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  ‘Interesting,’ echoed Hirsch, giving her a look. ‘Does that mean you have a theory about this?’

  Duigan countered with a question. ‘Does it seem random to you?’

  He’d decided against that notion in the first thirty seconds. ‘As in a warped stranger happened to stumble on the place? No.’

  ‘No,’ Duigan agreed. ‘This was personal.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Whoever did this was targeting Mrs Washburn—in particular, her emotional attachment to her ponies.’

  ‘Mm.’ That seemed obvious to Hirsch. ‘Why?’

  Duigan shrugged her bony little shoulders. ‘A grudge of some kind? Payback.’

  ‘It’s extreme, though. This is a seriously screwed-up person we’re talking about.’

  ‘Yes. Someone with a sadistic disorder of some kind, which he keeps hidden…under control…except that one day Nan offended him in some way.’

  ‘He?’

  The vet looked at Hirsch levelly. ‘Don’t you agree? And he’d be local. Maybe you already have your suspicions?’

  Hirsch smiled, shook her hand goodbye. ‘Thanks for everything you’ve done.’

  ‘Tell Nan I’ll call in again tomorrow.’

  ‘Will do.’

  Hirsch wandered back to the house, planning his day. Wait for other police to arrive, then knock on doors. The Cobb house first—because it was within walking distance—and then Adam Flann’s. How likely was it, though, that a pair of vacant, unmotivated boys had risen before dawn with blood lust in their eyes? Unless they’d been up all night—drinking, maybe taking ice—and been hit by a sudden brainwave. Or they’d been smouldering with humiliation since the apology. Or both. Hirsch thought he should probably pounce now, before weapons and clothing could be hidden or destroyed, but found himself halting in the driveway. Nan Washburn, desolate, frail, diminished, was still cradling her pony. Yvonne was at her side.

  He crouched with them. So much blood on Nan: her cheek, arms, hands, torso, probably her lap. And darkening the dirt all around. ‘The vet will drop by again tomorrow,’ he said. ‘And she’ll arrange for the, ah, disposal of the bodies.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask a few questions?’

  ‘Paul, no,’ Muir said.

  But Washburn was practical. She gently touched the other woman’s arm and said, ‘I’m fine now, Von, thank you.’ Turning to Hirsch she said, ‘Give me twenty minutes, okay? Both of you wait on the veranda while I reassure Radish and the others.’

  They did as they were told, watching Nan tip a haybale and a bag of oats into a bouncy green barrow and wheel it through the paddock gate and down to the far corner, slowing her pace as she neared the surviving horses, calling in a singsong voice. Radish reacted first, snorting, scraping at the dirt with his front hoof, but then, like an elegant machine set in motion, he walked to greet her, his big shoulders rolling. The ponies trotted behind.

  Nan rested the barrow and went to each animal, stroking, patting, crooning. They responded with nudges and head tosses, before passing on either side of her, bound for the tucker. She hauled the hay onto the dirt, cutting the twine, separating the compressed stalks into clumps, breaking these apart with her shoe. Then she poured a long, thick runnel of oats along the ground and stood, watching, as her horses began to eat.

  Hirsch looked on, and wondered if a man—or a kid—with a taste for mutilating animals might one day want to try it on humans.

  The questioning took place at the kitchen table. ‘You didn’t hear anything?’ Hirsch asked, gesturing at the world beyond the room, simultaneously glancing at Yvonne Muir, wondering how much she should be a part of this.

  ‘I took a sleeping pill,’ Nan said, regret on her face.

  ‘Do you have any thoughts on who might have wanted to harm you?’

  Nan blew on the surface of her tea. ‘I know you have thoughts, Paul. You’re thinking Daryl and/or Adam.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think some people might say those boys had a motive, they felt humiliated because they had to give a formal apology, but…really? It’s not as if I rubbed their faces in it. I didn’t quibble, didn’t insist on taking it further, didn’t go complaining to their parents, nothing like that. And the apology was your idea.’ She shook her head. ‘When it boils down to it, they’re basically good kids.’

  In Hirsch’s experience, a kid like Adam Flann might consider the apology an insult, and Nan Washburn a softer target for revenge than a policeman. ‘You raise pedigrees, right? They’re valuable? You win prizes with them, you sell to other breeders?’

  She glanced at him shrewdly. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it a cut-throat business?’

  Too late, he realised what he’d said. Nan gave him a crooked smile. ‘I take it you mean figuratively? It’s not. I suppose some of the other breeders might be envious, but I can’t see any of them hurting any animal.’

  ‘Perhaps you sold someone a dud pony and didn’t offer a refund?’

  ‘Nothing like that. I haven’t bred a single dud, as you call it. If I had, I’d have given a refund, no questions asked.’ The iron roof flexed in the growing heat, a series of cracks and creaks above their heads. ‘Your husband.’

  Yvonne Muir bristled, but Nan Washburn said calmly, ‘What about him?’

  ‘You’re separated. Perhaps he doesn’t want that? Perhaps he thinks there’s someone else in your life? I’m sorry, Nan, but I have to ask these questions.’

  ‘Paul, stop it,’ Muir said.

  ‘It’s all right, Von, he does have to ask these questions. And I can say categorically that there’s no one else in my life, and it was Craig who left me, not the other way around. And not because we were fighting.’ She paused. ‘He has mental health issues. He needs to be alone. I see him once or twice a month and we get on fine.’

  ‘Non-violent health issues,’ Yvonne Muir said, with emphasis.

  Nan touched Muir’s forearm, but followed up. ‘Yes, non-violent, he wouldn’t hurt a soul. Nuts, but harmless. It started a few years ago, and at first I made allowances. But it became too much in the end, he wanted to be by himself. I worry, of course. We all try to keep an eye on him, take him food and clothing from time to time, a quick chat, that kind of thing, whatever he can bear. Sometimes he’s lucid, other times…not, but in a gentle way. Muted.’ Tears came to her eyes. ‘One day a snake will get him, or he’ll wander off and die of thirst.’

  Hirsch drained his tea. ‘Have you had any threats lately? Letters, emails, phone calls, social media posts?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Rocks through your windows?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tyres slashed?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ Washburn said irritably. ‘I live a quiet life, okay? I don’t make enemies. I don’t yell at the neighbours for leaving their bins out or letting their dogs yap. I don’t gossip. I don’t make waves. Breeding miniature ponies isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s a quiet business, I keep the place tidy, there are no bad smells, no mistreatment, no gates left open, no horses roaming the district. All this’—she gestured at the carnage on the other side of her wall—‘seems personal in some way, but I have no idea how or why. You’re looking for someone who’s, I don’t know, sick. And I’ve no idea who that is.’

  Nor do I, thought Hirsch, but he had to start somewhere. He said goodbye and had barely reached Kitchener Street when the Port Pirie team arrived: one lone CIB detective, one lone forensic technician. They accepted Hirsch’s report and photographs without comment.

  ‘We’ll take it from here,’ said the detective, a bruiser named Comyn, looking intently at Hirsch with wide-set, doubting eyes.

  He knows who I am, Hirsch thought. He’s thinking whistle-blower, dog, maggot, rat. Thinks I caused the resignation of some good CIB men and the suicide of another.

  Hirsch smiled sweetly and set off to do some police work of his own.

  10

  HE RACED HOME, sho
wered, shaved, stuffed himself into his uniform and hung his towel on the backyard clothesline. The Santa suit was dry. Note to self: return to Martin Gwynne asap.

  Settling his broad-brimmed uniform hat at a stern angle on his head, he left the police station. A huddle of townspeople across at the shop; one of them beckoned to Hirsch. He waved cheerily and set off in the opposite direction. They know about Nan’s ponies, he thought. They want the official version. And reassurance.

  Two minutes later he knocked on Marie Cobb’s door. Waited. Walked around to the rear. Laura was there in shortie pyjamas, plugged into an iPod, watering the tomatoes. And Hirsch thought: Shit, what will the news do to her? Unless she mutilated the ponies? Hirsch rejected the notion as soon as it popped into his head. Me in cop mode, he thought: trust no one, suspect everyone.

  Laura caught him in the corner of her eye and started reflexively, placing her hand over her chest. Then, her expression resentful—masking apprehension, Hirsch thought—she released the hand-spray trigger, hooked the nozzle over the trellis and removed the headphones. The garden, still in shade, smelt coolly and cleanly of tomatoes and damp mulch.

  ‘Morning, Laura.’

  ‘Can’t you leave us alone?’

  This was a kid who got up early and filled her days, thought Hirsch. Shopping, cooking, gardening, schoolwork, housework, work-work. Watching over her mother and brother. The little household’s youngest member, she shouldered most of the responsibility; had no other choice. But how was she going to cope by the time Year 12 came around? She might get some leeway if she broke a leg or caught glandular fever, but if her brother was in jail? If—when—her mother acted out? Shy, shamefaced, Laura had told Hirsch some of it: Marie staying in bed for weeks at a time; talking non-stop for days at a time; calling her kids out of class to say her sore throat was cancer; bundling them into the car at 2 a.m. because the secret police were coming.

  Hirsch removed his hat and found that his mouth was dry. He swallowed, feeling clumsy. ‘Laura, there’s…I have to tell you something awful has happened to some of Mrs Washburn’s ponies.’

  Her hand bunched the neck of her pyjama top. Fear. ‘What?’

  He told her, and she was silent but tears ran down her cheeks. Then she gathered herself. ‘I need to go around there,’ she said. Paused minutely and added: ‘It wasn’t Daryl, he wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘But you understand that I need to speak to him?’

  She shrugged, clopping in faded pink Crocs towards the back door. Opened it, looked at him: she expected him to follow.

  Into the hot airless cave that was their little brick house.

  ‘He’s asleep,’ she said. ‘You know where.’

  She left him there in the kitchen. A door slammed. Presently, he heard squeaky taps and shower water drumming against a plastic curtain. Taking a breath, Hirsch walked through to Daryl Cobb’s battered door and knocked and waited. Knocked again, a hard, knuckling rap. Tough guy, he thought self-consciously, and decided simply to walk in.

  The boy was asleep, wearing only boxer shorts, a big, soft, downy creature beached on a grimy sheet, his feet tangled in the top sheet. The room stank: sweat, dope, the rancid smell of unwashed flesh and clothing.

  Hirsh regarded him glumly. Meanwhile Laura finished showering: he heard the water stop, the curtain rings clack. A quick towel rub later, her bare feet padded to her bedroom and a door slammed. Hirsch sighed again. Back to Daryl.

  His footwear first: runners, black pointy-toed going-out shoes, thongs. No blood. The clothing on the floor, the chair, in drawers and the wardrobe. No blood.

  Hirsch re-entered the hallway just as Laura emerged from her bedroom, her hair dampening the neck and shoulders of a yellow T-shirt, her legs thin and vulnerable in a baggy pair of shorts. ‘Quickest shower in history,’ he said.

  She ignored him. Banged out of the back door and, a moment later, he heard her bicycle wheels.

  The laundry next. The washing machine was bone dry. White knickers, a black bra and a Redruth High School summer uniform in the dirty-clothes basket.

  But the absence of bloody clothing and footwear wasn’t proof of Daryl’s innocence. Hirsch took out his iPhone and replayed the video. He finally spotted Daryl near the end—with his sister, and his mother, cheering as Nan reached up to Santa for her Best Christmas Lights certificate and plum pudding. He was wearing blue boardshorts and a Kings of Leon T-shirt.

  Hirsch returned to the bedroom. The T-shirt and the shorts lay where Daryl had stripped them off. Hirsch toed them open again: no blood.

  It didn’t mean anything. The kid could have changed his clothes, killed and slashed a few horses in the darker hours, buried his bloodied clothing in the backyard.

  ‘All of them?’ asked Daryl Cobb dazedly.

  ‘Four dead,’ Hirsch said. ‘Couple more with stab wounds.’

  He’d dragged two of the sticky kitchen chairs out into the sweeter air of the backyard, and now he watched Daryl stare at Laura’s tomato plants as if answers lay among them. The boy’s befuddlement might owe something to being hauled out of bed and plonked on a chair in the great outdoors hours before he usually awoke, Hirsch thought, but it owed a lot more to the enormity of the crime. The kid was staring vacantly, slack-jawed, unable to take it in.

  He hadn’t yet twigged that a policeman might view him as a suspect, and that counted for plenty in Hirsch’s book. Not guilty, he decided. Daryl wasn’t capable of concealing guilt. He hadn’t butchered and mutilated any ponies, hadn’t witnessed anyone else do it, hadn’t heard talk of it.

  Still, Hirsch had to be sure.

  ‘Did you have a good time at last night’s street party?’

  ‘It was all right.’

  Hirsch mentally reviewed Daryl’s face in Katie Street’s iPhone video clip: the uncomplicated enjoyment of a child. Uncool to admit that.

  ‘What did you do afterwards?’

  Daryl shrugged, struggling to make sense of where he was, who he was with, what it was about. ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘Mucked around with Adam?’

  A ship at sea might change course faster than Daryl Cobb. He blinked, frowned. ‘He wasn’t…he didn’t…I think he went home after. Or maybe down the hospital.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Hirsch repeated.

  ‘Nothing much.’

  Hirsch had the sense that Daryl barely recalled his evening. ‘Watch TV?’

  A cloud lifted. ‘Yeah. Game of Thrones.’

  ‘On DVD?’

  The sun and the air defeated Daryl again. He frowned at the dirt. And said, slowly, ‘Laura’s.’

  ‘It was her DVD?’

  ‘Got it for her birthday.’

  ‘You binge it? Late night?’

  Daryl struggled again. ‘Think so.’

  ‘Did you go out afterwards? To look at the Christmas lights, that kind of thing? Meet up with friends?’

  A dull intelligence stirred behind Daryl’s blankness. He looked astonished, as if Hirsch was suggesting he’d piloted a private jet to Tahiti. ‘Just went to bed.’

  ‘Who was here last night?’

  Another strange question. Overnight guests? Here? ‘Me and Mum and Laura.’

  ‘You all stayed in?’

  Daryl woke a little more. ‘I would never…We would never…’

  ‘Never what?’

  ‘Hurt Nan’s horses.’

  ‘What about Adam? Did he stay in town?’

  Daryl shrank. He looked hunted. ‘Dunno. Never saw where he went after.’

  ‘He didn’t pop in for a meal, watch TV for a while?’

  Daryl folded his arms. It wasn’t defensive, it was decisive. ‘Nup.’

  ‘I want to thank you again for apologising to Mrs Washburn, Daryl. It can’t have been easy. Perhaps you boys felt we’d put you on the spot?’

  Daryl blinked at the shift. And Hirsch realised that the boy had no sense of agency. It didn’t occur to him to resent, or permit himself to resent, the burdens and expectations place
d upon him by others. ‘It was all right,’ he muttered.

  Another mantra of the bush: things were never terrible or fantastic, merely okay. ‘You didn’t feel aggrieved at all?’

  The boy didn’t know the word. ‘You didn’t think Mrs Washburn and I were being unfair?’

  Daryl’s eyes swivelled wildly, as if he thought Hirsch were saying the apology was inadequate, more was expected of him. ‘Better than going to court,’ he said.

  ‘What about Adam? Was he upset?’

  Now Daryl could see where this was going. He shifted in his chair, his soft, pale thighs adhering to the vinyl. The rising sun had meanwhile begun to paint the yard, illuminating his bony feet.

  ‘Daryl? Did Adam complain about yesterday?’

  ‘Might of.’

  ‘Was he just a bit pissed off? Or was he angry?’

  A shrug.

  ‘Any plans to see him today?’

  Daryl went very still. He didn’t know the correct answer.

  ‘How’s your mum been?’

  Daryl struggled to find the words. ‘She’s, like, it’s the start of a down time, you can tell the signs.’

  ‘Things she says and does?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Did she enjoy last night?’

  ‘She went to bed right after.’

  ‘How long do the down times last?’

  Daryl laughed, fully awake now. ‘Weeks, months.’

  ‘Laura’s helping Mrs Washburn today.’

  Daryl shrugged as if barely aware he shared a house with his sister. Hirsch went on: ‘Perhaps you could stay in and keep an eye on your mother.’

  Daryl stared at nothing; at the layout of his life.

  Hirsch walked back to the police station. It was probably his imagination, but already the town seemed stunned and cowed. The smell of slaughter hung in the air, which he knew must be a memory trace. He was several hundred metres from Nan Washburn’s house now.

  For distraction, he took the Santa suit down from his backyard clothesline, folded it as if Martin Gwynne were watching his every move, and tried to slip it back into the David Jones shopping bag. Gave up. The suit as folded by him proved unequal to the bag, full of fabric, clips, buttons and air, and Hirsch thought that pretty much summed up his day and his situation in this fucking town.