They went berserk. That woman had really stirred their blood. He glanced across at her as he turned to walk back to the car and the constables herded the shouting reporters away. A delicate creature, despite her height, dressed not in the day-glo shell-jacket uniform of the regular press hound, but in a long black coat. Nor was she shouting questions at his back. She was looking at him with an expression that was doing something to a very private part of his head and his balls.

He was still looking at her as Daniel drove across the central verge and onto the empty slip-road to town.

‘Give them what they wanted?’

‘Nothing like.’

They drove in silence for a few minutes while Craig wrestled with his reaction to that face. For a man who had been celibate more than two years it maybe wouldn’t make headline news, but it bothered him like hell. He filed it and dismissed it.

‘So. Sam Hunt. What do we know, Hawk?’

‘An apple.’

‘An apple?’

‘Red on the outside, white on the inside.’

‘What’s he done to deserve that slander?’

‘You think that’s slander?’

‘Yeah. I do.’

Daniel shrugged. ‘He married white. His wife runs the Silver Heritage Museum.’

‘Okay. I’ve seen her. So that’s his big crime, is it? Marrying someone who can’t hold their own in a chicken dance.’

Daniel nearly smiled this time, then decided against it. ‘I didn’t say it was a crime. It’s a state of mind. If you want to live off-reserve sometimes you have to work pretty hard at staying Indian. Sam just chose to forget it.’

Craig studied Hawk in the illuminated gaps between the half-shadows of the street lights. His profile was unmistakably Indian, although his eyes had enough of an oriental slant to give him the frequent inconvenience of being taken for an Asian, and his short black hair, cut like a sixties astronaut, was not helping give the constable the image of a Hollywood Comanche. If Hawk was working hard at being an off-reserve Indian he needed to work harder still. He just looked like a cop.

‘How do you manage?’

‘It’s easier for me. My family are all full Kinchuinick. We talk Siouan at home. We keep up with a lot of the old ways.’

Craig put his folder on the floor at his feet. If he were honest, he didn’t care if Daniel kept up with the old ways or not. The old ways were gone.

‘You knew Hunt when you grew up?’

‘Nope. Met him for the first time in Silver.’

‘But you knew of him?’

‘Yeah. We knew all about his family.’

‘Anything interesting?’

‘Bad mother-fuckers, every last one of them. His father was a shit on legs.’

‘Want to expand on that? I mean how bad are we talking here? Jay-walking or international terrorism?’