chapter three

At about the same time that Dorothy was unceremoniously peeling herself off the table, the coarse weave of the starchy table cloth lightly imprinted into her right cheek, a minor incident was unfolding back in Gymea.

Marjorie Butterwell, the scatty, obsessive woman over the back fence with whom Dorothy had maintained a chilly stand-off for all of their twenty-three years as neighbours, was fastidiously hanging out her husband’s underpants on the Hills Hoist when she caught sight of Graham, the family’s scrappy Maltese terrier, burrowing his way back under the fence from Dorothy’s side. Only after Marjorie had ceased her shrill and patently ineffective reprimand did she notice what appeared to be a chicken wing in Graham’s jaws, the object of his grunty, salivating over-excitement.

But when she finally managed to prise the mangled morsel free, she recognised it not as a piece of poultry but a human finger.