Instead, he heard nothing. He stayed patient. He didn’t want to face a pair of fugitives tucked away behind a steering wheel and layer of protective glass; that would be complicated. He wanted this to be clean, calm and ordered. Hands in the air, give yourselves up, it’s over.

But still, he heard nothing. Just the engine idling. Had they seen him? Were they preparing their own surprise attack? Manolis listened, a tense current of sweat snaking its way down the canyon of his spine.

When he heard the engine pick up, he finally made the decision to stand, gun drawn. It wasn’t what he wanted. He’d only fired his gun twice in twenty years, and both times in response to being fired upon.

‘Joe…?’

It was Shrewsbury. The man killed the ignition, raised both hands in surrender. He was guilty-faced, as if he’d been caught doing something unlawful.

‘Well bugger me,’ Joe grumbled. ‘If it isn’t Dick bloody Tracy.’

‘Jesus,’ said Manolis. ‘I nearly blew your head off. Here, help me, quick.’

They carefully transferred the constable to the back seat of Joe’s vehicle. Shirtless Joe shook his head and grumbled.

‘He’s not gonna make it,’ he said flatly. He turned the key, made the cylinders hum. ‘He’s a goner.’

Manolis wasn’t having a bar. ‘Drive,’ he said. ‘Straight to hospital, fast as you can. Don’t stop for anything, man or beast.’

Joe eyed the road ahead, shimmering with heat. ‘Dunno, mate. Fucken roos on the road, fucken everywhere. You shoulda seen the mobs back earlier. I had to slow, beep, swerve, beep again, stop. Dumb bastards pay no mind, they do what they want.’

Manolis looked back in the direction of Cobb. ‘Just drive.’

‘Yeah righto, I heard ya the first time.’

‘You see a white station wagon drive past? How long ago?’

Joe stroked his chin. Manolis was already walking away when he heard Joe’s long protracted drawl: ‘Dunno…’

The response was not important: Manolis’s course was already set.

He didn’t even glance in his rear-view mirror. That was in his past now, in the lap of the gods.

He drove even more carelessly. With every rise in the road, every bend in the path, he refocused his eyes on the new horizon and imagined seeing the rear of a speeding white station wagon. And when it wasn’t there, that only meant it would be there the next time he looked, so he’d better drive faster, harder, more daringly. The thought had occurred to him that they may’ve turned off the road altogether, gone bushbashing through the grassland and scrub, forged their own desperate route to freedom.