Hirsch raised his eyebrows at her. She punched his upper arm lightly—don’t go making assumptions about old women—and he smiled and nodded. ‘Probably.’

They both stood there, and Bob Muir in his overalls stood there on his ladder, the three of them thinking their way into the head of a man who stole underwear from backyard clotheslines. Why he did it. What he did with his trove of old lady’s bloomers. And whether he was building up to something else.

He’d be hard to catch. And if he was caught, he could talk his way out of it, say he’d bought the underwear in an op shop. Embarrassing, but not theft. Then something about the authorities having no business in the bedrooms of the nation, et cetera. So each victim had been supplied with marked underwear: a hole punched in the top left corner of the waistband label in case he did it again.

Just then a light went on in Mrs Lidstrom’s rear side window: kitchen. Hirsch walked on, securing the town, burning away his overnight aches and stiffness, feeling good to be alive despite the cold, the tedium. He’d probably spend the morning witnessing a stat dec or two; writing up last weekend’s pub brawl between windfarm workers; chipping away at the clods of mud inside the wheel arches of his SA Police 4WD—the nasty, clogging, adhering red-soil mud of the mid-north plains.

Up the side path of a little brick-veneer house on the highway. A habitual good-luck knuckle-rap on the windscreen as he edged past his old Nissan. In through the back door. Then, showered, second breakfast inside him, he opened the connecting door and stepped from his suite of three cramped rooms into the room facing the highway.

This was the police station. A ceiling fan for summer, a useless bar heater for winter. Community notices on the walls, an out-of-date calendar of spring wildflowers east of the town, a counter separating his desk, computer, swivel chair and filing cabinet from the waiting room. People rarely waited. Crimes occurred now and then, perpetrators were about, but mostly a local or a stranger could be sure of immediate service—if Hirsch was there, at any rate; if he wasn’t out on patrol or answering a call. A sleepy country town. Mostly.

Seated at his desk, scorched-dust odours rising from the bar heater, his shins barely warm, he tackled his in-tray, read emails and checked the Tiverton WTF Facebook page. The snowdropping was an ongoing What the Fuck item, the commentary sometimes amusing, sometimes faintly off-colour; occasionally nasty. Hirsch supposed Betty Lidstrom knew about it. He couldn’t protect her from it. Police everywhere were fighting losing battles with social media.