Amanda listened intensely. Grief again, yet another form, this one the micro-focus type. She knew that grief sometimes made people focus on minute or unimportant things as a distraction from what was at hand, the huge and foreboding burden that was loss. It made people keep their appointment with the hairdresser on the evening of the day their spouse was killed. Focus on tasks. Focus on objects. Anything but the horrible truth.

She thought she might actually be feeling something, a sad little stirring, encouraged by her analysis of Keema’s parents’ grief. But the butterfly stepped across the threshold of her ear canal and Amanda laughed hard, just once, a sort of exhilarated cough. The three people standing on the stairs turned toward her. She waved at the creature and it fluttered away.

“Let’s go inside.” Brian Daule put an arm around his wife. “We’ll get this over and done with.”

There were a couple of aggressive incidents on my way down to Sydney this time. Fewer than I expected, actually. While I used the self-service check-in kiosk at Cairns airport, a couple of young men with backpacks stood nearby watching and sniggering threateningly, and when I passed one of them shouted, “Kiddie-fucker! Piece of shit!” There were some dirty looks on the plane, no vive-la-résistance wine and cheese this time. A few people stopping in their tracks and pointing as I made my way through the terminal at the other end. As I got into a taxi a woman in the queue yelled “Hey! Hey!” trying to get my attention. I slammed the door without responding and we drove off, but I did catch her mouthing something that didn’t look particularly friendly at me.

When Kelly was working, before Lillian, she used to manage a gym in the CBD, the kind that takes in polished men and women in corporate getup and spits them out glossy and half-naked, their taut bodies strapped into colorful Lycra. It gave me a little boost of self-esteem that she hung around these beautiful, powerful people doing impressive sorts of things all day—lying on gym mats putting their feet behind their heads while making multimillion dollar deals on Bluetooth earpieces—and at night she came home to me, the drug squad meathead. Sure, there was intelligence and cunning in what I did for a living. Sometimes I used world-class surveillance and intelligence-gathering techniques to nab some of the most dangerous criminals in the country. I’d been a part of teams that ordered private jets out of the sky, that sealed diamonds as big as garden peas into evidence bags, that posed cheekily for pictures with confiscated gold-plated AK-47s.

But then again, sometimes I burst in on filthy apartments looking for dope, and some drug dealer’s girlfriend threw a day-old plate of fish fingers and mashed potato at my face.