‘Sorry, Miss,’ he said, ‘but as bad as this looks, it’s heaps worse round the back, on the waterfront. Once the sun goes down, it’s a fuckin’ bloodhouse out there. That place where your mate got in a bit of strife today, the old marina, they throw up these massive bloody iron barricades of an evening. Lock themselves down behind them. Be an unusual morning when the sun didn’t come up on half-a-dozen or so corpses around the edge of Newie. So, sorry, but we’re better going through here.’

‘It’s okay,’ replied Jules. ‘I need to get my bearings anyway. So this place goes back what, four or five blocks to the inner harbour?’

Granger leaned on his horn, mounted the median strip and forced a passage past a couple of maxi taxis spilling drunken sailors directly onto the tarmac of the highway.

‘Fuckwits,’ he muttered. ‘Yeah, five blocks along the southern edge. Maybe eight or nine along the waterfront down by the marina, and three of four out of the arse end of Hong Kong Charlie’s here. The whole thing’s a fucking mess. Shaped like a heart. A blackened, hateful heart.’ He grinned, pleased with his literary allusions.

‘Probably best you don’t head in there,’ the Australian continued, as they bounced down off the median strip. ‘There’s three main roads run through the place, but soon as you get off them, you’re fucked. The Authority laid them down when the whole place was nothing more than a bit of waste ground with a few surveyor’s pegs on it. Pretty much everything else in there, every cross-street, every alley, every little fucking cut-through – and there’s dozens of them, maybe hundreds – they all just sorta sprang up along the natural lie of the land, between bits of ground grabbed up by whoever built on it. Sometimes a place will burn down, or maybe it gets burnt down, you know, and the next morning there’s a new cross-street. Probably with a handful of food carts, hookers and pickpockets already claiming it as their turf. Until someone bigger comes along, kicks them off, and runs up something like a fried chicken joint where you can get a bit of crystal meth and a dodgy tattoo with your bucket of spicy wings.’

A fight broke out on the footpath just beside her window, a brawling knot of civilians by the look of them. Maybe construction workers, Jules thought, judging by the high-visibility vests a couple of them wore, and the muddy steel-capped boots they were using to kick the shit out of a small Asian man they’d surrounded. Before she could see how that turned out – poorly, she would have guessed – Granger found a gap in the traffic and accelerated away.