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industry as a whole, or how it’s going to stuff up the net.’
    â€˜The Carmichael connection would be what Dollimore is after.’
    â€˜You could be right.’
    I enquired about payment for Ivan’s report. Lucy said she hoped he might have got a bit further than he had.
    There was a short silence, then I said, ‘I wouldn’t mind digging round a bit.’
    â€˜I’ll run it past the committee. Your rates would be the same as your partner’s?’
    I confirmed this, then added, ‘If you wouldn’t mind paying for services already rendered? Ivan’s currently supplying Moscow with about half its foreign currency.’
    Lucy agreed to this, then told me she had another call.
    I put the phone down, feeling pleased. Here was a job for me and no one else. Ivan was away. Ken Dollimore would certainly have insisted on speaking to him, if he hadn’t been on the far side of the world. If there really was a link between Eden Carmichael and CleanNet , it was up to me to find it. At the same time, I wondered what I was letting myself in for. I was used to having Ivan to talk to. I was used to noise and children’s chatter, not solitary thoughts echoing through hot, still rooms.
    . . .
    Herman Marcus Limited was registered with a firm of solicitors called Benjamin Plant and Partners . I rang them and asked if I could have a look at some annual reports. Then I rang Chris Laskaris and made an appointment to see him.
    I bought CleanNet ’s package from a local computer shop, had a bit of a play round with it, then made myself an early lunch and drove over the lake to the solicitors’ suite of offices. I was shown into a small comfortable room, so comfortable that, once I’d been sitting in one of the dark-brown leather chairs for about ten minutes, I started feeling sleepy. I’d been given a stack of annual reports and left alone to read them.
    Herman Marcus was a group of Canberra-based IT firms. I was ­surprised to find the group had chosen to invest in CleanNet . Representatives of several of the firms had given evidence to the Senate Select Committee On Information Technologies, and had expressed views that, if not quite at Electronic Freedom’s end of the spectrum, were broadly against the legislation, and sceptical about whether filters would do any of the things that their manufacturers claimed.
    Business is business? Maybe so. Maybe there was nothing remarkable in that. I’d learnt from CleanNet ’s website that their shares had gone from $12 to $53 in the week they were released. They’d hovered in the $40 to $50 range ever since. I was no expert when it came to the stock market, but it seemed to me that investors looking to make money quickly would have made it and got out by now. I wondered if this meant that those who remained were in for the long haul, that they believed CleanNet had a superior product that could beat American imports and survive the impending crash. I pondered the ethics of it—saying one thing publicly, in front of a Senate committee, and putting your money in another.
    I also wondered why none of the business journalists had picked up the anomaly. My friend at the Times , Gail Trembath, recently back from a year and a half in South-East Asia, wasn’t a business journalist, but she might be interested.
    I made a list of what was obvious, hoping to clear my mind of this, and allow room for more original thoughts to emerge. I glanced up at the Western Desert dot paintings on the walls, then gave in to my impulse to snoop. I opened desk drawers and scanned the spines of loose-leaf binders lined up in rows on heavy walnut bookshelves.
    In the drawers, I found stationery, a hole punch and stapler that looked as though they’d never been used, packets of paperclips, pads of paper with the firm’s logo at the top. The young woman who’d shown me into the office had taken down several volumes from a