Fyfe crushed Manolis’s fingers and palm in a show of cop strength. Fyfe’s red scabrous face and spider veins made him look like he’d been marinated in beer and left in the sun to dry. The dead glare in his dark grey eyes said this was a man who’d seen many horrors.

‘Nice clobber, mate.’

‘You look like you’ve come straight from a catwalk.’

The ’flies laughed, full and hearty, guts quivering, mouths agape, rotten teeth, shrivelled heads. Beneath their amusement, Manolis sensed a subliminal hostility. Indeed, it was almost tactile.

He acknowledged the barflies with a polite nod. Eyes were looking at him for an unnervingly long time, much longer than they would anywhere in the city.

‘So you’re the white knight,’ said the publican.

His hair was albino, his skin paler than snow. Manolis wondered how that was even possible in country Australia.

‘Come to save us from ourselves, eh?’ the publican continued. ‘Bless ya, son. Reckon that deserves a drink. What’s yer poison?’

Manolis was about to mention ‘duty’ but then reconsidered. When in Rome. He eyed the bar. It had a selection of nearly full liquor bottles, all weighed down with a thick coating of outback dust. The bar itself had four taps, all the same beer, full strength, lager, domestic. The walls and ceiling were covered with a selection of second-hand bras, jocks, footy jumpers, X-rays, business cards, photos and yet more Australian flags.

‘Whisky,’ Manolis said. ‘A double.’

His order seemed to silence the room. The publican looked at him crookedly. He wiped his nose, his odour yeasty. ‘Sure you don’t want a beer, mate?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Sure? It’s good ’n cold.’

‘Don’t drink beer. It bloats me. But I’ll have one for young Sparrow here…?’

Sparrow nodded blankly, as if he’d just seen something horrific, an abomination. He took his schooner and astonishment and went to sit in the corner while Manolis corralled Fyfe at the bar and pressed him for details about the investigation. Fyfe was elusive. Manolis pressed harder.

‘Look, mate, honestly, right now, we’re in mourning,’ Fyfe said. ‘Cobb’s a small place.’

‘I know it’s small,’ Manolis said. ‘Small and insular. It’s why I got seconded here from Major Crimes.’

‘I think that had more to do with what went down last night at the brown house than anything else.’

‘It does. But it doesn’t sound like it was an isolated event.’

Fyfe sucked on his beer like a vacuum cleaner. ‘It wasn’t,’ he said, through a frothy moustache. ‘That place was supposed to turn this town around. Jobs, they said. Economy, they said. Arse, I say. The jobs they brought in pay minimum wage – part-time cleaners and untrained security thugs.’