Emily wanted to speak with Henry’s parents, who had never, to her knowledge, given a media interview. Already she’d checked the online telephone directory for the Matfields’ number (news stories referred to Henry as a ‘Petersham man’), she’d looked through old White Pages at the Surry Hills library, and she called the Matfields’ former lawyer-spokesman and asked his assistant to forward a message. Emily didn’t expect much to come of that particular call. Help from other peoples’ lawyers? She checked the voter roll with the electoral commission, but the Matfields had either dropped off the register or requested their details be kept private. An ex-colleague, a reporter at The Independent, had once told Emily that chasing a person for an interview was like opening a CD case but finding the wrong CD inside, and then opening another case and finding nothing inside, and so on and so forth through the pile until, at last, you found what you were looking for. Back then Emily considered this metaphor clunky and juvenile. Now she felt a little clunky herself. In London she’d read reports from the coroner, from the inquest, and the inquiry into the police handling of the case, but still she felt like she hadn’t prepared enough. She hadn’t anticipated a problem with contacting the Matfields. She hadn’t done this kind of work in years! Instead, for almost a decade, she’d fixed sentences such as: The shark attack occurred at lunchtime. And: The man was found dead suffering from an unknown medical condition.

Perhaps all newspaper reporters—and for a moment she saw them as a force, a clique with knowledge she didn’t possess—owed Emily for her years of mostly thankless copyediting. She called in the debt; she got in touch with journalists who covered the shooting at Lucky’s to ask if they’d be prepared to pass on the phone number of Henry’s parents. The case was eight years old and no longer front-of-the-book news. They ought to share! thought Emily. First she dialled the switchboard of The Australian and asked for Rebecca Sturt, who’d reported the Third of April. Rebecca, now chief-of-staff, told her: ‘The family have disappeared.’

‘What do you mean by disappeared?’

‘I tried to find them a few years ago for a story about the fifth anniversary of the massacre but I couldn’t get hold of them. There you go: they disappeared. I got the yarn up anyway.’

Next Emily contacted a court reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald. The journalist—her voice was throaty and hurried—said Adam Matfield, Henry’s father, had died a few years earlier. Joanna Matfield was residing somewhere in the Blue Mountains. ‘But I don’t pass on numbers to other journos,’ the reporter said. ‘And anyway, seriously, Joanna will never talk to the media.’