Strange to think that 2019 had started with bush-fires all over the country. Nothing could top that. He hunched his shoulders, stamped his feet, pulled his head in, a swaddled figure under an Icelandic beanie, rolling down Canowie. Past the Uniting Church, now home to a retired geologist, past a transportable kit home, smoke rising straight up from the chimney, past more stone houses, their roofs made of faded red or green corrugated iron, their shrubs and Holland blinds keeping the world at bay. Like any country town: a mishmash of the old, the new, the restored and the forsaken, and he could feel the chill in each of their bones.

He paused at Mrs Lidstrom’s, 9 Canowie, giving himself a sightline along her side wall to a quadrant of backyard clothesline. A tea towel and a pair of the navy polyester pants she liked to wear. They’ll be ice-stiff in this air, he though. He imagined flicking them with a fingernail: the little snap, like cardboard.

He lifted his gaze to the eaves. After the snowdropper had struck numerous times in the district—here in Tiverton, down in Penhale, over in Spalding—targeting some victims more than once, the district police budget had covered the installation of a discreet CCTV camera at one house in each town. No incidents reported in Redruth, leading Hirsch and his boss, Sergeant Brandl, to theorise that the guy lived there. That was ten weeks ago. Since then, grainy video footage had been obtained from Mrs Lidstrom’s camera and the one in Penhale. A male figure in motorcycle leathers and a helmet. ‘Come to think of it,’ neighbours had said, ‘I did hear a bike last night.’ No face, only an impression of a stocky build—stocky in leathers, anyway.

Hirsch’s electrician friend, Bob Muir, had installed the cameras at each location. Mrs Lidstrom, standing with Hirsch in the side yard, watching Bob up a ladder, had used a word Hirsch had only ever seen in print.

‘Who would want to steal my old lady’s bloomers?’

‘It’s your cutting-edge taste, Betty,’ said Bob, looking down from the ladder, a pair of brass screws bobbing between his lips.

She snorted. She was round, comfortable and white-haired; sharp and mostly amused by the world. ‘Not to mention my bathers and best bra.’

‘Bathers?’ said Hirsch.

A little twist of annoyance: keep up, Paul. ‘Water aerobics. Redruth pool.’

As she’d once said to Hirsch, she wasn’t one to let the grass grow under her feet. Probus Club lectures, walking holidays in New Zealand, volunteering, fitness. ‘Right,’ he said.

‘Keeps me young. Not that young, though. I repeat, who’d want to steal an old lady’s underwear?’

‘It’s called snowdropping,’ Hirsch said.

Betty Lidstrom looked at him. He saw the snap and crackle of her mind. ‘A fetish?’ she said. ‘Psycho-sexual?’