“Stand there,” he whispered. “Right there, where he can see you’re there.”

“Why are you doing this? Christ, stop pushing me, will you.”

He tugged on her shoulder.

“Here,” he hissed. “Count up to ten- No! In your head!”

He pulled the collapsed back of his Air Max up over his heel, swore at the sharp pain as his finger was squeezed, and then he opened the door out to the garage. His nostrils filled with the comforting smell of oil and old grass from the lawnmower. The door swung shut silently behind him: Martin’s work again, he was sure.

Sure enough, in three steps, Mulhall was on the bench, stooped, and pulling the bar release from the window. The neighbours’ garden wasn’t a garden at all: it was more of a dump. Maybe it had started as storage, all the lengths of warped timber and the pieces of ruined particleboard, the cement blocks, and three or four disemboweled lawnmowers. But like Martin had pointed out, the neighbours had let the fence fall apart just like everything else of theirs, and there was a clear run to the lane. Lifting the window, he rolled into the opening. He dropped onto a soggy patch of last year’s leaves that were already almost covered by new grass.

He stayed in a crouch, staring at a deflated soccer ball, and listened. There was nothing out of the ordinary. A face appeared at the kitchen window, an unshaven man, drawing on a cigarette. It was Martin’s neighbour, Mr. Depressed, Mr. Alco. Mulhall gave him the nod, and then he skipped toward the stack of cement blocks. He threw his leg over the wall, gasping as he felt it tear through the denim at his skin. He straddled the wall carefully for several moments before swinging the other leg behind it.

The laneway was graffiti world of course, with all the usual half-arsed, jerry-built cement block sheds and old corrugated iron, and plenty of barbed wire.