Without warning the first armed response vehicle appeared in the dead-end street outside the McCabes’ terraced home. No lights, no sirens. Four armed officers filed out. Two went around the back and two went to the partially open front door. They made 193hand gestures and then pushed it open and stepped inside and moved upstairs, rifle stocks pressed into their shoulders. At the top of the stairs all doors were shut but for the bathroom. It had been forced open, door and jamb split at the edges. One officer made a hand gesture and then pushed open the door and the other officer moved in, rifle first. Liam McCabe lay in his blood on the linoleum, wearing a shirt sling, his face a beaten ruin, his head wedged at a horrible angle under the toilet. Beside him lay his daughter. Slathered and rolled in her father’s blood, she looked larval. His arm lay across her, pinning her to the floor, and she gazed about, hands squeezing, chubby legs slowly pedalling the air, ominously mute. She was dredged from the cold setting blood and taken to the landing and checked for wounds. Save the bruises on her forehead and arms, as if she’d been tightly gripped, she was unharmed. The officer called it in while the officer crouching beside Liam removed a glove and felt his throat. As far as she could tell, he’d been stabbed at least six times in the chest and stomach. She hung her head and shut her eyes. Through the fern-frosted window a helicopter drifted beneath its pounding blades, searchlight swinging through the dark. Then she felt it: a slow and distant pulse.

2

The following night Dolan materialized from a dark grove of trees carrying a splitting maul. He crossed a long dirt path towards a mansion surrounded by the jagged black cut-outs of hills, a 194modern glass box that cast a warm glow across the dark waters of a lake. In the carport on the block-paving driveway sat a horse trailer and a car cloaked in a grey waterproof cover. He stood balanced on the rear tyre of the trailer and looked in through the wired glass. An old Triumph Bonneville motorbike lay inside on the floor. He pulled off the car cover and looked through the dark windows of a yellow Saleen Mustang and saw a dash-mounted police computer and radio.