When the body in the bag is the wrong body, the case becomes the case. The seventy-three papers at the novel's centre are not, as you first assume, a list. They are a ledger. Academics rarely admit in public: that scholarship has always been inseparable from patronage, and patronage from obligation. Academic institutions, where power is quiet, consequences accumulate slowly, where power protects itself in beautiful rooms and Dr Alex Moreton's dining table at the Scholar's Table on the Swan River has, by now, heard more than its share of the city's unfinished business.

The Scholar's Table has never felt more like a threshold between two kinds of world: the warm amber of Marco's riverside dining room and the cold bureaucratic dark outside it.

Virgil appears at the exact right moment, as he always does. He says nothing, as he always does.

The river goes on.