Yoti permitted himself to smile. Canno had gone high; he himself had remained almost stationary, and the day was long back on life’s road when they had joined the Department together.

Napoleon Bonaparte! What a name! And, by all accounts, what a man! Sergeant Yoti pondered, his friend’s letter gripped by a sizeable fist. The tales he had heard about this Napoleon Bonaparte, this detective-inspector of the Queensland CID, this cross between Sir Galahad and Ned Kelly.

Well, the stolen babies would deflate this Bonaparte. They’d stir his grey matter and dry up his sinuses. He boasted that he’d never failed to finish an investigation. Well, well! Old Canno must be putting the yoke on this Mister Bonaparte, doing a snigger up his sleeve while urging him on to tackle the disappearances of four babies, babies who had just vanished, vanished from a pram or a cot, out of a house, off a veranda, even off Main Street one busy afternoon.

Yoti wasn’t amused when thinking about it, even though the only gleam of comfort in a dark night was the failure of Canno’s city experts to do better than he had done… which was just nothing in clear results. The first baby had been a routine job; the second baby, an upheaval. The third child had brought Canno’s boys; photographers andfingerprinters and dust collectors. And the last baby had loosened all hell in Mitford so that even his wife had looked at him with eyes of disillusionment.

Napoleon Bonaparte! Coming to try his luck weeks after Baby Number Four had vanished like a penny in the river. No wonder the cat laughed.

Sergeant Yoti loved cats, and was stroking the enormous black specimen on his desk when the telephone in the outer office blasted the peace. Yoti smiled at the cat, almost unconscious of the voice acknowledging the telephone call. He heard the receiver being replaced, then the quick, heavy footfalls of the uniformed constable who entered his office and stood stiffly beyond the desk.