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protégé, now his equal, and his closest – some would have said only – friend in the police force. “Did you really think no one would notice you’re not here?”
    The woman was already surveying the room. Being familiar with the dynamics of the bar and pub scene, she assumed Ihaka would shortly be walking out of her life. But there were plenty more fish in the sea, and she was confident of landing one. She doubted he’d put up much of a fight.
    â€œSo how’s the party going?” said Ihaka finally.
    â€œWell, it’s warming up,” said Van Roon, “but then it’s been going for three bloody hours. Look, I know he’s an old woman, but Christ almighty, Tito, the bloke’s put in fifty years.”
    Senior Sergeant Ted Worsp was retiring after fifty years on the force, having made more comebacks than tuberculosis. He’d been on the brink of retirement for well over a decade, but some interfering prick would always find a little task or project for him, some bullshit community-policing role or a cold case over which he could make an ineffectual fuss. Little or nothing would be achieved, but anyone
who happened to ask could be assured that something was indeed being done.
    And now that he’d clocked up the half-century, his departure was being marked as if the greatest crime-fighter since Wyatt Earp was bowing out. Everyone from the District Commander down had gathered to give him a big send-off. Everyone except Ihaka.
    â€œAh, fuck,” said Ihaka. The woman interrupted her reconnaissance to give him a deadpan, raised-eyebrows look. It was a look of such pure cynicism that he had to wonder if the whole bleeding-heart thing had been an act. Maybe she didn’t really give a shit about Maori obesity and the diabetes epidemic. I suppose I should be flattered, he thought.
    He shrugged and grimaced to indicate that the caller was being difficult and half-turned away. “I suppose Boy and Igor are there?”
    â€œOf course they’re here,” said Van Roon. “Is that what this is all about?”
    Â 
    Three months earlier Ihaka’s boss Detective Inspector Finbar McGrail had been promoted to Auckland District Commander.
    Over the course of the thirteen years they’d worked together the pair had established a strange, symbiotic, much talked-about relationship. A lot of the gossip that swirled around Auckland Central Police Station concerned McGrail’s tolerance, even indulgence, of Ihaka. For a time the popular theory was that McGrail was doing it under sufferance: he had to cover for Ihaka and turn a blind eye to his disregard for protocol and procedure because Ihaka had something on him. Maybe it was the same dark secret that had compelled one of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s rising stars to resign abruptly and emigrate to New Zealand. Sceptics pointed out that McGrail probably got the fuck
out of Belfast because he was on an IRA hit list. They also asked how Ihaka, who’d never ventured further afield than Sydney and was hardly a student of international affairs, would know more about McGrail’s Northern Ireland past than the recruitment team who vetted him before bringing him to New Zealand.
    The rumour-mongers then tilled more obvious and fertile ground: McGrail was a devoted husband and father and a lay preacher in the Presbyterian Church, but behind that pillar of the community façade he was obviously some kind of sleazebag or pervert because people who wore their virtue on their sleeves always were. Ihaka must have found out that McGrail consorted with under-age Oriental prostitutes or rent boys, or visited a dominatrix once a fortnight to have his nuts slapped around with a fly swat.
    What gave this version of the theory legs was the catch-22 cynicism – the more virtuous McGrail appeared, the more likely he was to have a depraved secret life – and the fact that even Ihaka’s most fervent