‘Or people smugglers?’ Tilly suggested. ‘Wasn’t there something about a boatload of Chinese people put ashore on the Kimberley Coast maybe five years back? Which is practically murder when you think of the isolation and distance from anywhere. It was just luck some of them found that station.’

‘Pretty damn silly to light a fire if they were trying to sneak in the back door,’ Luke objected.

‘There is that, of course. Do you want a cuppa before dinner?’

‘I’ll wait,’ he decided. ‘I need to shower first anyway. Might have a beer after that though.’

Nobody was late to bed that night. Once she had cleaned up in the kitchen, Tilly readied the bottles for Sophie to give the joeys their evening feed. The next task was preparing the possum’s breakfast. Matt, busy setting out the board and having failed to find a playing partner in Luke, then invited her to a game of chess.

She pulled a face. ‘You know I’m not up to your standard.’

‘Don’t matter. Call it practice.’ He shrugged.

Sighing inwardly, Tilly took a seat across the kitchen table from him. Not that she had anything better to do. The others had found their own pursuits, Sophie lost in a book and Luke watching a football game on TV, by the sound of it. She pushed a white pawn carelessly forward, and when her turn came around again followed it with another, seeing not the board but the hard glint in DS Burns’ face as he asked if she’d had contact with her husband. Even if it were possible that Gerry still lived, why would the police be involved? Just supposing he had somehow miraculously survived, was that in itself a crime? Matt was waiting on her; she moved a knight at random and saw his fingers, with their light dusting of blotchy freckles, grasp his king and tip it over.

‘No point,’ he said when she looked up. ‘Your head ain’t in it.’

‘I’m sorry, Matt.’ She hadn’t wanted to play but now she felt bad about spoiling it for him.

‘’S’okay.’ He was setting the pieces back on their squares, removing some and shifting others about the board. ‘I can nut out problems instead.’ Cradling his chin in one hand, he became rapt in contemplation as Tilly rose and left him. Everybody had their little quirks, she thought, and Matt’s was chess. He knew all the famous end-games by heart and often worked them through, trying to find alternative moves to those the masters of chess had played.