‘Yes.’ After a pause, Hirsch added, ‘Look, if you’d like me to run you out to your place…?’

‘Nup,’ and it was final. Adam poked Daryl in the upper arm and yanked on the door handle.

‘Suit yourself,’ Hirsch said, but by then the doors had slammed and the boys were gone.

‘Now,’ said Katie in a sunny voice, ‘where were we?’

Hirsch snorted. They had a mutual regard for each other.

Five kilometres south of Tiverton, Hirsch turned onto Bitter Wash Road, riding the now-familiar curves and undulations, passing an 1880s stone wall, property gates, grain stubble, skinny sheep in threadbare paddocks. The road climbed gradually, bisecting a range of low hills staked with windfarm turbines and offering a brief glimpse of distant ashen ground, the morning’s grass fire. Then onto a flat stretch, more grain heads and wheat stubble; finally a driveway and a small red-roofed house.

As arranged, a neighbour was there, her little Mazda parked in the partial shade of a massive oleander. Katie used to argue that she’d be fine alone until her mother got home. But she was linked to Hirsch, who probably had enemies, being a cop, and this was a back road. And violence, he’d learnt, was often random. So: an after-school minder. Giving him a peck on the cheek now, twinkling her fingers at him, she ran inside, backpack dragging and bouncing.

He turned to go. Then he realised: this was the last time. When school got out tomorrow she was going to a friend’s house. After the summer break, she’d start high school, the same school Wendy taught at. She’d be travelling there and back with her mother.

Hirsch headed for the highway, feeling an odd sense of loss. He slowed for the intersection, turned north, accelerated. And then, owing to the altered perspective on the return leg, he saw a flash of sunlight on glass a short distance from where he’d picked up Daryl Cobb and Adam Flann. A vehicle, half concealed by roadside grasses, was parked along a rutted farm track a hundred metres in from the highway. Ah hah.

Hirsch stopped to check it out.

5

5

HUNCHED IN AN airless hollow, partly screened by grain crops and dry grass on either side: a Holden ute. At least thirty years old. Dents, rust in the tailgate and wheel arches, bald tyres, a chipped windscreen, a frayed tonneau cover. Pungent warmth rising from the engine compartment, a stink of unburnt petrol and hot oil. It hadn’t been there long.