Ogilvie’s voice changed: light and chatty. She was looking forward to the Caledonian Dreaming get-together on Sunday afternoon; she named a couple of songs she thought would suit his voice. Hirsch swallowed. From their titles alone they were epic ballads of feuds, raiding parties and supernatural come-uppance. He dodged and weaved and got off the line without committing.

Hirsch pinned his mobile number to the front door and backed the police 4WD onto the highway. Cars were streaming into the side-street entrance to the school, and he wondered again why Lydia Jarmyn was being educated at home. He waited for the Broken Hill bus to trundle through, then trailed it north through farmland.

Wheat, oats and barley shoots in thick, vividly green rectangles on either side of the road and reaching in broad brushstrokes up the hill slopes, stopping where the soil gave way to stone reefs. Distant rooftops on these hillsides: farmhouses and implement sheds. He thought about the march of the seasons. He’d not much noticed it when he lived in Adelaide. The weather was hot, cold or in-between, that’s all. He didn’t register plants and birdsong, pollen and blossom, life and death. Only what to wear, did he need a jacket and was it hot enough to swim. But up here, three hours from the city, and quite high above sea level, there were two extremes: cold green winter and droughty summer.

A speck in the sky resolved itself: a crop-duster, short, stubby, the cabin a prominent bubble above the wings, sideslipping and straightening for a run across a wheat crop. Hirsch slowed, signalled, pulled onto the verge, and watched it drop, leapfrog the powerline, drop again and howl from fence line to fence line, releasing a thick stripe of chemical spray, climbing before it ploughed into the hill, tilting onto one wing and coming around again. Drop, hedge-hop, spray-bomb, climb, turn.

Timing it so he wouldn’t get a lungful of chemicals or a roof-rack full of landing gear, Hirsch pulled the police HiLux back onto the highway. Fifteen minutes later he turned left, a gravel road taking him up and then across the flank of a hill. Finally a driveway, sealed by twin galvanised iron gates padlocked together.

He parked and got out; stared balefully at the lock. The driveway wound between silvery gum trees to a 1970s tan brick house set among pine trees. Tremendous view, he thought, turning around to confirm it, seeing the world through the eyes of anyone who lived here, high above the valley.