Hirsch glanced both ways along the street. The shut-up houses crouching for shade, Tiverton Hardware, closed for forty years, the old stone bank with a sign in the window, Friday Clinic 8 a.m–6 p.m. His gaze flicked over a house brick and swung back. An open-fronted wooden box beside the petrol bowser, the brick anchoring unclaimed copies of the Advertiser at the end of each day. Hirsch grabbed it and belted it against the Hyundai’s side window. It bounced off the glass, jarred his wrist. Again, and the glass fractured. He stabbed the brick at the remnants, tossed it aside, reached in for the lock as hot air poured out. Now he was heaving the door open, one knee on the back seat, fumbling at the straps that secured the child. A girl, about three years old, flushed, clammy, unresponsive. Hirsch backed out with her in his arms and then a woman was clawing at him in a shrieking panic.

‘Give her back. What are you doing? She’s mine, give her back!’

Hirsch lifted the little girl aloft instinctively, twisting away from the woman, this way, that way. He stumbled against Gemma, who had trailed the woman from across the street.

‘She was in seeing the doctor,’ Gemma explained. Exhilarated, in her stolid way, to be caught up in the drama.

Still trying to dodge the mother, Hirsch escaped from the confines of the closely parked cars and trotted towards the clinic. Dr Pillai was emerging with her bag, a hand up telling him to stop. ‘It’s like an oven in there,’ she called as she started across the street.

Hirsch flinched. The child’s mother was clawing at his forearm. ‘Give her back to me!’

The ridiculous dance continued. Hirsch freed a hand and shoved the woman aside as her arms windmilled at him. ‘Calm down. The doctor needs to examine her.’

‘Give her to me!’ shrieked the woman.

She ducked under his arm. Slapped, punched and kicked as he tried to keep the little girl out of her mad reach. Then his shirt buttons were popping, his shirttails flapping, and, somehow, she had his service pistol in her hands.

Time seemed to stop.

The woman trembled. Blinked, stared aghast at the pistol.

Hirsch moved first. Turning in a circle, he proffered the child, seeking willing arms, but the onlookers were stunned, so he turned back to the woman. ‘Let’s all take a deep—’

The woman dropped the pistol. It smacked butt-first beside her sandalled feet and Hirsch flinched and ducked, expecting it to go off. Time stopped again. And then he scooped up the pistol with his free hand, holstered it, fastened the strap, watching warily as the woman shrank away and flailed her hands as if caught in a spider’s web. ‘I didn’t mean…I don’t…’ she stammered.

By now Dr Pillai was there, trapping her wrists. ‘Denise.’