Chapter Nine

He sold vacuum cleaners for six weeks. Encyclopaedias for nine days.

Then he got a job cold-calling for a timeshare outfit at Broadbeach, in a room with twelve desks and a whiteboard, and he was top of the board in his second week and top of the board every week after that.

The reason was not that he was smoother than the other callers. He was not, at nineteen, especially smooth. The accent was still country. The vocabulary was still small.

The reason was that Jamie McIntyre had no floor.

Every other caller in that room had a point at which they stopped. A point where the mark's voice cracked, or the mark mentioned a sick husband, or the mark said I'm on the pension, love — and the caller's own humanity arrived unbidden and put a hand over the mouthpiece.

He didn't have that point.

Not because he was cruel. He was, in person, warm and funny and generous with money that wasn't his, and genuinely likeable — which is the part nobody who reads the court file ever understands, and the part without which none of what follows would have been possible.

It was that somewhere in a machinery shed at West Broadview a component had been removed and never replaced.

The mark's distress was information. Distress meant engagement. Engagement meant the close was near.

He earned sixty-one thousand dollars in his first full year.

He sent his mother two thousand of it at Christmas with a card that said told you.

She never cashed it. It was in her things when she died, thirty-three years later, the ink gone brown.