He’d crouched down behind her, his arms round her neck which was swathed in woollen scarves against the ridiculous weather, and looked at those beautiful fragile things.

She reorganized them earnestly, as though the order mattered. ‘Our baby will have tiny nails like that and you can bite them for him. Stop him scratching his face.’

Yes, he’d thought. That’s right. We will. No doubt about anything. The McGees were married, they would have children and they would grow old and proud of those children. That’s how life went.

Craig was not superstitious then and nor was he now, but the memory of the gust of wind that ripped across the sands on that huge, freezing, empty beach, came back to him often, the wet wind that had whipped away those paper-thin shells and made Sylvia laugh as she tried in vain to gather them up again. He thought about that a lot now. His life, no longer on those invisible oiled rails that carry a person through without having to ponder direction, was now as fragile as those shells. The wind would come, he knew, and swipe him away too. And what kind of wind would it be? Joe’s had been a hurricane. A huge, angry hurricane. That’s the way Joe went, and he was jealous. Joe, Joe, Joe. Must keep thinking about Joe.

The murder on the Redhorn reserve could be nothing or something. But he was anxious to know, and by the time they viewed the squat grey town of Stoke beneath them, he was bursting with impatience.

Daniel had been quiet throughout the journey, the pair of them sitting like eavesdroppers as the police radio occasionally spat out other people’s conversations. When he spoke, they had been silent for at least three-quarters of an hour.

‘You ever police a reserve, sir?’

Craig was hauled back from the pit of his thoughts.

‘Nope. Ten years in Vancouver, two in Banff, eight in Silver.’

It was Craig’s turn to be defensive now. ‘Why do you ask? Does it make me a bad cop ’cause I didn’t spend twenty years chasing illicit whisky stills and locking up wife-beaters?’

Daniel didn’t smile. ‘Guess not. It’s just a different kind of police work, that’s all.’

‘And you’re saying this because …?’

Daniel made a dismissive movement with his shoulders. ‘Sometimes what white cops think is abnormal on a reserve is pretty normal for the Indians who live there.’

‘Like wife-beating and child-abuse.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Bull shit. Violence and abuse isn’t normal anywhere, Hawk. I don’t give a damn if it’s an Indian, a Caucasian or a fucking Martian. Anyone who jumps the bones of their five-year-old needs locking up till they rot.’

‘Sure. But they don’t see it that way.’

‘Big deal. Who cares how they see it? They have to learn to stop doing it.’