The truck trundled on and then a radio crackled. Bob Muir listened, said, ‘Good oh,’ and jerked his head. ‘This way, Constable Hirschhausen.’

A long, rutted driveway took them down to a gap in the hedge and the house and sheds on the other side. The house had been unoccupied for years, the stone walls ceding to the dirt, the rocks and the dying grass. Ants teemed where once had been lawns and flowerbeds. A wheelless pram beside a crooked garden tap; a ladder busted down to three or four rungs leaning against the tank stand. Nothing seemed whole. Cracked windowpanes, grass in the rusted and drooping gutters. Only the palm tree showed any splendour, and its base was littered with dead fronds.

Hirsch parked behind Muir in the side yard and got out. Here the smoke was more acrid—burnt vegetation with an overlay of scorched rubber? The sunlight was queer, too, winking hazily where it came through the ragged fringe of palm fronds, casting blurred shadows on the dirt.

Looking up, Hirsch said, ‘These old country places with their palm trees.’

Muir grunted. ‘Over this way.’

He took Hirsch along the flank of the house and around the tank stand to the backyard. The cypress hedge sheltered the house and garden on three sides, Hirsch realised. To his eye, the fire had started in one corner, charring the patchy grass before scorching its way through the hedge, leaving a spidery tangle of blackened, leafless twigs in its hunt for better fuel on the other side—the wheat stubble.

‘What do you make of that?’ Muir said, pointing at the blackened dirt.

Hirsch looked down. Ash on his toecaps now, not only dust. He felt sweaty, greasy, a sensation of grit in his teeth. And still early in the day. ‘Kids playing with matches?’

Muir might have been disappointed in him. ‘Mate, the wire.’

Coiled in the ash at the base of the hedge was a length of insulated cable. Now Hirsch understood the taste of the smoke: molten plastic. But mostly his gaze was caught by a stripe of copper glowing bright.

‘Ah.’

‘Exactly,’ Muir said, spreading his arms. ‘I mean, why go to the bother of slicing off insulation with a knife when you can burn it off? Lovely hot summer’s day, dead grass all around…’

Hirsch grinned. ‘Maybe they felt better-hidden in here.’ Muir pointed to the dead ground between the house and the sheds. ‘They would’ve been just as invisible from the road over there in the dirt.’

‘Who called it in?’

‘Your girlfriend, in fact.’

Hirsch visualised it. Wendy Street heading down to Redruth at seven-thirty to arrive at the high school by eight, same as usual. Saw the fire, called Bob, knew Bob would call him.