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Word came down the pipe to McGrail: bring your attack dog to heel.
    Which he did, with unusual vehemence. (McGrail’s normal mode of censure was impassive sarcasm, mild only in the delivery.) It was one of the few times in their long relationship when he seemed to take Ihaka’s lone-wolf behaviour personally. What Ihaka didn’t know was that McGrail was closing in on his goal of becoming Auckland District Commander and lay awake at night running through scenarios which could prevent that happening. Almost all of them involved Ihaka.
    Ihaka paused in the doorway. “Oh yeah, the hit-and-run,” he said, making the speech marks sign. “They’ll make a fucking meal of that. Any brilliant ideas?”

    McGrail’s expression became even more dubious. “As in turning the negative into a positive?” He shook his head. “That’s probably a bridge too far. If I was in your shoes, I’d focus on damage limitation.”
    It all went pretty much exactly as McGrail had anticipated. Ihaka never got around to devising a strategy to neutralize the issue. When it came up at the interview, instead of dealing with it quickly by admitting error and declaring that he’d learned from the experience, he said he still thought he was right. The panel chairman observed that Ihaka seemed to be missing the point, which was his unprofessional conduct rather than who was right and who was wrong. With all due respect, replied Ihaka, although respect wasn’t evident in his demeanour, that mindset was another example of priorities being arse-about-face.
    McGrail’s replacement was a detective sergeant from North Shore, Tony “Boy” Charlton, who was six years Ihaka’s junior.
    It was bad enough being overlooked, worse that he now had to report to the guy who’d got the job, but what Ihaka really couldn’t stomach was that Charlton was everything he wasn’t – youthful, good-looking, polished, politically adept, destined for stardom. He was going all the way to the top; it was just a matter of how quickly and by which route. Unfortunately for Ihaka, Charlton’s chosen route ran slap-bang through his career.
    Charlton had been given his nickname by an Aussie cop over on secondment. “Boy” Charlton was an Australian folk hero of the 1920s, a swimmer who set world records and won an Olympic gold medal. The famous public swimming pool in the Sydney Domain overlooking the Woolloomooloo Finger Wharf was named after him.
    Ihaka was thrilled to learn, in the course of a moan to a contact in the New South Wales Police Service, that the Boy
Charlton Pool was a renowned homosexual hangout and pick-up spot. He’d disseminated this information far and wide but the take-up was disappointing, perhaps because Charlton’s wife was as good-looking as he was. The fact that Charlton was a lust object for some female officers and administrative staff might also have had something to do with it.
    One step behind Charlton came Detective Sergeant Ron “Igor” Firkitt, a shaven-headed hulk with a chain-smoker’s poisoned well of a mouth. Some likened their bond to that between McGrail and Ihaka, but there was no comparison. Charlton and Firkitt were rusted onto each other, hence Firkitt’s nickname referring to the shambling monster who does his master’s dirty work in Gothic horror stories.
    Given that Ihaka regarded Charlton as personifying the police force’s transformation into an organization in which he didn’t fit, he might have been expected to find common cause with Firkitt, who was even more old-school than he was. It didn’t work out that way. Perhaps there was an element of two bulls in one paddock, of Auckland Central not being big enough for both, but from day one Firkitt made it clear he wasn’t interested in cooperation. Whereas Charlton treated Ihaka with studied politeness, Firkitt never missed an opportunity to remind