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  This sandwiched in with Mrs Keir’s reports of a visit from a Shropshire cousin, the delivery by horse and wagon of a piano, afternoon tea on a neighbouring property and the despondency of a shepherd whose son had drowned.

  Neither the shepherd nor his son was named. Hirsch wondered if Mrs Keir was as dreary and sour as her tone sometimes suggested. She’d written two thick volumes of a journal: she must have a curious, alert mind. But she did seem…easily irritated. Still, one thing Hirsch had come to rely on since his arrival in the mid-north: almost every week he’d meet someone who wanted to tell him about the pioneers, how tough they’d had it, and imply that they themselves were a chip off the same block.

  Hirsch walked the streets of the town as the light that smeared the skyline threw his striding shadow ahead, alongside and behind him. His corner of the world at peace for now. Small children were awake here and there, filling the quiet town with giddy shrieks, filling Hirsch with memories. Presents in the sitting room, his parents beaming sleepily on the sofa as he tore open the wrapping paper.

  No fun being a Christmas orphan, he thought suddenly. No fun being a small-town policeman on Christmas Day. He trudged back towards the police station, wondering when the shit would hit the fan. The expectation was unremitting. It was like a blanket in this godawful heat.

  ‘Merry Christmas.’

  He hadn’t noticed Gemma Pitcher and her mother behind the grapevine draped along their veranda. He stopped, blinked. Creased faces, unruly hair, they were not long out of bed. Drinking tea and contemplating the soft morning light.

  ‘Same to you,’ he said.

  Eileen Pitcher was tiny where her daughter was large, a dry, wizened woman with a flinty soul. She drew hungrily on a cigarette and extended a smidgin of Christmas cheer: ‘Tea?’

  The old Hirsch might have said, sorry, too much on, but today’s Hirsch was consumed with his homesick blues. A cup of tea might be just the job.

  ‘Don’t mind if I do.’ He perched on the veranda boards, his spine against a paint-peeling post. ‘Plain black, please.’

  Assigned, with the merest jerk of her mother’s chin, the task of making it, Gemma shuffled in pink slippers and huge T-shirt over satin pyjama shorts to the screen door and into the house, her thighs, branded with a criss-cross pattern from her chair, winking at Hirsch. He looked away. Presently tap water splashed, a kettle grumbled, a cup hit a saucer.

  Meanwhile Eileen was staring out at the sun-lit world, ignoring Hirsch as if he was one of the veranda posts.

  ‘Best time of the day,’ he said.

  She grunted and then he was saved. Gemma was there with his tea—and it was weak, milky, sweet. All at once the world was nothing worse than ridiculous. You had to laugh.

  The conversation—Hirsch’s conversation with Gemma—veered from Nan Washburn’s horses to the TV vans and Hirsch in a Santa suit. Until Gemma said, ‘Did that man find you?’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘He come in the shop yesterday.’

  Hirsch waited. In his experience, no one ever just spat it out. They delayed and withheld as if they were on an hourly rate. ‘Yesterday,’ he prompted.

  ‘That lady with the baby in the car.’

  ‘Mrs Rennie?’

  ‘He said her name was Reid.’

  ‘A man came into the shop and…?’

  ‘He wanted to know where she lived.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  This seemed to be a difficult question. Finally Gemma shrugged, ‘Average, I guess.’

  ‘Age?’

  She assessed Hirsch. ‘A bit older than you?’

  ‘Forties?’

  ‘S’pose.’

  ‘Did he say why he wanted to find Mrs Rennie? Or Reid or whatever?’

  Gemma shrugged again.

  ‘Do you know where she lives?’

  Gemma shook her head. ‘Told him to ask you.’

  ‘Didn’t see him,’ Hirsch said.

  With his small taste of Christmas spirit curdling in him, Hirsch carried on through the town, checking on the Cobbs, the Washburns and an elderly woman whose husband had dementia. These two were also on their front veranda, watching the sunlight advance across the quiet world. They were holding hands. Hirsch didn’t go in, merely chatted briefly from the footpath. ‘Going to be another scorcher,’ he said, wishing them a happy day, lifting one hand in a wave goodbye. The woman smiled and nodded, but didn’t wave, didn’t break the spell of her husband’s hand in hers. She’s counting the Christmases left to them, Hirsch thought.

  He showered, changed, brewed coffee, called his parents, then Wendy and Katie, then there was no one else to call. The walls of his cramped house drew in around him a little.

  Relief came with a phone call via triple-zero: a crash reported on a bend of the Barrier Highway north of Mount Bryan. Hirsch raced down there on an empty road, through slumbering country, to find the witness had overreacted. A station wagon had gone straight ahead instead of around the bend and ploughed through a wire fence. No blood; minor damage. The car sat, barely scratched, a few metres inside a paddock. The greatest risk was a grass fire set off by the hot underside of the car, but there wasn’t enough grass to burn. The paddock lay fallow, a dismal stretch of red dirt and sparse dead stalks.

  A stocky, grey-haired man stood, bent at the waist, near the front of the car.

  ‘Need a hand?’

  The man straightened, brushing his hands. Dark trousers, dusty black shoes, a white short-sleeved shirt and a clerical collar. He winced to see a man in uniform.

  ‘Checking the radiator and headlights.’

  ‘Anything?’ asked Hirsch.

  The minister shook his head. ‘Dents and scratches.’

  Hirsch came closer to look for himself. ‘Not the best day to run off the road.’

  ‘You can say that again. I’ve got three services this morning and I’m already late for the first one.’

  A country minister tending to dwindling flocks in dying country towns. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Act of God?’ the cleric said, with cheerful vigour.

  Hirsch grinned. ‘You haven’t, umm, been hitting the Christmas sherry?’

  ‘That comes later. No, took my eyes off the road for a second.’

  Hirsch glanced at the car’s interior. Sheets of paper on the passenger seat, scrawled handwriting. ‘Rereading your sermon?’

  The man blushed. ‘I was, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Don’t you know them all off by heart?’

  ‘Nothing is fixed or certain. My sermons evolve,’ the minister said, with good-natured self-mockery.

  Hirsch gave him a little salute. ‘No harm done, except to the fence and your car.’ He glanced around to the far corners of the paddock. No stock; the fence could stay as it was for the time being. ‘If you give me your details, I’ll pass them on to whoever farms this place.’

  ‘To pay for the fence? Yes, of course,’ the minister said.

  Mid-morning, Liam Kennedy called. The family had returned from church in Redruth to find their house burgled. Most of the Christmas presents—yet to be opened—had been swiped from under the tree, together with a TV set and jewellery from the master bedroom, a phone and a laptop from the kids’ room.

  Their farm was ten kilometres west of Tiverton, a 1970s suburban-style brick veneer at the end of a winding track on a slope overlooking lucerne flats. As Hirsch turned off the approach road, he saw a sun-flash a short distance along a nearby side road. A car was parked there.

  Check out the Kennedys first.

  He parked behind a Subaru wagon on the gravel turning circle. That was the signal for the family to spill out of the house: Liam, Fiona, two girls of upper-primary-school age. They took him inside, the air close and warm, and showed him the back door. It had been forced open. Then the Christmas tree, an artificial one, with a couple of forlorn parcels under it. Then the kitchen.

  ‘They raided the fridge!’ Fiona said, her face tight with stress. ‘I m
ean, you hear about people saying they feel violated when they’re burgled…’

  ‘It’s a terrible feeling,’ Hirsch agreed.

  He glanced at Liam. A big man, scarred and scraped by a life on the land; combed and tidied now for church. Calmer and harder than his wife. A good thing he didn’t walk in on the burglar, Hirsch thought.

  That car he’d seen…

  ‘Mind if I look around outside?’

  ‘This way,’ Kennedy said.

  They were ten seconds into a sweep of the yard when Hirsch saw the dark gleam of a flat-screen TV under a rosebush beside the veranda steps. He said, very firmly, ‘Liam, I want you to fetch Fiona and the girls and go sit with them in the car. Understand? Don’t say anything to them, use hand signals.’

  Kennedy twigged quickly. A rasp in his voice as he said, ‘Let me—’

  ‘Liam, you need to look to your family,’ Hirsch said, putting some grit into his own voice.

  ‘If it all gets away from you, I’m—’

  ‘Understood, thank you,’ Hirsch said.

  He waited, watching the family troop out and into the Subaru before re-entering the house. He went through the place quickly, quietly: room by room; behind doors; under beds.

  That left the wardrobes.

  Master bedroom. Two teens, a boy and a girl, huddled on the floor of the walk-in closet. Backpacks, a corner of Christmas wrapping showing at the top of one pack, the thin, silvery edge of a laptop in the other. They were frightened, scowling, the hems of jackets and dresses brushing their heads. As far as Hirsch knew, they weren’t local kids.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ he said. ‘You came by car?’

  Silence.

  ‘Heard the family come home and panicked? Dumped the TV outside when you heard their car and ran back inside with the rest of the stuff…’

  Still nothing.

  Hirsch wanted to say, ‘Not very bright of you,’ but they were kids; you didn’t expect them to think.

  ‘There’s a car nearby, over on the other road. Is it yours?’

  Nothing. And Liam Kennedy came lumbering in. ‘Thought you were in strife. Thought—’

  The girl shrieked. Burrowed deeper into her corner. ‘Stay away from me.’

  The boy wrapped an arm around her, his face half-averted from the wrath of the adults, half ready to leap to the girl’s defence. Kennedy stared in at them, stupefied, as if aliens had slipped into his house.

  Hirsch said, ‘You know them?’

  ‘Never seen them before.’

  Then why’s the girl so scared of you?

  Hirsch had his answer later, the kids in the car with him on the way back to town. Brother and sister, they were from Peterborough, an hour north of Tiverton. Their stepfather had lost his grain-handling job on Christmas Eve and gone on a bender. Wrecked the house and put their mother in hospital. When he flaked in the early hours of Christmas Day, they’d stolen his car and headed south. Low on fuel, hungry, no money, they’d turned off the highway and happened to see the Kennedys’ Subaru head down onto the valley road. Took a chance that the house would be empty. Ate, fell asleep, woke up in time to start thieving just as the family returned from church.

  Sorting that out, liaising with Peterborough police—who’d arrested the stepfather for assault and property damage in the meantime—and finding temporary accommodation for the kids, took Hirsch through to mid-afternoon. The Kennedys gave the kids fifty dollars each, said they wouldn’t press charges—an expression they’d heard on TV. Hirsch knew it wasn’t that simple. He could downplay the crimes, though.

  Just another sad, Christmas Day fuckup. Could’ve been worse.

  Then a third call came in.

  15

  IT WAS SERGEANT Brandl. ‘I need you to do a welfare check.’

  ‘Okay…’

  ‘People named Redding. Family members are worried because they’re not answering the phone.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Hirsch, writing down the address: 6 Hamel Road. Turn any corner and you’d find yourself on a road named for a Great War battlefield, he thought. He tried to place it mentally. Over near Mischance Creek.

  ‘The call came to me,’ Brandl said, ‘but I’m dealing with a three-car pile-up near Farrell Flat and can’t spare anyone.’

  ‘I’m closer anyway,’ Hirsch said.

  Brandl continued, an odd tone to her voice: ‘The thing is, the call came direct to my mobile, a man asking a series of questions to establish who I was before telling me he was from police headquarters in Sydney.’

  A tone in her voice: suspicion. She hadn’t been given the full story. Watch yourself.

  ‘Right,’ said Hirsch, reading between the lines. Why would this man call her mobile and not the police station landline? And how would a policeman in Sydney even know her mobile number? And why had the call come from there? Sydney residents concerned because interstate relatives weren’t answering the phone on Christmas Day would probably notify their local station first. They’d pass on the request to police in Adelaide, who’d ask the closest rural station to make the check.

  ‘Perhaps headquarters gave them your number,’ Hirsch said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Brandl said, not buying it. ‘Call me as soon as you learn anything and I’ll get back to Sydney.’ Pause. ‘This bloke sounded a bit tense.’ Another pause. ‘Merry Christmas.’

  Welfare checks were reasonably common in Hirsch’s experience, often on behalf of someone who’d been unable to contact an elderly parent, an addict son or daughter, a friend in an abusive relationship, a neighbour whose newspapers were piling up. On one occasion he’d actually discovered a body—natural causes—but in most circumstances the explanation was mundane: the loved one or neighbour was deaf, off on an unannounced holiday or avoiding their relatives.

  Late afternoon by the time he reached the Bitter Wash Road turnoff, heading east, the sun low behind him, flaring on the hills ahead. His sense of travelling back into the past was stronger than usual—roads that had barely evolved from bullock-wagon routes, old buildings, drooping telephone lines, ancient Austin trucks listing on perished tyres. But behind and beneath the things he could see was a more remote and comfortless past, at least if Mrs Keir’s journals were anything to go by.

  He slipped Katie’s CD into the slot. Leonard Cohen, ‘Closing Time’. Perfect for bringing order to his long line of jangled thoughts. Redding, 6 Hamel Road, Mischance Creek. You didn’t ask for a welfare check on a whole family unless something was wrong. Even if they’d all spent Christmas Day at another location, or with other people, wouldn’t at least one family member be contactable on a mobile? Or have posted their plans on Facebook, or texted someone?

  The road wound through marginal country. Hirsch retraced the route he’d taken the day he located Craig Washburn until the crossroads sign. He turned right there, towards Mischance Creek (Ruins) and finally onto Hamel Road. A line of mallee scrub; tough merino sheep the colour of the soil; even a mob of emus. Hirsch stopped, blinked: he’d never seen emus in the wild. Leonard Cohen growling his dark urban poetry, a police vehicle on a mallee plain, emus raising outback dust…Where was the logic connecting those three facts?

  He rolled on. The tyres shuddering on the corrugations, the tiny stones pinging against the chassis—the familiar music of his days. He’d seen a couple of distant farmhouses, rooftops above clumps of farmyard gum trees at the ends of long driveways. Number 6, when he reached it, was a stock ramp at the head of a dirt track lined with scraggly cypresses that led up a gentle incline and out of sight. He turned in.

  The cypresses continued on the other side of the rise, down to a stone farmhouse with a sun-faded red roof. A house typical of the region—maybe smaller, squatter, than most—and a car-shed hard against the left-hand side wall. On the other side of the house were a corrugated-iron rainwater tank and a ten-metre-high tower topped with an old-style TV antenna.

  Beyond the house, implement sheds, stockyards and a woolshed. Everything for a working farm, but this wasn
’t one: no sign of sheep, hay, tractors or any other machinery. A barren tree in the yard, its twigs and branches like forks of black lightning frozen against the sky.

  He switched off, got out and stood for a moment, wary of dogs, wary of a homicidal/suicidal husband and father. Between the Toyota and the front door were a couch-grass lawn, some struggling rosebushes and a dedicated dry-country garden, only the second one Hirsch had seen. Shaped piles of stony dirt held together with tough little shrubs, succulents and ground cover, drab at first glance until you noted the subtle tones of pink, yellow, olive and khaki.

  The shadows were long now, the sun beginning to smear the western hilltops. No wind. No sounds but for creatures claiming the evening. Surely someone had heard him arrive? He felt reluctant to cross the yard. The house wasn’t repelling him, but nor was it just a pile of stone. It seemed to be gathering some shameful emotion to itself. It seemed not to want intruders.

  Hirsch shook off the feeling. The car-shed’s roller door was closed—not necessarily significant but, in his experience, the locals left their car-sheds open unless intending to be absent for some time. He pulled on crime-scene gloves and started with the shed.

  The door was unlocked. It rolled upwards, revealing a dusty pink Hyundai Excel with a gaffer-taped sheet of black plastic sealing a broken rear window. Hirsch felt a jolt: Denise Rennie’s car. Her fear and evasions; ‘Redding’ close in sound to ‘Rennie’; the false address.

  He peered in. The car was empty.

  Not so the rest of the shed. He edged past the car to a workbench on the end wall—vice; scattered woodworking tools; hammers and saws on a pegboard. Set into the adjacent side wall was a door that presumably led into the house. It was locked.

  He looked down. The car sat over an old-style service pit sealed with wooden slats. And, on the floor, evidence of hasty or interrupted gift wrapping: empty carton with an illustration of a pink tricycle, roll of Christmas wrapping paper, sticky tape, pink ribbon. No sign of the bike—and it hadn’t been fully assembled. The saddle still lay on the stained concrete.

  A tricycle for a little girl, thought Hirsch. Anna Rennie? It’s Christmas Eve and she’s asleep at last and now Mum or Dad can wrap her present from Santa. The shed door down, just in case she wakes up and gets curious.