The road wound through marginal country. Hirsch retraced the route he’d taken the day he located Craig Washburn until the crossroads sign. He turned right there, towards Mischance Creek (Ruins) and finally onto Hamel Road. A line of mallee scrub; tough merino sheep the colour of the soil; even a mob of emus. Hirsch stopped, blinked: he’d never seen emus in the wild. Leonard Cohen growling his dark urban poetry, a police vehicle on a mallee plain, emus raising outback dust…Where was the logic connecting those three facts?

He rolled on. The tyres shuddering on the corrugations, the tiny stones pinging against the chassis—the familiar music of his days. He’d seen a couple of distant farmhouses, rooftops above clumps of farmyard gum trees at the ends of long driveways. Number 6, when he reached it, was a stock ramp at the head of a dirt track lined with scraggly cypresses that led up a gentle incline and out of sight. He turned in.

The cypresses continued on the other side of the rise, down to a stone farmhouse with a sun-faded red roof. A house typical of the region—maybe smaller, squatter, than most—and a car-shed hard against the left-hand side wall. On the other side of the house were a corrugated-iron rainwater tank and a ten-metre-high tower topped with an old-style TV antenna.

Beyond the house, implement sheds, stockyards and a woolshed. Everything for a working farm, but this wasn’t one: no sign of sheep, hay, tractors or any other machinery. A barren tree in the yard, its twigs and branches like forks of black lightning frozen against the sky.

He switched off, got out and stood for a moment, wary of dogs, wary of a homicidal/suicidal husband and father. Between the Toyota and the front door were a couch-grass lawn, some struggling rosebushes and a dedicated dry-country garden, only the second one Hirsch had seen. Shaped piles of stony dirt held together with tough little shrubs, succulents and ground cover, drab at first glance until you noted the subtle tones of pink, yellow, olive and khaki.

The shadows were long now, the sun beginning to smear the western hilltops. No wind. No sounds but for creatures claiming the evening. Surely someone had heard him arrive? He felt reluctant to cross the yard. The house wasn’t repelling him, but nor was it just a pile of stone. It seemed to be gathering some shameful emotion to itself. It seemed not to want intruders.

Hirsch shook off the feeling. The car-shed’s roller door was closed—not necessarily significant but, in his experience, the locals left their car-sheds open unless intending to be absent for some time. He pulled on crime-scene gloves and started with the shed.