She pushed over a set of photographs. ‘That’s me,’ she said. I looked through them. She was good. A bag lady on a bench, a plump man walking two small dogs, a tired-looking nurse going home, a man in overalls next to vans with Telstra and Optus written on the sides. ‘Don’t get a chance to go out anymore, the business’s got so big,’ said Angela. ‘Once it was just Bert, my late husband, and Harry Chalmers and me. Now it’s ten full-timers, thirty temps on call, part-timers, they do a shift. Works well, you never see the same person, same vehicle, twice. Variety, that’s the key. Variety. The police have trouble getting that part right.’ I didn’t demur. The jacks didn’t get lots of things right. I’d tried very hard to point some of them out. In a manner that was held to be extreme. Murderous in fact. ‘Yes,’ said Angela. ‘You can’t run a business like this on trade union lines. Flexibility, that’s what you need.’ We were in the cheerful offices of Cairncross & Associates above a printery off York Street in South Melbourne.
