He barely climbed out of third gear for the first half hour, the HiLux creaking and flexing like a stiff little ship in pitching seas, but eventually he reached a lonely intersection where a bunch of dead flowers rested on the grassy verge. Someone had died in a car wreck here, meaning that other poor souls continued to grieve. A short time later he passed a muddy dam where, according to Bob Muir and others in the town, a toddler had drowned. A landscape imprinted with death, thought Hirsch. Hopes died and people died. Mrs Keir’s ‘natives’, children, motorists, gold fossickers, tourists. Some who wandered into the dry country intending never to return. A murder might pass unnoticed and undetected out here, he thought. Nowhere here is neutral. It’s loaded, complicit.

He braked at a T-intersection. A sign pointed to Mischance Creek (Ruins) in one direction and Mischance Creek in the other. ‘You want the creek itself,’ Nan Washburn had told him. ‘Drive until you see a wagon wheel, it marks the track to Craig’s camp, if not Craig himself.’

Out of curiosity, Hirsch checked the ruins first. Nothing much to see. Mischance Creek had been a tiny settlement of houses a century ago but now was mostly stone walls sinking back into the red soil. He U-turned and headed in the opposite direction and turned off at the wagon wheel. A hundred metres down a rutted track he came to the creek and Craig Washburn’s campsite. Hirsch was impressed. The main structure was a long caravan, squat and square, shaded under an extensive thatched roof supported by treated-pine poles. Palm tree fronds, he realised. In a clearing on one side of it, an array of solar panels and a battery. On the other side, an old rustbucket Kingswood parked under a slanted corrugated-iron roof fitted with a downpipe to an incongruous new poly tank the colour of the sky.

He got out, stretched the kinks in his spine, and wandered over to the car. It didn’t look serviceable and there were no other vehicles that he could see. Two heavy-duty blue work shirts drying on a cord stretched between a couple of gum trees. A bucket with a hole-stippled base strapped to a tree—a showerhead? Tidy piles of used food tins and plastic and glass bottles. He crossed a dirt patch where bull ants teemed and examined the recyclables. Soup. Milk. Mineral water. No beer, wine or spirits.

The place felt deserted. Hirsch lifted his nose and sniffed cautiously, not wanting to detect decomposition on the wind. He sensed nothing. A man lived here but barely made an impact on the wider area, it seemed to him. He knocked on the door to the caravan. No answer. He tried the door—unlocked—and found himself stepping into a spartan world of folded bedding, textbooks and notepads, a metal detector on a rack above a sofa. No dust, odours, spills or clutter.