As he emerged into the cold air he heard waterfowl calling sweetly from the far bank. Kids were walking to school across the footpath high above, singing. This harmless place was where Dad said Cousin Tony had jumped to his death sometime in autumn. Judging by the bare branches of poplars reaching up towards the bridge, their leaf buds looking ready to unfurl in a matter of days, winter was swiftly coming to an end in the border country.

James spied the broad thicket of trees beneath the bridge, strode across the car park and pushed through a nettle-filled ditch into the shadows under the concrete span. After about twenty metres, the water’s edge stopped him. On the far side of a wide pool dammed by concrete pylons, scraps of police tape had been left tied around some of the timber struts that held up the railway line. As he scanned the thick layers of greenery that concealed the place where Tony’s body must have been found, a flock of birds shook the long reeds and took off towards the cliffs.

The parklands sat at the lowest point of a high-sided gorge. From down here, both road and railway bridge connected the rocky walls that rose each side of the river. Their undersides looked about ten metres higher than the tops of the tallest poplars. James dropped his head and squeezed his eyes shut against the many dangerous looking gaps that someone could have jumped through.

‘Fuck, Tony. What the fuck?’ he said.

Images of victims came to him, all the black-and-white death masks he’d encountered in police photographs while working the crime rounds; restless souls who’d overdosed, severed, gassed, poisoned or jumped their way out of life, often for no apparent reason.

But James had an idea why the body of Kippen’s favourite son lay undiscovered in the river for almost two months before anyone noticed he was missing. As soon as he’d arrived and spotted the public toilet with the utes parked at a distance, the angle of this suicide story had revealed itself.

Detective Constable Daniel Brandt would have missed all the clues. Yet James felt absolutely no sense of superiority over his father, the way his newsroom colleagues did whenever they bitched about how cops always downplayed the obvious.

Looking back towards the safety of his hire car, James sensed that he might be about to pass beyond reason. The unstable feeling came creeping into his gut like the ripple of nausea, just as his counsellor had predicted.