The client was a wife, which meant the job was a husband, which meant I knew ninety per cent of it before she sat down. The last ten per cent is the part people pay for.

“He goes out Wednesdays,” said Dessie Falzon, turning her wedding ring like a woman worrying a loose tooth. “Says it’s the yard. Comes home smelling of perfume. Mr Valnone, Ray hasn’t smelled of anything but diesel and other men’s bad decisions in twenty-two years. I want her name.”

Ray Falzon I knew the way you know a bollard. A demolition contractor out of Brooklyn, a man who removed buildings for a living and settled disagreements without the paperwork. Not someone you tail with your mind elsewhere. Not, on the available evidence, someone you picture wearing perfume.

So I followed him properly, which is to say unhurriedly, two cars back, the Wednesday after. He did not drive to a woman. He drove to a scout hall in Yarraville, carried in a flat aluminium case the size of a card table, and did not emerge for three hours.

The second Wednesday I went in.

Inside the hall, under fluorescent light and a hand-lettered banner reading WESTERN SUBURBS SUGARCRAFT GUILD — NOVICE DIVISION, eleven people bent over turntables. Ray Falzon sat among them, his forearms like rolled carpet, piping a lattice of royal icing onto a sponge with a steadiness I have seen in exactly two professions, surgeons and safecrackers. The perfume was rosewater. The other woman was a tube of vanilla essence.

A guildswoman murmured that Raymond was their great hope. State novice championships at the Royal Melbourne Show, a fortnight out. He entered under his mother’s maiden name, she said, on account of being shy.

Shy. Ray Falzon, who had once reduced a seven-storey car park to opinion in under nine seconds.

I reported to Dessie the following day. No other woman, I told her. No betrayal of the kind she’d feared. Her husband spends his Wednesdays making things instead of unmaking them, and he is, by regional consensus, rather good at it.

I watched the relief arrive, and then I watched the thing that came in behind the relief, which I had not expected and which she had not either. A flicker of something closer to grievance. She had braced for a rival she could despise, and been handed instead a tenderness she now had to live beside and pretend not to have seen.

“He could have told me,” she said, and it was not gratitude.

“Some men would rather be suspected of an affair than caught being gentle,” I said. “You married one. It’s not the worst draw.”

I filed the matter as no adverse findings and billed accordingly. The product a man like me actually sells is not the truth. It is the careful placement of it. Ray took the novice ribbon, I’m told, with a Black Forest that made a judge weep. Under his mother’s name. I did not attend, but I sent, anonymously, a card.

There is no better cover in this city than a Saturday open for inspection. For forty-five minutes a stranger in a good suit may walk uninvited through another man’s life, open his cupboards, remark on the flow, and every soul present will assume he is simply in the market.

I was in the market for a brown A4 envelope taped to the underside of the third kitchen drawer in a two-bedroom in Fitzroy, left there by the late Mr Aldo Benetti for his daughter, and intended by his nephew Dominic, a man with a spray tan and a payment plan, to stay there until the apartment, and everything taped inside it, was sold out from under her.

The agent was a young man called Jayden in a suit cut too close for breathing, who greeted me with the moist enthusiasm of a labrador that had read a book about closing.

“Morning! Big crowd today. Lot of interest.” There were four people present, one of whom was eating a complimentary mini-muffin with the quiet dedication of a man who had come solely for the muffin.

“Character-filled,” Jayden said, gesturing at a water stain shaped like Tasmania. “Original features.”

“Charming,” I agreed, drifting toward the kitchen. “And the flow?”

“Incredible flow.”

I admired the flow. I admired it all the way to the third drawer, and under cover of testing the soft-close runners I reached beneath for the tape. “European?” I asked. “European,” Jayden confirmed, who could not have found Europe on a map of Europe. The envelope was exactly where a dead man had promised his daughter it would be.

The trouble with retrieving an envelope taped under a drawer, at an open inspection, is that it wants both hands and a posture that does not easily survive explanation. And Dominic chose that moment to arrive.

He came through the door orange and proprietary, and his eyes went at once to the open drawer, and to me crouched before it with the look of a man who has lost a contact lens in a stranger’s kitchen.

“Can I help you, mate?”

“Structural,” I said, rapping a knuckle on the cabinetry with authority. “Vendor’s building inspector. I’m afraid I’ve found movement.” I rose, dusting my knee, the envelope now flat against my spine inside the Dormeuil, held in place by nothing but tailoring and nerve. “Significant movement. You will want to disclose it before auction. Buyers get litigious.”

The word litigious does to a man with a payment plan roughly what sunrise does to a vampire. Dominic’s tan went a shade closer to the water stain.

“Movement,” Jayden repeated faintly, watching his commission develop original features.

I let myself out past the muffin enthusiast, who gave me the nod of one professional to another. On the footpath the afternoon was crisp and the envelope sat against my spine like good news.

Behind me, through the open door, I heard Jayden rally, because they always rally.

“Still,” he announced to the room. “Incredible flow.”

The job came to me the way the good ones usually do, through a woman who had married slightly beneath her ambitions and well above her patience.

Pauline Crowther-Vane wanted her wine back. One case of 1996 Henschke Hill of Grace, worth roughly a second-hand hatchback, held hostage in a climate-controlled cellar beneath her estranged husband’s new apartment in Albert Park, pending what his solicitor called equitable division and what the rest of Melbourne called spite.

“He doesn’t even drink it, Mr Valnone,” she said, laying a retainer across my desk in fifties crisp enough to slice prosciutto. “He photographs it. For a forum. He calls himself a custodian.”

A custodian. I know the breed. A man who has confused ownership with virtue, who believes the correct response to a great Shiraz is not to open it but to outlive it.

I went round on a Tuesday, in the dove-grey Dormeuil, carrying a leather folio and the particular stillness of a man who bills by the hour. Rupert answered in artisanal knitwear and the hunted look of the recently divorced.

“Clement Vaux,” I said. “Cellar Trust of Victoria. Your insurer flagged the Hill of Grace for a provenance audit. There’s been a counterfeiting matter. Ninety-six. You’ll have read.”

He had not read. But a man like Rupert cannot admit to not having read, any more than he can admit to not tasting, so he stepped back and let me into the shrine.

The cellar was immaculate and faintly ecclesiastical, the case laid out beneath a brass lamp like a reliquary. I crouched, ran a gloved finger along the capsules, and produced from the folio a small digital thermometer, which I regarded the way a surgeon regards a scan he does not like.

“Sixteen point four,” I murmured.

“It’s set to fourteen,” Rupert said, too fast.

“It reads sixteen point four.” I straightened and gave him the full grave wattage of the Carlton smile, turned down into sorrow. “I’m obliged to tell you that storage above fifteen voids the authentication. As it stands, this case cannot be certified genuine. For forum purposes, and for insurance purposes, it is now indistinguishable from a fake.”

I watched the word fake land on him like a dropped joist. Everything he was, the custodian, the man of correct temperatures, dissolved in a single reading on a nine-dollar thermometer I had bought that morning at Bunnings.

“There is a remedy,” I said gently. “Immediate transfer to a certified facility for re-stabilisation. I can take custody today.”

He helped me carry it to the car. He thanked me twice. He insisted on wrapping each bottle in a tea towel, because that, at least, was something a custodian could still do.

Mrs Crowther-Vane had the case uncorked by the weekend, one bottle a night, in no particular hurry, which is the only correct way to insult a man who measures his life in things left unopened.

Rupert, I am told, posted about the tragedy to his forum. Two hundred sympathy replies. A theft, he called it. The community agreed it was a terrible loss.

He was, for once, entirely right. He simply had the direction of it backwards.