Anna had been asleep, lulled by the movement of the Toyota. Using the mirror, Hirsch had seen the doctor touch the child’s forehead from time to time. Then suddenly a little voice was piping, ‘The wheels of the bus go round and round.’

‘We’re feeling a lot better, aren’t we,’ cooed Pillai.

Hirsch tuned them out. Twenty minutes later, Redruth appeared, streets named after Cornish towns. Old stone houses and an abandoned copper mine set in the folds of seven small hills. Down past the high school, the council chambers and a car repairer, through the square where a scene from Breaker Morant had been filmed, and out along the southern entrance to the town. Redruth and District Hospital, the sign said. Hirsch knew it didn’t have the staff, equipment or expertise of a city hospital—was more of an aged-care facility than anything—but better the kid be monitored for a few hours than sent home with her mother just yet.

‘Am I in trouble?’ Denise Rennie said, in a low, wretched voice.

Hirsch chewed on that. Then Pillai was looming between the seats again. She touched his upper arm. ‘Paul?’

Hirsch came to a decision. ‘Not from me.’

After a moment, he clarified. ‘Unless Anna’s condition deteriorates. I’m sure you understand.’

‘We do,’ Pillai said.

Hirsch would keep quiet about it. Denise Rennie had learnt a hard lesson. She’d committed some kind of misdemeanour, though, and another cop might have taken action.

Pillai was saying, in a jolly tone, ‘So no more leaving kids unattended in the car on a hot day, Denise.’

‘I won’t.’

And no more grabbing your friendly local policeman’s service pistol, thought Hirsch.

Rather than wait around at the hospital, and conscious that Tuesday was the twenty-fifth, Hirsch went Christmas shopping. As if Christmas would bring much joy to him this year. Wendy and Katie were going to a family thing in the Barossa Valley and he was on duty. Either staring at a wall, just another Christmas orphan, or mopping up after drunks, pulling bodies out of car wrecks and breaking up family brawls.

The main Redruth shops were clustered around the square. Hirsch knew from reading a local-history booklet that a 1960s primary-school headmaster, dismayed that no one recognised the town’s historical significance and tourist potential, started a movement to restore and preserve the copper mine and the Cornish miners’ cottages and other colonial-era buildings. That had been okay with everyone. Less okay, as far as town-square business proprietors had been concerned, was the proposed removal of neon signs and banner advertising from shop facades. Right now the streetscape was more commercial present than colonial past.

First, Redruth Antiques and Gifts, where he bought a tall, slender, unadorned vase. ‘You can’t go wrong with a vase, right?’ he asked the woman serving him.