Hirsch shifted in his seat. He’d been expecting the question—it had already cropped up a few times in the YouTube comments. ‘One, her evident distress. Two, she apologised, she was mortified. Three, she struck me as a devoted mother in all other respects. Four, I don’t think she’s very well off. Five, it’s close to Christmas. Six, I didn’t think she deserved to be punished any further. Seven, I was surrounded by people I’m trying to forge good relations with. I didn’t want to come across as bullying the poor woman.’

Brandl looked at him and said nothing. He said, ‘Look, she ducked across the road to pick up a prescription, that’s all.’

Better shut up now, he told himself. Brandl was stony-faced.

Then, a transfiguring smile. ‘Ah, stuff HQ. We’re at the front line, they’re not.’

Police cultures, thought Hirsch, grateful. Police against the great unwashed. Front-line police against the pencil pushers.

A knock on the door, Landy calling out: ‘Sangers just arrived, sergeant.’

Brandl looked at Hirsch. ‘Hungry?’

They joined the others in the tearoom, pulled their crackers, put on their paper hats. Ate, drank their soft drinks, swapped police stories and Christmas stories. Like all good things, it didn’t last.

‘It’s Christmas Eve,’ the sergeant said as they went their separate ways. ‘People are already getting into the grog.’

14

14

DAWN, CHRISTMAS DAY.

The Natives continue to effect depredations upon our flocks, determined to do as they please, and Douglas is very much of a mind to put a stop to it.

This sandwiched in with Mrs Keir’s reports of a visit from a Shropshire cousin, the delivery by horse and wagon of a piano, afternoon tea on a neighbouring property and the despondency of a shepherd whose son had drowned.

Neither the shepherd nor his son was named. Hirsch wondered if Mrs Keir was as dreary and sour as her tone sometimes suggested. She’d written two thick volumes of a journal: she must have a curious, alert mind. But she did seem…easily irritated. Still, one thing Hirsch had come to rely on since his arrival in the mid-north: almost every week he’d meet someone who wanted to tell him about the pioneers, how tough they’d had it, and imply that they themselves were a chip off the same block.

Hirsch walked the streets of the town as the light that smeared the skyline threw his striding shadow ahead, alongside and behind him. His corner of the world at peace for now. Small children were awake here and there, filling the quiet town with giddy shrieks, filling Hirsch with memories. Presents in the sitting room, his parents beaming sleepily on the sofa as he tore open the wrapping paper.