HIRSCH RANGED ON foot in all directions, across the patchy dry grass beyond the yard and the sheds, around and through a nearby huddle of gum trees, over the neighbouring paddocks, into the mallee scrub fringe and along a dry creek bed. Looking for bodies, breadcrumbs. For dirt powdery enough to hold shoe prints.

Fruitless. Too dark. He returned to the house and searched the weedy drainage channels on each side of the driveway. It ended at a stock ramp on Hamel Road, beside a fence gate. Here the soil was looser, part talc and grit, churned by vehicle tyres—his included. No shoe prints, not that Hirsch was expecting any. If the girls had been abducted, they’d be in a vehicle. If they’d run, they’d head across country, not along the driveway.

He wandered back to the house and the world had become a silent place, full of shadows cast by a slice of moon. With nothing else to do, he sat in the HiLux, listened to his CD. Dylan, ‘Desolation Row’. Spot on.

Then his old training kicked in. Grabbing a roll of crime-scene tape and several garden stakes, he sealed off the tyre-churned dirt between the crown of the road and the stock ramp. Then he opened the paddock gate and marked out a path to the house parallel to the driveway, one stake every twenty metres, preserving his dwindling supply of tape by tying bows to each stake. Finally, he sealed off a parking area for the expected flood of official vehicles on patchy grass away from the yard, house and sheds. That was about all he could do to preserve the scene. He left the HiLux where it was and waited, seated on the ground this time, his back to the trunk of a pepper tree.

Sergeant Brandl arrived first, the headlights of her Commodore pitching and yawing over Hirsch’s path of paddock stones, clods and grass tussocks parallel to the driveway. He stood so she’d spot him, pointed to the parking area he’d marked out, and watched her pull up and get out.

She said, ‘I’d like to go in and look for myself, but it was made pretty clear I shouldn’t go stomping over everything in my hobnail boots.’ She glanced around at Hirsch’s row of garden stakes. ‘Good thinking with the tape.’

‘Sarge.’

‘Got any other photos?’

Hirsch handed her his phone, watched her flick through to the end. ‘So where are the two girls?’

‘I had a quick look around before the light failed. Didn’t spot anything.’

‘If they’re not out there somewhere, dead or hiding’—she indicated the endless plain—‘then maybe they’re with the killer.’

‘Maybe. Let’s suppose an estranged husband or boyfriend does find them. Why not kill all of them?’

‘The girls are special to him?’ Brandl said.