Eileen recited it, slowly, pauses between the digits. Hirsch called it. Voicemail.

He checked his watch: two hours before Kellaher and Dock were due in town. ‘She didn’t say anything to you about picking up Daryl Cobb? Where they were going?’

‘Not her.’

‘The man who came looking for Mrs Rennie the other day—has he been back?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Gemma hasn’t mentioned him again?’

The little shoulders shrugged.

‘Did Gemma seem upset or anxious or scared to you yesterday?’

‘Not her.’

Hirsch wondered if Eileen knew of her daughter’s involvement with Adam Flann. He said carefully, ‘Perhaps she and Daryl went to a particular friend’s house? Adam Flann’s, maybe?’

A pause, and, for the first time, Eileen Pitcher showed a flicker of feeling. It was like watching someone start to wake up. ‘Is Gemma in trouble?’

‘Not with the police, Eileen. I’m sure she just spent the night with her mates. But we do need to speak to her.’

The bony hands washed and rewashed themselves. The eyes looked inwards.

‘I tell you what,’ Hirsch said, ‘I’ll head out to Adam’s house and if she’s there, tell her to call you, how would that be?’

‘Is he going to hurt her?’

Asking about the stranger, thought Hirsch, not Adam. ‘No,’ he lied. ‘He was just a nosy reporter.’

Hirsch was running out of time for finding Gemma before the Homicide officers arrived. He climbed into the hot cab of the Toyota and called the Redruth hospital: Brenda Flann had palmed some painkilling meds and taken them all at once. Now she was sick as a dog.

‘We’re monitoring her condition. And she’ll need a psych eval before we release her.’

‘Are her sons with her?’

‘Haven’t seen them for a few days.’

Hirsch completed the call and headed out across the bumpy back country to the Flanns’ rundown homestead. No sign of Wayne’s ute but someone—presumably Wayne—had towed Brenda’s old Falcon home from the Tiverton council yard. The crumpled front panels were gone and wrecking-yard replacements sat in the nearby dirt—a glimpse of a dutiful son.

He knocked: no answer, and the outer doors were locked. He peered in the windows, didn’t see anyone, and wandered in and out of the sheds. No dead teenagers. Just dust, oil stains, beer bottles, split garbage bags and an old tractor. Rat droppings and hessian sacks. Only one gleam of new metal—a sizeable locked cabinet tucked in the corner of a hayshed. It was partly concealed behind some large sheets of splintery five-ply painted white and fitted with rolling mechanisms. Looked like the sliding doors of a built-in wardrobe. Hirsch had no means of searching the cabinet and no reason to obtain a warrant, but the itch was in him.

He walked back to the house, cocked his ear, phoned Gemma again. Then Daryl. Nothing. Silence inside the house.