Hirsch pulled the bag closer. He plucked at the opening, revealing a neatly folded pair of overalls, neck uppermost, M. Gwynne on the nametag sewn inside the collar. Slowly he slid the stiff fabric into view, and saw where jets and smears of blood two weeks old had darkened the folds, and even though he’d long figured it out, he still felt the need to brush his palms against his chest, and he jerked back as something dank and rotten drifted past his nose and spread, and settled—and then Joyce, in her wisdom, was coaxing him outside, into the peaceful street. Saving him, when it should have been the other way around.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Peace was written in partial fulfilment of a doctorate at LaTrobe University. The author thanks his supervisor, Professor Sue Martin, and Text Publishing editor Mandy Brett for helping to make it a better book.

CONSOLATION CHAPTER 1

1

DID HIRSCH OWN the town?

At times he felt he did—was making it his, at least, as he prowled the streets at dawn. When he’d begun doing this eighteen months ago, he was mapping the place. Fixing the police station in relation to the little school on the Barrier Highway, the general store, the side-street lucerne seed business, the tennis courts, the painted silos at the defunct railway station—and the houses, mostly built of the stone found hereabouts. Wheat and wool country, halfway between Adelaide and the Flinders Ranges.

That achieved—context established—the cop in him began to emerge. Protector and enforcer. He watched over the teen siblings who cared for their manic-depressive mother, the old woman whose husband wandered off if her back was turned, the Indigenous kid who’d come halfway to thinking Hirsch wasn’t the bashing kind. And he watched for stupidity, cunning and plain malice. Recasting old crimes and cockeyed fate until a veranda post here and a driveway there were imprinted with blood, regret and if-only—so that next time he might anticipate it. The glint of craziness in a man who was, at first glance, a solid citizen. Or where on First Street he’d be able to head off an escape attempt. Or how, on Canowie Place, he’d eventually nab the snowdropper. Every place was porous. Badness—goodness—seeped through and linked them all.

The snowdropper. Hirsch turned off Mawson Street and headed down Canowie Place, this frosty Wednesday morning in late August, frost dusting the grass, blades of ice reaching down from dripping garden taps, frost and ice splitting into prisms and diamonds as the sun struck. A bright, still, freezing day ahead. Snow reported on the Razorback yesterday, and Hirsch was prepared to believe it, his eyes watering right now, his cheeks and toes frozen.