His first visit to Maria Vincenti had been an almost total waste of time, for she had refused point blank to answer any of his questions, taking refuge in a pretence of not understanding. It was a stupid ploy, since it would have been obvious to anyone but an imbecile that no-one could live in an English-speaking country for twenty years without gaining at least a working knowledge of the language, but one he had found impossible to get around, though it had confirmed his suspicions that Maria knew a great deal more than she was telling. He had decided to leave her alone for a while and then make another attempt when perhaps he would catch her in a different mood. And in the meantime he had a number of other leads to follow up. First Tom had tried to follow the tracks of ‘Michael Trafford’s’ business interests. These were diverse and were connected only by a string of registered offices across the southern half of Australia. Tom called numbers in Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, but in each case he drew blanks.
