she had chosen, but it sure seemed to keep choosing her. Certainly the casual psych tutoring she had picked up at the Australian National University in Canberra had not encouraged her to find similar academic work in Sydney. Teaching a semester of ‘Introduction to Methodological Design and Statistics’ to first-year students was excruciatingly tedious, and not very helpful for her pocketbook.
    ‘Nine-thirty in my office.’
    ‘Nine-thirty? Okay,’ she heard herself saying. ‘Uh, Marian, who is this client who asked for me?’
    ‘I’ll see you in the morning. It’s good to have you back.’
    Mak hung up the phone and ran a hand through her mane of long dark-blonde hair, her fingers catching in a tangle at the ends.
    Back to investigations.

CHAPTER 2
    With considerable haste, Mr Nicholas Santer departed from his palatial London home at the hour of five a.m. while his wife of seventeen years slept soundly in her own bedroom, on her own floor, in a separate wing of the house. He had packed several valuable items from his private safe including £20 000 in hundred-pound notes, his father’s medals and watch, and a small Rembrandt ink sketch no larger than his fist, which he hoped to sell on the black market.
    He had not bothered to say goodbye.
    Nearly twenty-four hours and over 1000 kilometres later he was snoring in a rustic farmhouse south of the town of Vézelay, France, his dreams assisted by a now empty bottle of fine cognac. As the bottle from his impressive cellar had been steadily drained, so also his worries and strain had dissipated, along with the feeling in his limbs, his lips, his face. He was tingling and warm by the time he nodded off, stretched out on a couch he barely remembered buying years before, surrounded by white dust covers, a half-unpacked case and an overflowing ashtray of cigarette butts that he could no longersee through the blur across his eyes. His 52-year-old body slumped in inebriated rest, but even in his dreams his mind was active with worry. He imagined himself in a huge wine barrel, running like a mouse on a wheel, a heavy briefcase of money in his hand. In his nightmare everything depended on him running and never stopping.
    Running…running…
    A bead of acrid sweat rolled