So she had – and about everything else too: the restuarants they’d frequented, the business, his time out on the boat. She had questioned none of it, and see where that had led! To fire sales and repossession, leaving her, as her stepfather would have put it, without a pot to piss in. How could she have been so blind? There must have been signals that all was not well. Surely no one could be that deeply in debt and act as unworried as Gerry had seemed. Looking back, he had been edgy at times with the occasional flare-up of temper, but he’d been quick to apologise and blame it on work. Tilly had believed him because she had seen it with her stepfather. The sea was a hard mistress, and fishing as unchancy a livelihood as you could well find. Temporary crews, bad weather, light nets more often than not, and the gruelling nature of the work itself. Men came ashore dog-tired from the boats, and it was understandable that they should occasionally be out of sorts.

That was how she had dismissed it, Tilly thought. Gerry had spent his time on the water, so whatever he was wanted for had to be connected to the boat or the sea. Had he been running drugs? People smuggling? No, that was absurd. Where would he take a cargo of illegal refugees? You couldn’t just dump them ashore in croc-infested country – they’d be bound either to perish or be discovered. And he could hardly sail into Darwin Harbour with them. There must be checks – Customs officers, a Port Authority, something – at the docks. It was the back door to Australia after all: the government wouldn’t leave it wide open, not with all the refugee boats heading this way. But if Gerry were just the transport, she reasoned, his cargo could have been met ashore by some other member of the gang and trucked to a dispersal point, couldn’t it? Tilly had no idea how people smuggling operated, only that it happened.

She cringed, thinking of the misery of the desperate folk involved in such ventures, paying their life savings over to unscrupulous operators. How many were caught and sent back, or spent the next decade in detention? Why would Gerry do it? Surely not just to fund the lifestyle they had enjoyed. She had been as content with him in the tin shed of their fishing camp as in the fancy townhouse in Cairns. Had she ever given him reason to think otherwise? Could those nameless, hopeless refugees from the world’s worst trouble spots have suffered on her account? The thought was insupportable.