‘You don’t suppose I had anything to do with it?’ Searle stammered.

‘We just need to rule people out,’ Kerr said quickly.

Manolis stared at Kerr coldly. He reprimanded her only after the headmaster had left. ‘You can’t say that. You’ve got to be objective. Look at your community as an outsider.’

From the vacant look in her eyes, Manolis wondered if he was asking the impossible of Kerr.

‘And what do you think, is he telling the truth?’ he added.

‘Can’t see why he wouldn’t.’ Kerr tightened her hair tie, fixed her ponytail. ‘What about you?’

Manolis rubbed his sandpaper chin. ‘Not sure yet. It’s all very neat. Very neat and tidy. That usually sets off an alarm in my head.’

Kerr huffed. ‘Christ, not everyone’s a suspect.’

‘Everyone’s a suspect…’

Manolis grabbed his car keys with one location in mind. Kerr said not to bother, that everyone would’ve already gone home for the day, except for the two disinterested security guards on the front gate who monitored curfew and read pornography.

‘Tomorrow, then,’ Manolis said. ‘Right after we interview a sober Shrewsbury.’

A thorough search of Molly’s house was absolutely essential. But experience told Manolis that searches were best conducted in daylight; fumbling about at night risked missing clues or contaminating evidence.

Kerr wanted to call it a day. Her frail mum was waiting, and the witching hour was approaching. The old woman often went wandering at dusk, looking for her childhood home or dead relatives, and Kerr sometimes encountered her en route, inching forward in her lavender nightgown and house slippers. On other occasions, finding her mum missing when she got home, Kerr had spent hours traversing the town in darkness before discovering the old woman sitting patiently on a park bench, waiting for a bus that never came.

‘I understand,’ Manolis said. ‘You can go. But before you do…’

MANOLIS WAS FAMILIAR with the notoriety of Cobb’s decayingly murderous base hospital: a string of recent fatalities, doctors and nurses suspended, the coroner always investigating. The community’s trust was gone; they would sooner drive hundreds of kilometres to the nearest neighbouring hospital than visit their own. At least there they stood a chance.

Adding further strain to the hospital’s stretched resources was the detention centre. The detainees were rumoured to receive better medical care than the locals – comprehensive health checks, specialist doctors, access to prescription medicines, sterile bandages, clean needles. Not to mention all the paramedic callouts to the centre when a detainee was found hanging from plaited rope or bedsheets. It all came from the duty-of-care arrangement, which meant the government could be sued if they failed to discharge their duty. This was why an adult detainee with a cut finger got priority over a newborn local baby struggling to breathe.