‘Nice one.’ Wozza grinned in appreciation. ‘My funniest catch was when I fell on one. I was chasing a bloke and he jumped a fence. I jumped over after him. Didn’t realise he’d come a cropper and I landed right on top of him.’

‘Did you buy him dinner first?’ I asked.

Wozza laughed. His mood lightened.

I said, ‘As soon as Meg Mulligan wakes up, we need to ask if her Jack had a fresh set of black eyes. You saw him in court. Bit hard to hide something like that.’

Wozza nodded. ‘Part of his face was the colour of a plum.’

‘First, we need to talk to the school principal, then we have to find’—I checked my notes—‘Rachel, Jess and Anna. See what they’ve got to say.’

Wozza pulled into the school grounds. Parked illegally, right near the door.

If Rachel, Jess and Anna were at school, I wondered why there hadn’t been a whisper about their missing friend. Why weren’t they shouting her disappearance from the rooftops? Then again, there were many reasons girls kept secrets.

‘C’mon,’ said Wozza, hauling himself out of the car. ‘No rest for the wicked.’

I frowned. The wicked in this small town were very busy indeed.

The Deception Bay High School was red-bricked and square, and somehow a bit taller than the primary school version down the road where two of Wozza’s daughters went, and where I had experienced some sporadic schooling many years ago when my mother went off on one of her missions—inoculations in Africa, orphanages in Nepal—and left me with my grandmother. I was plucked out of my school in the city and landed at Deception Bay Primary.

As we looked for the front entrance, a gaggle of tall boys with lank hair and untucked shirts walked past, nudging and pushing each other in the way peculiar to boys of that age.

Wozza groaned. ‘Oh jeez, I bet my Sophie brings home one just like that.’

I elbowed my partner in the arm. ‘Sophie’s little. Give her at least a couple more years before she raises your blood pressure.’ I pictured a slightly older Wozza greeting Sophie’s potential suitors at the door with his police badge in hand. I looked sideways at him. He was in his mid-forties, not as fit as he should be, thick around the middle, and his work suit was a bit crumpled. There was a smudge of jam on his tie. Sophie and her sisters could do a lot worse for a dad, I thought.

We located a sign that pointed to the front office and followed it to a reception area. Behind a glass sliding window, an officious-looking woman in a cardigan sat at a desk. She looked at us suspiciously over the top of her spectacles.

‘Yes?’ she said, elongating the one syllable into two.