Mathers made inquiries into the Guns River Caravan and Cabin Park thefts using the two-by-two approach, which bore a strong data-set that he subsequently filtered through the Lacanian model. He’d learnt the two-by-two from Dickie ‘Hudcaps’ Wheeler while investigating adultery cases in Eastern Sydney in the 1980s. It was a simple and effective method: you talked to people at 2pm and watched, and, if you could, listened to them exactly 12 hours later for 2 days straight.

‘That’s actually two-by-two-by-two,’ Mathers had corrected Hudcaps.

‘Yeah, matey. You’re right, but that’s an old gumshoe tradition: you never give ’em the third dimension ’til you’re fuckin good and ready to’  and Hudcaps had swung his clenched hand as though it held a cricket bat, or a heavy piece of lumber.

It was on the second night shift that he saw the goat-boy crawling under cabins 4 and 7, and the 25ft Viscount caravan in lot 34. The youth had then scurried up the Hubers Road, a  moderately stuffed sugar-cloth sack on his back.

Back in Huberville Hotel Mathers felt that the old ‘two-by-two’ had once again delivered the goods. There was a set of clues, incidents, signs and objects that were now ready for the Lacanian model. If Hudcaps had shown him the old private dick ground-work method, Jacqui Q had turned him on to psychoanalytic approaches.

‘To understand this Lacanian model it is important to acknowledge that embedded in all of these investigations is the issue of desire, [*] ‘ she had instructed him at the office whiteboard during an almost interminable investigation into an insider-trading case that took in half the social strata of Paddington, in one way or another.

After the facts, desire. It was the only way you could get purchase on what were more often than not wildly discordant  chunks and bites of information. Desire made patterns and causal chains. The missing sink p-trap under Cabin 4. The stolen hard-drive from cabin 2. The broken-glass through the female amenities block. The heiress to the Ingerfold Group answering the door to cabin 7. The bribery charges levelled at Huberville’s chief planner.

He was onto something, and the goat-boy’s escapades were a distraction to the main line of inquiry which was only peripherally pertaining to the thefts per se. Thinking about desire helped him to see that. But the question as ever was what were his own desires in this investigation. 

‘Sometimes you have to bring your ego down like a hammer,’ Jacqui had counselled.  

It was 4 am. And sometimes you just needed to sink into sleep and allow the dreaming self to get on with it.

Mathers popped a couple of paracetemol, stripped to his boxers and turned the cable-tv on. It was The Big Sleep.

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[* cited from Patrick Fuery (ed), “Introduction” in Repesentation, Discourse and Desire: Contemporary Australian Culture and Critical Theory, 1994: 7]