Suddenly, John Tasker is a divided, but enjoined, man. Physically, he is running from the law while hunting down his own father, just as his father used to track down the wild tuskers in Sri Lanka. Mentally, he is tracking down his murderous brother’s enemies with a strange and deadly efficiency. It is not the realization that his own milieu is suddenly pulling him towards the cliff’s edge. It is suddenly being able to see though his twin’s mind’s-eye into the inner workings of a truly violent international Tamil group. Suddenly, yes, there seems very little of purpose, except the sighing and dying of everything he thought he could hold safely dear. One day all is normal; the next, he has the living scaffold of the Sri Lankan Charles Ekanayake looming over his once-comforting public-servant’s desk. He can’t know what has brought the Inspector to Canberra to question him and his family, and so evidently intimate with the killing worlds of his father and of his brother. Suddenly, yes, all John Tasker’s senses scream out to push back, and quickly, for this Sri Lankan is obviously a hunter who cares nothing for any inner-eye perception, but only for the hunt’s vicious conclusion. It all feels so wilfully as of old, when he watched his father’s leg-bound tuskers trying to crash their ways back into the wild, grossly hobbled by the ropes tied to those snaring stag-horned skulls. Yet, once John Tasker starts pushing back, it all seems so natural.