‘If we go out, I’ll leave cold meat and salad in the fridge,’ his mother said.

His parents were bound to go out. They were energetic in their early retirement, never home: golf, bridge, roadside clean-up campaigns, bushwalks, handing out how-to-vote cards. Hirsch’s own busyness was more pragmatic: being neighbourly and civic-minded oiled the wheels of his police work.

Part of his police work was standing in for a Redruth officer now and then. Hirsch reached the town by 8 a.m., stationed himself behind the front desk and waited. The hours passed. He witnessed two statutory declarations, directed three German backpackers to the visitors’ centre and had one of those conversations—fairly common, in his experience—that proved most crims were idiots.

A man came in and said, ‘I was robbed.’

Hirsch tutted in sympathy, pen poised. ‘Name and address, please, sir.’

Tony Alford, a street behind the old railway station.

‘And what was stolen?’

‘All of my weed.’

Alford was one of those men or women so tall they stand at a slant. About forty, greasy hair, three-day growth and bony arms and shoulders inside a Redruth High School polo shirt. His son’s? Op shop? Grimy jeans barely clinging to his hipless middle.

‘Your weed was stolen,’ Hirsch said.

‘All of it. In pots on the back veranda.’

‘Your weed.’

‘You know, grass,’ Alford said. ‘Dope.’

His eyes hadn’t alighted on Hirsch or anything else in the police station. He was so twitchy, Hirsch couldn’t stand it. ‘You do know there are laws against growing it?’

Alford knew his rights. Folded his arms and stated that there were also laws against stealing.

Might as well roll up the whole drug empire while I’m about it, Hirsch thought. ‘Do you happen to know who might have done it?’

But Alford shrugged. ‘That’s for you to find out.’

‘How much weed are we talking about?’

‘Three pot plants.’ Alford sniggered. ‘Three pots of pot.’

‘Perhaps,’ Hirsch said, ‘we can send in our forensic team and go right over your property, inside and out, collecting fingerprints and other samples for the lab.’

A late-dawning gleam of awareness in Alford’s glassy eyes now. ‘No, she’s right, I’ll put it down to experience,’ he said, hurrying out and down the street.

Hirsch entered it in the log.

Then nothing for a long stretch of time. At twelve-thirty he locked the station, texted Medlin and Landy that he was off to lunch and walked down to the Redruth town square. Even with the reduction in police numbers the bistro and deli were crowded, so he bought a salad sandwich in the milk bar and ate it sprawled in a patch of shade near the rotunda.