‘Tell you what, whatever I cook, I’ll leave a plate in your fridge, yep,’ she said. ‘You can enjoy it whenever you get home.’

The car started. Hallelujah, praise the Lord.

‘That’s very considerate, but no thank you,’ Manolis said. The gear engaged with a crunch. ‘Sorry, but I have to go.’

He floored the accelerator with determination, hands clenching the wheel as the cold engine roared in agony, and he sighed with relief.

THE FLYBLOWN COP shop finally resembled a working police station for Wednesday morning’s nine o’clock briefing. Manolis was momentarily stunned. He stood before the constables and spoke briefly but assuredly. He told them about what he’d seen on Molly’s body during the morgue examination. He said the pattern of trauma suggested injury to the back of her head as well as the front.

Sparrow and Kerr looked at each other blankly, then at Manolis with the same expression.

‘So?’ Sparrow finally said. ‘She was stoned to death. With rocks. What a newsflash. I reckon that’d involve a fair amount of head trauma, don’t you?’

‘Well yes, obviously,’ said Manolis. ‘But she was tied to a tree. Don’t you find injuries to the back of her head surprising given she was tied to a tree?’

Sparrow let out a laugh. ‘Did you see the final position of her head? All drooped. Her bloody neck was broken.’

‘I guess it’s not that hard to imagine her head slumped forward after she died,’ Kerr added, ‘and then copped a few more rocks to the back, is it?’

Manolis agreed that was plausible. ‘I just didn’t expect it. I didn’t imagine someone would keep raining blows after she died.’

‘They would if they got pleasure out of it,’ Sparrow said.

‘She might’ve also turned her head away,’ Kerr said. ‘I know I would.’

Manolis looked at his feet, was reflective. ‘Yes, also possible. But just hear me out when I say I found it odd – my sixth sense was tingling. I’ve seen more brutal assaults in my time in the city. There might be something in it, there might not. But keep an open mind to all possibilities. I will too.’

Sparrow was soon hunched over his desk, simultaneously working a handset and filling an ashtray, searching for the phone records of a Mary Abbott or Margaret Abbott, or Molly or Mary or Margaret Boyd, her married name. Kerr went out doorknocking and chasing up alibis; Principal Searle was her first stop. Manolis expressed some concern over her house-to-house enquiries, which she was going to do solo – this wouldn’t have been allowed in the city. She told him, ‘Piss off, I’ll be fine,’ in a fierce tone. He backed down.