If anything ran in families, Gordon thought, it was the looks in certain male lines. As if time had a sardonic sense of humour, Tony was a diminished version of his son. The bones of his shoulders were still broad but the flesh holding them together was concave and withered. The handlebar moustache was moth-eaten. The forehead was higher, to reveal a galaxy of scabs, crusts, keratoses, basal cell carcinomas and, with any luck, melanomas.

Giving himself a mental slap, Gordon said, ‘Rachel and Jason are the straightest people in the Northern Rivers. They drive Beemers. Solid citizens. Never smoke dope. Three daughters at private schools.’

‘That’s why they’re weirdos,’ Tony agreed with himself. ‘If you’re not some hippie dipstick, who but a weirdo would move up there?’

‘They were surprised about me and Kel,’ Gordon said to Sam, hoping to rescue the chat they might have had before Tony’s intervention.

‘I wasn’t,’ Tony interrupted.

Sam and Gordon looked expectantly at Tony. Misinterpreting their looks as an invitation, he blurted, ‘How Noel Chidgey’s daughter put up with this hopeless case is anybody’s guess. She saw the light before she’s too old to find someone else. Mind you, she pretty much is.’

Gordon frowned at Tony, not because of the offensiveness of what he had said, which was par for the course, but because this was, more or less, what all of Bluebird said: that Kelly had been unhappy for a long time, everyone could see that she and Gordon had gone past their use-by date, and the only surprise was that she had left her move so late.

‘We used to place bets on you,’ Tony said. ‘Pollyanna here’—he indicated Sam—‘thought the Chidgey lass would stick it out, but I knew what was coming.’

‘Bets?’ Gordon said to Sam, who was wiping up the coffee cups.

‘He means figuratively.’

‘I would have put real money on it if he’d let me,’ Tony went on. ‘Everyone knew you two were a mismatch, but a lot of people stick together so long, despite the evidence, that people figure you must have some secret special thing that nobody else can see.’

‘Usually in the sack,’ Sam added unhelpfully.

‘But no, there’s never a secret,’ Tony said. ‘Noel’s daughter just took longer to see what we all knew.’