‘Where’s the investigation up to? Take me to the crime scene. Did you know the victim? Has the coroner seen the body? Can I read their report?’

Sparrow stared straight through his city colleague, his eyes glassy and unfocused. A fly buzzed lazily against the window.

‘Where’s your evidence locker?’ Manolis continued. ‘What did you recover from the scene? Any witnesses? What about suspects? Leads? Have you spoken with the media…?’

The country cop kept staring. Finally, he leant forward in his stackable chair and helped himself to a strip of crocodile. Tore a piece. Chewed.

‘Well,’ he said, mouth full, ‘you’ve asked a fair bit there, mate. And we’ve only just met. Tell you what, let’s go to the pub.’

It wasn’t a request. It was an initiation. Manolis was loath to go; there was a murderer at large. Reluctantly, he agreed.

They walked past the empty drunk tank on the way out. Manolis gestured at it, surprised.

‘There’s never enough divvy vans and drunk tanks,’ Sparrow said. ‘Most days, it’d be easier to just lock up the sober people.’

He secured the station using three different locks and strode to his patrol car, a white Ford sedan with a red bonnet, no hubcaps and the biggest roo bar Manolis had ever seen.

‘We’ll take my car,’ Manolis said.

Sparrow’s sunglasses caught the glare like popping flashbulbs. ‘Suit yerself. North please, driver. We’re going to the top pub.’

Situated at the top end of town, the so-called top pub was appropriately named and easily distinguishable from the bottom pub, at the southern end of town, near the Aboriginal community.

‘Top pub whitefellas, bottom pub blackfellas,’ was how Sparrow explained it. ‘Put simply.’

He also admitted he was technically in the wrong place, but that most of his people considered him ‘a sellout anyway’.

They made small talk on the way. Sparrow explained the town’s two stale pubs were the epicentres of trouble most nights of the week, which kept the cops sufficiently occupied.

‘Good distraction for a murder,’ he added.

He asked if Manolis had seen the Aboriginal settlement on Cobb’s southern outskirts. He had. Sparrow said he grew up there. Manolis recalled a shantytown, all aluminium sheeting and milk crates, old tyres and mattresses for walls, clumps of clothes. Bodies were strewn across the land, the soles of dusty feet, people and dogs sleeping under whatever had shade. Seeing the Valiant, a group of Aboriginal kids had stopped kicking around a battered Australian Rules football between two packs, and stood eyeing it roll by.

‘Yair,’ Sparrow said. ‘That’s me mob.’

‘How’s your mob with the police in this town, they get along?’

‘Not really,’ Sparrow sighed. ‘Or should I say, far from it. Pigs will always be pigs, but hopefully a black cop in town changes that. That’s what I’m tryin’ to do.’

‘You always wanted to be a policeman?’