He pulled up outside the police station, lowered the windows a crack, and got out. The shop across the road was shut, no cars at the kerb. The pub shut? That was a first.

He locked the Toyota, toe-tested his spotted driveway—the new tar was satisfyingly soft—and stepped onto the veranda. There was a note poking out from under the door.

Big, looping script: Dear Paul Daryl never came home last night Laura.

He turned around and headed along the street, the sun pounding on his shoulders again.

Hirsch wondered if Marie Cobb had moved from her chair at the sticky table since he’d last seen her. The same slumped posture, the same ashtray, the same long, amnesiac pauses between one desperate suck on her cigarette and the next.

But Laura was all business. Moving around the kitchen as if her mother was a permanent fixture, she fetched Hirsch a glass of water, plonked it on the table, sat opposite him.

‘Gemma come and got him.’

‘Last night some time?’

She nodded.

‘Early? Late?’

‘Late.’

‘Did he say where he was going?’

‘No,’ she snorted. ‘He’d never tell me.’

‘Did Gemma say anything?’

‘Never talked to her. She just tooted out in the street and off he went.’

‘She hasn’t got a car.’

‘She had her mum’s,’ Laura said.

I bet they drove to Adam Flann’s, Hirsch thought. ‘Has Daryl got a mobile?’

‘It just goes to voicemail.’

‘I wouldn’t worry too much. It’s the holidays. They probably had a few beers at Adam’s and decided to stay the night.’

‘I rung the house six times this morning. No answer.’

Wayne would have been taking part in the search for the missing Rennie girls. Was Brenda still in the hospital? If she’d gone home, was she too stiff and sore to come to the phone? Or too drunk. ‘Do you have a number for Gemma?’

Laura shook her head—and then, exquisitely attuned to everything around her, she got up from her chair and stood behind her mother, wrapping the thin frame in her arms, resting her chin on the lank hair. Hirsch realised that Marie was crying silently, tears streaming down her cheeks. He glanced up at Laura. Laura gave him a look. You know what you have to do.

It seemed that Eileen Pitcher hadn’t moved for days either, still perched like a twiggy bird in the speckled shade thrown by her grapevine.

Hirsch leaned against a veranda post and said, ‘You’re not worried she hasn’t come home?’

‘She’s a big girl,’ Eileen said, staring, in her dead-eyed way, past his torso. Nothing and no one to look at out there, only harsh sunlight on the empty street.

‘Does she have a mobile?’

A ripple of astonishment crossed the woman’s face: who didn’t have a mobile?

Hirsch drew his phone from his pocket. ‘Can I have her number?’