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bad things got, he wouldn’t have that.
    There was only one person he yearned for, one person he wished he could cling to in the night, but she was out of reach. He’d made sure of that.

TITO IHAKA, JOHAN VAN ROON
Wairarapa, yesterday
    Well, would you look at this, thought Johan Van Roon as he nosed his car through the trees into a space between two grimy utes. It was a classic summer scene. A cricket match was in progress on a converted farm paddock, a natural oval bordered by a long, curving stand of macrocarpas on one side and a stream on the other. Brown hills undulated across the horizon. Late afternoon was becoming early evening, and the burn and dazzle of Wairarapa summer had receded to a benign, golden glow.
    Van Roon got out of his car, almost planting his boat shoe in a fresh cowpat. Yep, classic Kiwi all right.
    He jumped the stream at a point where it narrowed to not much more than a metre, and negotiated a low wire fence to join the scattering of spectators on the boundary. Some boys were having their own game with a plastic bat and tennis ball, while a couple of toddlers tottered like drunks among the female support crew spread over several picnic rugs.
    A classic scene, perhaps, but not one in which Van Roon had ever expected to see Tito Ihaka. Yet there he was at square leg, typically the only fielder not wearing a cap or floppy hat. Unless Van Roon’s eyes deceived him, Ihaka had shed some weight. It wasn’t that he was a shadow of his former self, like the ex-fatsos in diet adverts who pose beside life-sized cardboard dummies of their old, blubbery selves, but there was definitely less of him.
    Next over Ihaka was stationed on the long-off boundary, not far from the spectators. Van Roon wandered across. Ihaka was too focused on what was happening in the middle to notice him.
    â€œYou’ve been down here too long, mate,” said Van Roon. “I suppose you’ve taken up pottery as well.”

    Ihaka glanced over his shoulder. “Detective Inspector Van Roon. What brings you…?” The rest of the sentence was drowned out by a group bellow from the middle. Ihaka’s head whipped around. His team-mates were trying to alert him to the imminent arrival of a skier. Ihaka got a sighter, unhurriedly positioned himself and took the catch with a minimum of fuss, the ball seeming to nestle gratefully in his meaty grasp.
    The other fielders converged. After a minute or so, Ihaka extracted himself from the back-slapping huddle and walked over to Van Roon. “If I’d fucking spilled that,” he growled, “you’d be face-down in a cowpat right now.”
    Van Roon retreated to a wooden bench a few metres back from the boundary. Nothing’s changed, he thought. Ihaka might have spent five years in this backwater, he might have lost a bit of weight and taken up a team sport (and a pretty white, middle-class one at that), but under those cricket whites was the Tito he knew and loved – and had sometimes regretted ever setting eyes on.
    A few minutes later Ihaka came on to bowl. Van Roon expected him to try to bowl faster than was sensible for a man of his age and build. In fact, he shuffled in off half a dozen paces and rolled his arm over as gently as if he was bowling to an emotionally fragile eight-year-old in backyard cricket. While his slow-medium trundle seemed, to Van Roon’s admittedly untrained eye, to sit up and beg to be flogged to all corners of the ground, it proved too crafty for the opposition. In quick succession three batsmen launched violent swipes and were either clean bowled or caught in the deep. With the youngster bounding in from the other end chipping in with an athletic caught and bowled, the game ended in a clatter of tumbling wickets.
    The fall of the final wicket was the cue for a round of hugs and high-fives. Van Roon wished he’d brought a camera:
he knew people who’d pay top dollar for photographic evidence of Ihaka