‘Early start for your average copper thief,’ Hirsch said. ‘Maybe it’s the country air.’ Back in his CIB days in the city he could rely on the bad guys sleeping till noon. He glanced dubiously at the old house. ‘They didn’t strip it out of there, surely?’

‘Nope. Not worth their while. What this is, is their base. Big metal skip full of copper in the barn.’

Hirsch gazed across a stretch of dead soil broken only by abandoned harrows, a rusty fuel drum and a silvery gum tree. A barn, an open shed collapsed at one end like a mouth in rictus. ‘So they’ve been at it for a while.’

‘Be my guess,’ Muir said.

Hirsch recalled a department memo: two thousand reported thefts of semi-precious metal in South Australia this year, estimated value $2.5 million. Mostly copper, mostly from building sites; also powerlines, rail networks and storage depots. Electrical wiring, antenna cables, transformers, hot-water pipes. Police members advised to keep an eye open for unusual activity or reports that might indicate blah, blah, blah…

He ran a mental gaze over the district, the thousands of square kilometres he patrolled. A couple of new houses going up in Redruth, but that was his sergeant’s headache, not Hirsch’s. Some kitchen remodelling here and there. The long-abandoned railway service. Not much in that. Maybe the stuff was brought here from far and wide to be stripped, stored, shipped elsewhere. He didn’t know where to start with it. Sometimes, it seemed to Hirsch—newcomer to the bush—that his job was as much probing the landscape as probing the circumstances of the crimes committed in it.

‘Prints,’ he muttered, thinking of the paperwork ahead, wondering about the likelihood of getting a forensic team here so close to Christmas.

Hirsch photographed the wire coil in the ashes, the charred grass around it and the skip piled with stolen copper, much of it dulled by oxygenation. Then he looped crime-scene tape across the entrance to the barn and called his sergeant, who was underwhelmed but promised to notify CIB in Port Pirie.

Finally, Hirsch reassessed the day ahead. On Thursdays he took a swing through the back country south and west of Tiverton, on Mondays he patrolled north and east. Hundreds of kilometres a week, checking in. An elderly grazier here, a widow with a schizophrenic son there. A police presence—meaning a cup of tea, a chat, a follow-up. I’m afraid your car was found down in Salisbury, burnt out. Your neighbour claims your dogs have been troubling his sheep. I’m required to ensure that your rifle and shotgun are properly secured. Any further sightings of that mysterious truck you saw last week?