He’d lift her into the boat. She’d be safe. Until that moment she had forgotten that a far greater danger than drowning lurked in these muddy, offshore waters. But her relief was short-lived, for the unmanned Esmerelda chose that moment to heel sideways and she had lost sight of them. They’d be all right though, both safely aboard. It wasn’t the easiest thing to climb into a boat from the water but Gerry was strong – he would manage. All she had to concentrate on was driving the Esmerelda to a point where she could pick them up without running them down.

Would it have made a difference if she had remembered and activated the EPIRB, the emergency beacon, right then? Or put a call through on the radio? She had been desperate not to lose them and when it became plain that she had, precious time had already ticked away. Help had come but by then it was too late.

The night and the ocean, or something worse, had swallowed her little family and the endless litany of once upon a time had begun.

The fishing fraternity had rallied to her wild distress, quartering the seas about the islands until dawn. Rough, kindly men with salt-scarred skin plotted where the tides would carry a small boat, forced thermos tea upon her and organised a search of the islands’ shores. The police had arrived at daylight, and a light plane owned by a local charter pilot had flown a grid pattern over the waves. He was later joined by a small helicopter borrowed from some station muster. Together they had crisscrossed the Gulf waters around the Sir Edward Pellew Group of Islands and further out into the vast soulless blue where the plane reported no sightings beyond a prawn trawler, whom the police had immediately co-opted into the search. The helicopter pilot, however, who was young, and new to the north, brought back an excited description of the many big crocs he’d seen hauled up on the silty banks fronting the mangroves.

Tilly’s nightmares had started then, peopled with scaley monsters devouring her child. Two days later her mother had briefly appeared, crying as she held her sobbing daughter, but Elaine Williams couldn’t stay. Her husband suffered from dementia; he had slipped away mentally from his family several years before and needed constant supervision. She had placed him in respite care for the brief duration of her visit and both of them knew she must return.

‘They’re gone, love. There’s nothing more you can do here, so come home with me,’ Elaine had pleaded.

Tilly had refused. ‘I can’t leave them, Mum. I can’t. There’s a chance still,’ she cried fiercely. ‘There is! There must be!’