The grieving mother’s howling fills the air, and no one notices the sky. Crime scene officers in bone white body suits appraise the scene that runs the length of what, according to those who live on it, is as quiet a residential street as you’ll find in the suburbs of the city. The wrecked car smoulders dead in its tracks, stopped by a streetlight bent ninety degrees like a broken scarecrow. Shards of glass besparkle the tar macadam around it like flakes of snow. Numbered markers erect as buttercups plot grim hemispheres indicating bullet casings.

Six in total. Crime scene officers resembling swans by the studied way they motion, measure elliptical tyre tracks left by a car that made haste from the scene.

Infatuated residents watch on from doorsteps, through netted windows, roused hours earlier when it was dark by a crash of metal, followed by wailing, followed by the discharge of echoing cracks not immediately recognisable to green ears as gunfire. Those who knew what they were hearing held back. Others in their ignorance made for their front doors, front rooms, toward the chaos like moths to a flame. Moss Higgins, deployed with the UN on several peacekeeping missions to the Israel-Lebanon border, instantly returned there when he heard the ruckus outside his window. Hezbollah and the Israeli Defence Forces would fire over his watchtower at night to keep each other awake: pop-pop, pop-pop. Several doors down from him, Lisa Hanly’s red setter, Sylvester, ran for cover under the stairs, covered its ...