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looked in at the blackened dripping mess. A firefighter picked through debris on the floor. The case was such a washout she could feel it sapping her strength already. Paperwork, identification of the accelerant – she was guessing petrol – talk to Edman again, put a little pressure on, but in the end what for? If he admitted to the insurance fraud it’d only mean more paperwork. Days hanging around court waiting for his hearing, which would probably end in a suspended sentence. If he’d been a bad boy before, maybe a few months inside. Whoopee.
    Ella watched the firefighters roll up the hoses, and sighed. Where was the big case, the one that would envelop her, the one she could attack with passion and drive? Over the last few months her enthusiasm for the job had leached away like water through Sydney sandstone. She found it hard to know whether she still loved the job or only the potential it held. She sometimes felt a little of the old thrill when she drove in to work, or when she was at home and the pager went off, but lately all the cases were such crap. Stupid people did stupid things to other stupid people and she had to sort it out and clean it up. She was like one of Pavlov’s dogs in reverse. When the bell rings but there’s no meat, you soon stop salivating.
    She heard a thump and looked around to see newspapers being dropped at the newsagent’s door. She walked up as a man came out of the shop. A few coins later she was reading about yesterday’s bank hold-up and shooting.
    Now that was a decent job. Strike Force Gold – so called because the thieves were scoring pots of it, the joke went – was a huge team made up of detectives from the Metropolitan Robbery Squad plus a few from various city stations. They and the other squads in Crime Agencies had everything: resources, money, profile, interesting cases and genuine bad guys. They never had to deal with assault complaints where Girl A accused Girl B of throwing an avocado at her, while Girl B said Girl A threw it first.
    Ella ground her teeth. Over the past three years she’d applied regularly to move into Crime Agencies – preferably Homicide Squad, but she’d take whatever she could get – yet never scored so much as a week’s secondment. Forget what her mate Detective Dennis Orchard said about the process being fair; someone was white-anting her.
    Oh, it was fine for Dennis. He was already in there. It was easy for him to say nobody remembered the time on her first homicide case when she’d barked at the Assistant Commissioner to get the fuck out of the crime scene before she had him arrested. It wasn’t entirely her fault: the man wore civvies and it had been really dark at the time. His name was Frank Shakespeare and he was retired now, but it was clear he still had friends in the job.
    Ella watched Edman Hughes stare into the ruins of his shop. The world was chock full of weasels like him determined to pull the wool over her eyes, and it would always be so, but she wished it could at least be for a big and juicy reason.
    5.05 am
     
    Ella’s bank owned half an unrenovated Federation house in Putney, a small suburb sandwiched between Victoria Road and the northern shores of the Parramatta River, and let Ella live in it for an exorbitant amount of money each fortnight. The house was built of dark red brick with a red tile roof, the kind of place where you expected to see a swan made from an old tyre on the front lawn and the lawn itself to be thick and springy and mown once a week right down to the white. The lawn around her house had neither a swan nor springiness. It was thin and weedy and grew rank along the edges where unused garden beds lay like the mounds of simple graves.
    She parked the unmarked car on the street, leaving the windows down a bit to let out the smoke smell. Her part of the house was the back. The front was owned by a thin young man by the name of Denzil, who was deaf and worked as a computer programmer from home. He