A different Katie gazed at him. ‘I know you have to work today, but work isn’t everything.’

He said, ‘Er,’ again.

‘There are three police at Redruth. One of them could’ve stood in for you today.’

‘Katie,’ Hirsch said, wondering how to follow up.

She got in first. ‘Mum likes you. I like you.’

Hirsch struggled to sit upright and give a considered response, but Wendy had appeared in the doorway, her shower-damp hair darkening the neck and shoulders of a blue sundress. ‘Give the poor man some peace.’

Hirsch just wanted her back in bed with him. He said, ‘Give the poor man some privacy, more like.’

She smiled, distracted, and crossed the room to plant a brief kiss. ‘You went back to sleep.’

He usually didn’t. He usually slipped away from her bed before dawn. ‘The brat says you’re off soon?’

‘Five minutes,’ Wendy said.

Her hands on her daughter’s shoulders now, she gazed at Hirsch sombrely, as if unpicking a tangle of feelings. She’s wondering if I’m worth it, he thought. And probably hoping I don’t stumble on any more scenes of slaughter. He tried a smile. She nodded briskly and bundled Katie out of the room.

Hirsch was showered and dressed inside four minutes and found the two of them stowing bags into the car. At the five-minute mark he was hugging them goodbye and then Wendy was adroitly looping her Mazda around the turning circle beside her veranda. They disappeared down the driveway.

Feeling faintly rebuked, Hirsch retreated to the house. It smelt of toast and coffee. The vase he’d given Wendy glowed on the sideboard. And he felt bereft suddenly. Anchored to nothing, unimportant. He made some toast and ate it on the veranda. It tasted of cardboard. Eyeing Wendy’s roses, he fetched the secateurs for a spot of deadheading. Another hot day ahead.

Twenty minutes later, he headed back to town, Sound-garden cranked up to shake him loose. The road dipped and rose and turned in on itself as it followed the contours of a disorderly landscape. The music helped but he was still uneasy—loneliness creeping in, the Hamel Road house, the missing children. His thoughts took him to the shepherd’s son’s grave. The past was proximate and unsettling—stamped in stone, so if you lived here you’d never rid yourself of it. The graves and the abandoned lives out in the back country, the blood spilt and now unspoken about.

He reached the grain silos and rolled through the town. Baking under the mid-morning sun, its blinds were down, doors and windows shut, air-conditioners rattling. Everyone indoors. But, far from defending itself against the summer heat, the place seemed huddled tight this morning. Fear or shame, or something of both. Nan’s horses; the Hamel Road killings.