‘Also in the caravan?’

‘Not that I could tell. I don’t know about inside the house.’

‘You knocked? Peered through windows?’

‘Nobody home. They’ve gone to Clare, apparently.’

‘Be nice if we could be there when they get back.’

‘Except we don’t know when that will be,’ Hirsch said.

‘Mmm. Perhaps one of the neighbours has a mobile number for them. Otherwise we leave a note telling them to call the station.’

‘Sergeant.’

‘Text me as soon as you get to the hospital.’

Redruth, spread over seven small hills, was thirty minutes south of Tiverton. A pretty town, pastoral these days but settled in the late 1840s by Cornish miners, who’d built cottage rows as a reminder of home. The copper mine was now a bottomless, deep-blue pit of water surrounded by stone chimney stacks, powder magazines and engine houses on the hillslopes. Lydia Jarmyn was asleep, or Hirsch might have told her some of this as he rolled through the outskirts.

Down into the town square, an irregular patch of lawn around a red and yellow rotunda and out along the Adelaide road to the hospital, a small, understaffed place more aged-care centre than anything else, and reliant on doctors from the town’s only medical clinic to take up the slack.

Hirsch parked, texted his arrival to Doctor Pillai and Sergeant Brandl, walked around to the passenger door and reached in. Lydia stirred, her eyes fluttered, then she fought him feebly as he lifted her out. She was rigid in his arms, panicked to be carried across a strange car park, past strange cars to a strange building. Fight or flight, and somehow that rendered her feather-light.

But when they stepped into the foyer and crossed to the reception desk she was overwhelmed and glued herself against him, a dead weight now. The receptionist, a scowling woman with short grey hair, watched him as if nothing in her experience or the rule book allowed for a policeman to advance across the foyer and stand before her with a grubby child in his arms. A smelly, grubby child. She sniffed and looked away and said, disobligingly, ‘Help you?’

‘I’m meeting Doctor Pillai.’

The woman looked across at the waiting room as if Hirsch might soil it, then down along the main corridor. ‘She’s busy.’

‘She’s already here?’ Hirsch said.

‘What does it concern, if I may ask?’

Take a wild guess, Hirsch thought, and was saved from more time-wasting when a voice called, ‘Paul.’

He turned. Doctor Pillai, her black ponytail swinging, scarlet-rimmed glasses flashing, was slipping one arm and then the other into a white surgeon’s coat as she emerged from the corridor. White runners on her feet—how would that go down with the receptionist?—black trousers and a navy top. Gold here and there: earlobes, wrists and fingers.