Gaddis stared at him without expression. ‘Very well. Now, this brings us to the unauthorised use of your official police fleet vehicle.’

And instantly Hirsch saw Martin Gwynne: stationed at a window, hovering in his front yard, watching Hirsch sail by in the HiLux, Katie Street in the passenger seat.

He played dumb. ‘Sir?’

It was his friend Rosie who took up the charge. She was all business now, no longer rolling her eyes, so Hirsch knew for sure he’d fucked up. ‘You were seen, on numerous occasions, transporting a child in the passenger seat of your fleet vehicle, Constable Hirschhausen.’

‘Her name is Katie Street and she’s, er, the daughter of a friend who teaches at the Redruth high school and generally isn’t able to pick her up after school,’ Hirsch said. His face was burning. ‘She’s usually collected by a neighbour, but there were a few occasions when the neighbour couldn’t do it so I gave her a lift home—in my own car, actually, except for twice when it wouldn’t start and I used the fleet vehicle. I apologise. But it was only twice, not numerous occasions. And there won’t be other occasions because she’s going to high school next year—she’ll be travelling with her mother.’

‘That’s hardly the point,’ Rosie said. ‘You may use your fleet vehicle to transport civilians in certain circumstances—giving a lift to a stranded motorist, for example, or taking someone to safety or to hospital—but not for private purposes.’

‘Insurance obligations, for a start,’ Gaddis said, his gold teeth flashing. ‘Issues of propriety and image and good sense—the fact that you are a grown man and she a young girl…’

‘What if you’re accused of misconduct by mother or daughter, further down the track?’ Rosie demanded. ‘What if you fall out with them for some reason, and they decide to take it out on you? No matter how innocent those trips might have been, it’s not going to look that way to the rest of the world.’

Hirsch felt mulish. ‘There’s not going to be any fallout from mother or daughter.’

‘You can’t know that, Paul—Constable Hirschhausen,’ Rosie said.

She was right, of course. ‘As I said, there won’t be any further occasions.’

Gaddis said, ‘Were you on duty, these times you took the child home?’

How to explain that a country copper is always on duty? That an eight-hour shift is meaningless in the bush? That often he was setting out on patrol at dawn and if he happened to be in town when school let out at three-thirty, he’d already worked a nine- or ten-hour shift?

‘No, sir.’

‘Did you consider the repercussions if, halfway through one of these trips, you were called to a road fatality or a suicide or a murder or to deal with an out-of-control ice addict? What that might do to the child?’