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detected a note of resentment there. He savoured it for a second but almost immediately felt guilty. Maybe his soon-to-be ex-wife was right, he did have a mean streak and a chip on his shoulder. He tried to shake it off and stay bright and positive.
    ‘We’re on the case, temporarily seconded to Albany Detectives; they’re over-stretched. We’ve got just over a week before Hutchens sends one of his regulars over to run things.’
    Buckley didn’t seem that excited, even less so when Cato told himjust who Hutchens wanted in charge. Cato sweetened it so that it sounded like Buckley would maintain a ‘managerial overview and inter-agency liaison role’.
    All bullshit and they both knew it.
    Buckley squinted out through the lace curtains. ‘Go get ’em, Jackie Chan.’
    Something was burning. There were blood spots in the sink. Stuart Miller muttered his third ‘fucking hell’ of the day, chucked the disposable Bic into the scummy water and rushed through to the kitchen to rescue his toast. The timer on the microwave read 8.20. Days when he woke up after The Dream were usually like this: accident-prone, out of sorts, pissed off. He hadn’t had The Dream for months: just as well, too many mornings like this and he’d have topped himself by now. He tried scraping some of the black stuff off the toast. He didn’t actually mind the taste that much but Jenny kept warning him he’d get cancer if he ate it. He gave up, binned it and slotted two more in the toaster.
    Miller switched on the radio. Somebody was wittering on about the cost and quality of a cappuccino in Perth versus Fremantle. He usually preferred the ABC talk over the ads and crap music on the other stations but lately the chat seemed to get more and more trivial and giggly. Alien. Sometimes when he woke up from The Dream he felt as if he’d just landed like those poor wretched asylum-seekers in the leaky boats up north: desperate, unable to fully understand what was going on, isolated, not knowing what the day would bring. He went back to the bathroom and peeled his daily pills off their foil – blood pressure, cholesterol, blood thinner, beta blocker – chucked them down without the water and got back to shaving. Why shave? He no longer had a job to go to, no longer had appearances to keep up. Jenny had left him a list of things he might do to occupy his dotage, provide him with a meaningful and active retirement. The backyard needed weeding, a few things to be got from the shop, he could walk or cycle into town and back, and there was always retirees tennis for fun, fitness and friendship.
    ‘Fucking hell.’
    That was the fourth for the day.
    Everyone was gathered at Murder HQ for the first official squad meeting on Operation Flipper. Cato had passed on the news from DI Hutchens and noted a raised eyebrow and half-smirk from Tess when he explained the operational arrangements and line of day-to-day command. He kept to himself the bit about Hutchens wanting them to just go through the motions and not actually achieve anything. He had a point to prove, if only to himself, that he could be a good cop. Just once more. He’d called Jane to let her know something had come up at work and that he wouldn’t be able to have Jake this weekend. Jane sounded particularly bright and carefree. Cato got the message: she was already moving on.
    He outlined, for Greg Fisher’s benefit, the essence of the pathology findings so far. The body would be on its way to Perth in a cold box on the next flight out from the recently expanded airstrip at Ravensthorpe. In the absence of proper freight facilities the torso was in a sealed body bag, in an old chest fridge supplied by the Ravy butcher. In Perth it would undergo further examination and tests. Cato was well aware that the flight from Ravy to the Perth PathLab would be the only fast-moving thing about the investigation. This wasn’t a high priority – an unidentified person who nobody seemed to be making any noise