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neighbourhood territory he chooses to stake out and fight to maintain. A ship’s cat only has a small area above and below decks to patrol and is almost always in the process of being observed by someone. Trim Flinders, like all ships’ cats, had no secrets from the humans with whom he shared his cloistered life.
    On long tedious voyages, Trim’s feats of derring-do often formed the prime subject of conversation among the crew, his daily exploits invariably recounted with a fair dollop of exaggeration, most of it concerning his hunting skills, his mastery of the art of acrobatics and his extraordinary sagacity. In the minds of Trim’s admirers, this level of practical intelligence was placed well above that of many an admiral of the fleet.
    Billy thought a moment about cats. He had always been passionate about them, and Baby Grand, the cat of his own and later Charlie’s affections, had lived to be almost twenty when he’d died. In the last years of his life, Baby Grand had been in and out of the vet’s so often that Billy had learned a great deal about the anatomy of a cat. In his mind he now explained to the boy why the average domestic cat is remarkable in several respects.

    A cat’s body contains two hundred and thirty bones, twentyfour more than a human skeleton. Its pelvis and shoulders are more loosely attached to its spine than most other fourlegged beasts, which gives it extreme flexibility. Its capacity for great speed over short distances is founded in muscles that seem larger than necessary for so small a frame. Like a monkey, a cat is also equipped with a tail that provides the necessary balance when jumping or landing on a narrow branch or ledge, surface or wall.
    Cats can leap from considerable heights and they do so with their backs arched and all four legs extended, which allows the shock of landing to be spread evenly and so cushion their fall. Their forelegs can turn in almost any direction so they almost never fall awkwardly or sprain a wrist or jar a heel. Their heads can turn nearly 180 degrees so that they can look to the rear without employing their shoulders. They can see well enough during the day, narrowing their pupils against the brightness, as well as exceptionally at night when their pupils expand to utilise all of the available light. Their hearing is acute and a cat can distinguish its master’s footsteps on the pavement several minutes before he arrives home. Unlike most animals, they walk on their toes with the back part of their paw raised. Their paws not only hold things down but may be used to scoop, lift, grip, pat, pummel and punch.
    Trim and his feline family are remarkable athletes, although they are sprinters rather than endurance runners, stalking their prey and then accelerating at high speed to make a kill, like the larger cats in the wild, particularly a cheetah stalking an antelope, which is a picture you see often enough on television.
    The cat’s chest cavity is small and equipped with a compact heart and lungs that tire easily, and after short bursts of high activity require long periods of rest. This narrow chest cavity allows more room for their digestive organs, which are comparatively large, suggesting that before cats discovered the comfort of humans with their meals provided on tap, they didn’t always have things their own way. Large digestive organs allowed the cat to gorge on a kill and then engage in a fairly prolonged period of fasting. Which turned out to be a very useful characteristic for Trim Flinders to possess, as in the course of his ardent and adventurous life, he would endure good times and bad, and had he been born a dog, he might not have survived.
    Billy was approaching Circular Quay and the New Hellas Cafe owned by Con the Greek. Constantine Poleondakis was a fifty-five-year-old widower with two unmarried adult daughters of his own and another three nieces, only one of them married and the youngest in her late teens. Con had assumed