Hirsch had to trust them to be safe, to be wise. He ran back to the HiLux and bumped along the creek bank to where he’d left Hansen. Fished around for the pressure bandages and bottled water and slid down into the creek where Hansen lay unmoving.

Dead.

Hirsch checked for a pulse, but it was unmistakeable. Hansen lay in the loose, collapsed attitude of death, flat on his back, eyes open, head angled to one side. He’d vomited again: a crusty mess of it around his mouth, down his shirt front and on the ground. And he’d evidently tried to call for help: one hand, slack in death, nursed his mobile phone.

Hirsch retrieved it, the movement animating the screen, revealing Hansen’s final action. Not calling. Recording.

Hirsch took out his own phone, checking automatically for reception, and began to photograph the dead man and the site of his death. The legs, the riddled snake, the blood-splashed stones. Then he hauled Hansen up the bank and draped him along the back seat of the HiLux and strapped him in. He glanced uneasily along the creek. There was no need to rush now—not for Hansen. But Roesch…

He’d call for backup when he had a signal. Right now he needed to find Craig and the girls.

They would have run downstream, not back to Craig’s camp—the first place someone like Roesch might look—so he drove along the creek as far as he could go. Wayne Flann’s ute was parked in a patch of dead grass—both doors open, windows down, curiously. Hirsch got out, approached cautiously: no one inside it, no loose ignition wires. The ground was baked too hard for shoe prints, but that didn’t mean the girls and Craig hadn’t been here. Meanwhile, any evidence it might contain could be contaminated or degraded by the sun, the wind and the dust that forever lifted from the plains. He wound up the windows, shut the doors.

The terrain beyond the ute was impassable, the creek petering out. Hirsch felt the perversity of the day: a sense of control removed from him; of waiting for something worse to happen. All he could think to do was drive, and he found himself bumping along in Flann’s wheel tracks across the dirt and grass to a gate on the Tiverton road, the smell of vomit hanging in the air.

The hayshed. He parked between the gate posts and ran across to the listing walls. The hay was rotting but he found a hidden nest among the bales; an empty spring-water bottle, not a speck of dust on it.

Where now? Prowl up and down the roads? Their instinct would be to head for Tiverton. Back in the Toyota, he placed Hansen’s phone in the bracket on his dashboard, and set it to play the man’s dying declaration.