‘The sleep of the dead.’

Hirsch hoped not. ‘Let’s go. I need to make a few house calls on the way, if that’s all right.’

‘Fine by me,’ Washburn said, hitching up his binder-twine belt, adjusting his duct-taped glasses.

They left the town behind them, Hirsch curious about the altered light. He’d grown accustomed to weeks of cloudless days, a vast blue dome above, sharply-etched objects all around. Today he was traversing a piebald landscape, the sun pouring intermittently through ruptures in the clouds. Sun, shadow. Pouring, retreating.

Meanwhile his passenger was silent, as if contemplating a return to solitude. What did Craig do or think about all day? Hirsch didn’t mind companionable silences, but this one seemed fraught. Had Craig squabbled with Nan? Was he rethinking his self-imposed exile? Hirsch wanted to dispel the mood—he was tempted to play the CD Katie had burnt for him. But if Craig was allergic to the twenty-first century, a burst of Leonard Cohen might tip him over the edge.

Hirsch’s first stop, the woman with the rehab daughter. He knocked—no answer—and the car was gone. He checked doors and windows: the house felt unoccupied rather than touched by junkie-offspring violence, so he left it at that. It was a sense that all cops developed, knowing when a situation behind closed doors was right or wrong.

He climbed behind the wheel. Craig said, ‘Lovely woman. Sad about the daughter.’

Hirsch said nothing, surprised he was keeping tabs on events in the district.

Then along a looping side road to a small 1970s brick-veneer house on a struggling carob-tree plantation, the home of a seventy-year-old widow and her son Trevor, who had Down syndrome. ‘Mrs Watts always serves a cuppa; I could be a while.’

Washburn waved that off. ‘I’ll stay here, don’t worry about me.’

The widow, answering Hirsch’s knock, spotted Craig in the Toyota. ‘That idiot,’ she muttered, gesturing at Washburn with a frail hand, veins like pulsing cords over the fragile bones. Then she smiled and stood aside for Hirsch to enter.

Half an hour later, fuelled with leftover mince pies and rumballs, Hirsch stuck his card under an Eiffel Tower magnet on Mrs Watts’ fat old fridge and said goodbye. Unspoken between them, as always, the question: What happens to Trevor when I die?

Feeling like a change of scenery, Hirsch decided to keep going rather than retrace his route back to the main Mischance Creek road. Craig Washburn remained subdued. The powdery dirt and corrugations marked their passage; the minutes passed. So much for a change of scenery, though: this was a road like all of the others and Hirsch realised he could be anywhere out east. Then the detour rewarded him: a kilometre of new pine fence posts and taut strings of shiny wire and a gleaming galvanised gate bearing a sign: Great Wall Pastoral.

‘Fucking Chinese,’ Craig muttered, ‘buying up family farms left, right and centre.’