‘I spent most of my life trying to forget about Dad,’ I breathed. I was rapidly trying to put everything Michael was telling me in order and sift through it for the truth at the same time. I’d been wilfully ignorant of the circumstances around Dad’s death; I never felt he deserved my attention after what he’d done and how he’d died. There’s no blaze of glory in dying in a gunfight with police. It wasn’t a brave death, a death to be proud of. It was a death to be forgotten. That was why Alan’s name hadn’t lit up a flashing sign in my brain during Michael’s trial. And with Marcelo persuading the court to accept an early plea and therefore suppress Alan’s sordid history, I might have never known differently. I pushed at my memory to see the man standing in front of my mother, smearing cream across her dress. Did I see a gold-plated lapel that read HOLTON? Or was that flash of memory constructed by the information Michael had just told me? Was this, as I’d told him earlier, one of those moments where I was losing which parts were real and which parts I was filling in myself? I apologise; that’s not something a reliable narrator does. Did police officers even wear nameplates?

I pushed all these thoughts aside and said, to Michael’s surprise, ‘This doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t mean you get the right to do what you did to Alan. And it doesn’t make it right what Alan did to Dad. But’—I was aware that I was choosing a very un-Cunningham side here, sympathising with the enemy—‘Dad was a criminal, he was caught in a robbery and he’d just shot Alan’s partner in the neck. If Holton’s who you say he is, he was just fighting back.’

‘I’m not denying that,’ Michael said. ‘But think about it. Did we grow up rich? Did Dad drive a flash car? Did Mum wear expensive jewellery? We didn’t revel in a life of crime. Dad broke the law to feed us, to care for us. I’m not saying that’s right, but he didn’t do it to line his own pockets. He wouldn’t have.’

‘That’s a very favourable view of our father,’ I said.