She walked with Hirsch to his 4WD. ‘I hate to add to your workload, Paul, but there was a bit of excitement in town just now, while I was doing the shopping.’

No one had notified Hirsch. Maybe he’d been out of range. ‘Do I want to know?’

‘Brenda Flann.’

‘Yeah. I didn’t want to know,’ Hirsch said.

2

2

EVERY CITY SUBURB and bush town had its Flanns. They lived in run-down houses with car bodies and washing machines rusting in weedy, untamed yards. Rangy dogs and snot-nosed toddlers sitting in the dirt. No obvious means of support but no apparent shortage of cash either. Always a couple of family members rotating through jail or ‘known to police’. Flashpoint tempers in the pub, the shop, the schoolyard, at the football. You didn’t look sideways at a Flann.

Brenda Flann and her brood lived east of Tiverton, out in rain-shadow country, where the early settlers had been conned by one year of bumper rains then damned by decades of drought. Her husband, Stu, was serving five years for robbery and her sons were headed that way. Brenda herself wasn’t light-fingered—or she hadn’t been caught yet—but she was heavy-footed. She racked up fines and demerits the way some other women collected handbags.

And that morning—no more than an hour ago, according to Monica Fuller—Brenda had tried to enter the main bar of the Tiverton pub without exiting her car first.

‘There was this almighty bang and I ran out of the shop and there she was, wedged under the veranda.’

‘Was she hurt?’

‘Nine lives, that one,’ Monica said. ‘But she’d knocked over one of the support posts and part of the roof had come down on the car.’

‘Already drunk,’ Hirsch muttered.

‘Well, is she ever really sober? Anyway, next minute her wheels are spinning and she’s trying to reverse off the veranda. She didn’t get very far, Ed and Martin managed to pull her out and confiscate her keys.’

Ed Tennant owned the shop; Martin Gwynne was the town stickybeak. Hirsch closed his eyes briefly, thinking of the paperwork. Citizen’s arrest, if that’s what it was. Police arrest. Damage report, witness statements…And he’d rather take a DNA swab from a hungry pit bull than try to breathalyse Brenda Flann.

‘Where is she now?’ he asked, thinking that if Ed and Martin had her locked in a room, he’d be facing another stretch of legal quicksand.

‘They drove her home in her car.’ As if reading his mind she added, ‘But they have her keys and with any luck she’s passed out on her bed.’

Hirsch shook his head, thinking of the other vehicles owned by the Flanns.

Monica was giving him a sly smile. ‘Want a squiz?’