The Feeneys had stored sheepskins in the house. When the rooms were first repainted, the sharp animal smell disappeared, said Nelly. Then it returned to stay.

On his third or fourth visit to the library’s archives, Tom learned that the police had re-interviewed Mrs Atwood in the light of Jimmy Morgan’s evidence. The photograph that showed her shouting at the camera coincided with this development. It was at this stage of the story, too, that conscientious citizens began writing to the papers urging Nelly’s arrest: You’ve only got to look at her to know it was all her idea. Nelly Atwood failed the first universal test of womanliness, which is to appear meek. She failed the fi rst Australian test of virtue, which is to appear ordinary. Intangibles such as these, operating with a subterranean force unavailable to mere evidence, bound her to the figure Morgan had seen among the ti-tree.

Sources inevitably described as close to the couple claimed that the Atwoods’ marriage had been unhappy. There had been arguments about money. She was always on at him, wanting more. Tom read reports of extravagance on a Roman scale. Mrs Atwood was a brand junkie. She wore tights woven in Lille from cashmere and silk. A weekly florist’s bill ran to hundreds of dollars. Confirmation came in the form of a photograph: the florist himself, righteous above an armful of triangular blooms.

And so, with the practised ease of a sleight-of-hand, disapproval passed from the man to his wife. Atwood photographed well. He went surfing. His victims were bankers. He was halfway to being a hero in Australian eyes.

Nelly Atwood was also Nelly Zhang. She was A and Z, twin poles, the extremities of a line that might loop into a snare. She was double: a rich man’s wife and an artist; native yet foreign. Duplicity was inscribed in her face.

But Morgan insisted he had seen a tall woman. ‘Same as me, about’; and he was five foot nine. Nelly Atwood came in at barely five one. High heels might account for missing inches but seemed unlikely on a sandy track; in any case, the story kept running into Morgan. He was shown TV footage of Atwood’s wife. The woman on the path had been, ‘Different,’ he insisted.

His objections were easily disregarded, of course. Morgan reeked of imbalance. One chop short of the barbecue. And then-distance, darkness, the passage of time: these might deceive a far steadier witness.

But-and this was crucial-if Morgan was to be discredited over small things, he could scarcely be relied on for large ones. The woman on the dunes might have been elfi n. Equally, she might never have existed. Elusive female forms were known to appear to men who lived alone in the bush. Folk tales were told about them. The woman on the beach might have been nothing more than a splutter of memory, the brightest element in a story related by lamplight in the unimaginable kingdom where Jimmy Morgan had been young.

The police commissioner himself appealed to her to come forward. But the woman from the sand dunes never materialised. She had appeared in flashes among the scrub, then vanished. Like the hitch-hikers who were her kin, she remained legendary; the latest variant of an old tradition.

There was a limit to what journalism could concoct from repetition and guesswork. There was a limit to what could be done with Morgan. The bush lent him a tattered heroism. Shabbiness, alcoholism, eccentricity: these might pass as the decadent residues of a mythic past. But there was a fatal laxity to the man. He should have been shrewd and sparing of words. In fact he ran on endlessly, a garrulous drunk.

There was a hunger to equate the woman he had seen with Nelly. All those years later, Tom felt it quiver under the surface of tabloid prose. It would have been so neat. Perfect solutions make perfect stories. This one foundered on a paradox: the solution required Morgan, but Morgan undid the solution.

An interview with Carson Posner appeared in a Saturday supplement. The photographer had posed him against an early Howard Arkley abstract, and there was much obsequious fi ller about the dealer’s reputation as a talent-spotter, his unwavering, unfashionable devotion to painting, and so on. But the real subject of the feature was never in doubt.

Posner said he had been devastated to learn what Felix Atwood had done. The evidence against the broker was overwhelming. Nevertheless, Posner felt sure his friend was not devoid of conscience. Atwood would not have required the certainty of punishment to suffer for what he had done. When they were both boys, he had spoken of drowning; that it was the way he would like to go. And so he, Posner, believed that his old friend had chosen to end his days in the southern waters he loved.

His interviewer raised the subject of a note. Wasn’t the absence of one a serious flaw in the suicide theory? Posner’s disdain was superb. ‘Art exists because there are realities that exceed words.’

If it was plain that Posner’s portrait of Atwood had been airbrushed into smoothness, there was admiration, in the days that followed, for the loyalty that had produced it. Mateship: the Australian male’s birthright. Even stockbrokers were worthy of it.

Above all, Posner’s opining added weight to the idea that Atwood had taken his own life. Perhaps not having really made a decision, merely going on swimming; the continent receding, and with it, the braided pull of life itself.

The most satisfying conclusions are bodily: a corpse or a coupling, death or its miniature. Tide patterns had already been verified, currents monitored. Felix Atwood’s body was never recovered. Still, the story might have ended as the larger one is said to have begun: in the huge, slow roll of the sea. But there was the feeling that had built up against Atwood’s wife. In time it would find the outlet it required.

In August, Esther Kade asked if Tom would like to meet for lunch: a small, proprietary pat to check that he was still in place.

She arrived with amber and Mexican silver bound about her wrists and said at once,‘So, Tom: what’s all this about Nelly Zhang?’ It being Esther’s habit when faced with a closed door to turn the handle and walk in.

Tom, chary of the scorn of Esther Kade at amateur trespassing on her art historical terrain, repeated the hazy half-truth he had devised in his email to her: that he was considering writing about literary and artistic controversies. ‘Nothing academic, of course. You know how the vicechancellor’s always saying we mustn’t shut ourselves off from the marketplace. So I’m thinking along the lines of feature articles. Eventually, maybe a book. The kind you see in real bookshops.’

Esther rolled her bright brown eyes, dismissing their vicechancellor’s idiocies along with Tom’s rigmarole. She had the face of a friendly monkey and was much feared on committees.

In the course of their affair, she had said, ‘I’m like one of those cities that people go, Oh it’s great for a day or two.’

Now she produced a manila envelope from her bag. ‘Not exactly my field. But I asked around the department.’

Tom took out a thin sheaf of photocopies: reviews, catalogues, the bibliography of a book called Contemporary Australian Art in which entries had been marked in fl uorescent pen.

Esther said, ‘A starting point.’

When he thanked her, she replied, ‘I saw the famous show, actually. The one that caused all the fuss.’

‘I’ve read what the papers said. But I was PhD-ing in the States at the time.’ A tiny irrelevant shard of history was rising to the surface in Tom’s mind, the memory of walking with a visiting Australian friend down an avenue of lime-green leaves in Baltimore. The tourist had fashioned silver tips for his shirt collar from foil in parody of current fashion.

A waiter dropped cutlery on the table. He made cabbalistic passes with a pepper grinder and commanded them to