Half a kilometre along, steering with his right hand, one eye on the road, the other on his phone signal, he suddenly had two bars. Stopped, got out, consulted his notebook and made four calls to his non-urgent clients. Wouldn’t matter if he didn’t pay these people a visit this week.

First, Rex and Eleanor Dunner. She picked up. Sorry, but he had no leads on the graffiti artist who’d tagged their heritage-listed woolshed.

‘That’s very disappointing, Paul.’

Hirsch took that philosophically. He was always disappointing someone.

Next he told Drew Maguire it wasn’t a police matter if the neighbour’s sheep strayed onto the Maguire property through a hole in the fence.

‘What if I flatten the bastard?’

‘Then it becomes a police matter.’

Next, a call to the owner of a wallet that had been handed in. No cash or cards in it, but he’d drop it off next Thursday. Finally he checked on Jill Kramer, a single mother who’d been robbed and hospitalised by her ice-addict daughter.

‘She’s in rehab.’

‘Doing okay?’

‘Well as can be expected.’

That was a kind of mantra in the bush. Hirsch heard it once or twice a week. Acceptance. Not daring to hope for better times. ‘Will she come home to you when she gets out?’

‘She’s got nowhere else to go.’

‘Let me know when,’ Hirsch said…And I’ll check in more often than once a week.

He drove on, past a homestead with a windsock on a landing strip, down and around and in and out of old, eroded cuttings in the folds of the earth. Along a sunken road between quartz-reef hillslopes, and across the Booborowie valley, a patchwork of wheat stubble, crops awaiting the harvester and green-black lucerne, darker where massive, computer-controlled sprinklers crept over the ground.

Then up. Over Munduney Hill and onto a side road—and now Kip knew his home was drawing near. Climbed to his feet, stuck his snout into the airflow and barked.

‘You bet,’ Hirsch said.

He slowed for the cattle grid at the front gate—not that the Fullers ran stock anymore. Then onto a track that wound past star thistles and Salvation Jane to a transportable house on stumps. No weeds here. It was as if a switch had been flicked: vigorous couch-grass lawns, rosebushes and native shrubs. No sign of Graham Fuller’s old Land Rover in the carport, but—perfect timing—Monica was there, unloading groceries from the open hatch of her Corolla. She turned with an expectant smile, a lonely country woman who didn’t get many visitors, the smile growing curious when she saw she had the police on her doorstep.

Then she spotted Hirsch’s passenger and simple joy lit her face. She let the shopping bags go, wiped her palms on her thighs and came at a little run to yank open the passenger door. ‘You found him!’