Even Marcelo’s presence at a murder trial was, in itself, staggering, and I think put laser-pointer guy off his game, but that wouldn’t be giving enough credit to Marcelo’s defence. He’d argued that Michael couldn’t have been expected to make rational decisions given the circumstances. While Michael had failed his duty of care towards Alan (this is important, because in Australia your legal responsibility to help someone only materialises once you begin to help someone, which I learned during the trial) by putting him into his car but not driving him to medical help, he’d also feared for his life, your honour, as he didn’t know if the shooter was still out there or if he was likely to be attacked or followed. So the rub, without getting all technical, was three years’ jail.

Testifying cost me a lot, and by the time the final bargain was accepted – the prison sentence was negotiated behind closed doors in the judge’s chambers – it hadn’t even mattered. I’ve made a lot of bad choices in my life, not least accepting Andy’s invitation for a drink at the bar after lunch, and I still haven’t decided if testifying was one of them. Sure, I’d have had to learn to live with staying silent, but I’ve had to learn to live with speaking out too, and I’m not sure which is worse. I’d love to tell you I did it because it was the right thing to do. But the truth is, in my brother’s low growl – ‘he just stopped breathing’ – there was something different. And I could say something clichéd here like, ‘He didn’t feel like my brother anymore’, but it was, in fact, the opposite. He felt like a Cunningham. I saw him without the layers. And if there was something in him like that growl, like his shoulders, his forearms flexed as he strangled the life out of someone, then was it in me too? I wanted to banish that part. So I’d turned to the police. I hoped there was some part of my mother that understood why I’d done it. And when tomorrow came, I was hoping there’d still be some part of me that did too.

I’ll admit to being a little wobbly as I crunched my way across the snow to my chalet. Andy had been excited enough by the promise of a drinking buddy that he’d been willing to swap allegiances and I’d humoured him as long as he was buying. Andy is a horticulturist. He grows the grass on cricket pitches and football fields to the right length and specifications. He is a terrifically boring man in a terrifically boring marriage, which, I have always found, makes for a generous shout.