‘There he is, swimming in cash, but does he pay for his little snack? Not our Stuart. Shoves everything under his jumper and walks out.’ Muir paused. ‘The whole thing caught on CCTV. Arrested a couple of hours later.’

‘It’s called an incapacity for consequential thinking,’ Hirsch said.

‘Oh, is that right?’

The men grinned at each other. Hirsch understood Stuart Flann’s actions because he’d seen it a hundred times before. Bob Muir understood them because he was a smart man.

‘Was he a drinker?’

‘He was,’ Muir said. ‘Brenda not so much, not before she married him. He was a nasty drunk. Knocked her around.’ He paused. ‘I went to school with her. She was just one of the gang. Stu fucked her up.’

‘The boys, too.’

‘Count on it.’

Hirsch glanced at his watch. ‘I need to let them know about Brenda.’

Muir pulled a leather flip case from his pocket. ‘Landline number. Wayne should be home by now.’

He scrolled through his contents, touched the screen, listened to the dial tone and thrust the phone at Hirsch. ‘Here you go.’

‘Wayne?’ Hirsch said. ‘This is Paul Hirschhausen on Bob’s phone, I’m calling about your mother.’

He explained. Not too badly hurt. Redruth hospital. The car? Still on the school oval. ‘A write-off, I’d say,’ Hirsch said.

Silence on the other end, then Wayne Flann said, ‘Understood,’ and ended the call.

‘Profuse with his thanks,’ Hirsch said, returning Muir’s phone. ‘A wailing and gnashing of teeth.’

Muir gave him a look: mates or not, don’t overstep the mark.

A Land Rover rolled through the town, caked in back-country dust, plates obscured, only a half-moon of windscreen available to the driver. Hirsch geared up for the chase, then slumped. He was tired, overloaded, been running around all day. He’d notify Redruth to pull the vehicle over. Or not.

He checked his watch again. Twenty minutes before he was due to collect Katie Street from school, and Wayne Flann’s last question echoed in his mind: the car?

He said, ‘Bob, if you’re free, maybe you could—’

‘Help you tow Brenda’s heap of junk somewhere.’

‘Amazing how your mind works.’

‘I could have been a professor.’

Yes, you could, Hirsch thought.

They used the Tiverton Electrics ute and a fire-service rope to drag the damaged Falcon back along its path of destruction and onto the highway. Then, hooking the rope to the front of the car, they towed it to the outer edge of town, where a cyclone fence housed a storage shed and the district’s sole grader and road-maintenance truck. The area was a wasteland of hard baked red soil and dead grass; a couple of heat-stunned gum trees. Muir had the key. He has the keys to the town, Hirsch thought. Literally and figuratively.

‘It can’t sit here forever,’ Muir warned, coiling the rope hand to elbow, hand to elbow.