Beyond where Patrick stood, the crowd of onlookers were all still there, not even pretending not to stare at the man, waiting to see what he would do next. Patrick turned and scanned their faces, locking eyes with a flat-headed grunt who was probably a head taller than he was and twice as heavy. Harper stepped forward, sensing the bristling of male anger, turning to violence.

She kept her voice low. “Now, Mr Tranter …”

He shouted past her as if she hadn’t spoken, “Why don’t you all just go the fuck home, hey? The show’s over.”

The flathead in the crowd looked backwards over his own shoulder, incredulous, and finding no one behind him turned back to Patrick and narrowed his eyes. “You talking to me?”

Patrick balled up two fists by his sides.

The man kept staring right at him. “You looking at me?”

One hand poised at his radio, Atkinson said, “Please, Mr Tranter …” and placed a hand on Patrick’s shoulder that he shook off, forcefully.

Taking a step towards the crowd, Patrick said, “What are you all staring at, anyway, you losers? This is my life. These are my children …” and he might have said that was my wife but suddenly he bent over and sobbed into his knees, curling pitifully into a ball on the ground next to the stroller.

Harper spoke to the crowd. “If you could go about your day, please, ladies and gentlemen, I think we need to give this man a bit of privacy. Thank you, thank you,” and the onlookers began to grumble and disperse. Some of them had the grace to look shamefaced as they shuffled off. Evidently the sight of a grown man crying on the pavement was not as enthralling as the earlier sight of a woman ripping clumps of her own hair out and screaming where are my babies, over and over when they were there, right there in front of her. “They’re here, my love,” Patrick had said, and when Lauren had met her husband’s eye she’d been unrecognisable, her face an animal snarl, the whites of her eyes turned pink with bloodshot as she tried to get away from him with the stroller and roll the twins into the river, her own children. There was blood on Patrick’s face from where she’d scratched him in the struggle, but between he and Harper, they had somehow managed to hold on to the stroller, stop it from tipping, prevent Lauren from doing whatever she was trying to do. Thwarted, Lauren went for Harper’s face but Patrick got his arms around her, pulled her backwards away from the babies, towards the river.