The Big Drop

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They found my late client, Norman Scholfield, at the bottom of a half-built office block in the city. That is, they found part of him there; the office block is destined to rise twenty-five storeys above our fair city and Norman came off the twentieth which is just a concrete shell. He’d bounced on the scaffolding a few times on the way down and this smeared and scattered him around a little. Still, my card was in pristine condition in his pants pocket, which was why Detective Sergeant Frank Parker was sitting in the client’s chair in my office. The last bum on that chair was the now fairly widely distributed Norman’s, but I didn’t tell Frank that.

‘What did you make of him?’ Parker said.

I shrugged. ‘Man in trouble, real or imagined. He had a delivery to make to an address and he needed protection.’

‘What was he delivering?’

‘Money, what else? Said he was paying off a bet.’

‘You believed that?’

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