There, up ahead on the left, Jules could see the marina where the Rhino had moored his boat. Police tape still fluttered across the entrance near the manager’s hut. She then caught a sunburst flaring off the tinted rear windows of the car in front as it screeched through a hard right turn and disappeared into the diabolical labyrinth of the city’s red-light district.

‘Oh God, we’ll lose them,’ she said, despair in her voice.

‘They cannot move at speed now,’ Shah assured her.

Yeah Shah, but neither can we, she thought to herself.

Within moments they had reached the same corner where their quarry had just entered New Town. The driver yanked the wheel once more and took them into the congested chaos, blowing through a pile of garbage as he did so. The stench of rotten eggs, meat and vegetable matter saturated the inside of the Volvo. Jules resisted the urge to gag.

She craned around awkwardly to see how much back-up Shah had. She could see one other SUV, an older Toyota of some sort. Red and blue flashers turned inside its grille work, adding their own urgency to the bubble the driver had placed on the roof. She might have shaken her head had it not been so painful to move. The longer she was in this city, the less she understood it.

‘Where are the police?’ she asked.

‘They will be back at the crash site,’ said Shah. ‘But Northern Territory and city law prohibits them from exceeding the speed limit by more than twenty kilometres an hour, even while in hot pursuit. There have been incidents. Pedestrian fatalities.’

As if to underscore that point, they passed a trio of bodies, lying face down in the bone-dry dust, their blood spilling into the earth. Crowds had gathered, but kept their distance, as if the corpses might somehow transmit the violence of their ending through simple proximity.

‘But we –’

‘We do not answer to the city or Territory,’ he explained patiently. ‘We are licensed by the development authority.’

Birendra spoke up again from the front seat, where he was loading shells into a military-style shotgun. ‘They would not follow us into New Town anyway, Miss Julianne.’

‘Turning right,’ their driver said, giving another brutal hoist on the steering wheel. The Volvo scraped past a pair of pedestrians, the vortex of the vehicle’s passing yanking their hats off into the rubbish.