He stood and I tried to scramble away, got nowhere, curled into a ball, thinking he was coming for me again. But he just turned down the hall and left the house.

There was a shoe by my face, but it wasn’t a black boot this time. It was a dirty pink Converse sneaker with wet grass sticking to the shoelaces. A thin ankle covered with tattoos of yellow tigers and wet jungle leaves straining as she stood over me. I felt Amanda nudge me in the side with her other shoe. I made a sound of life.

“Ted! You are alive!” she said, but her jubilation plummeted quickly into grief. “Damn it. I just lost a bet with myself.”

She leaned on me, and I felt her slip a knife or scissor blade into the cable tie at my wrists. My hands flopped onto the floor, numb and useless.

“Birds,” I said.

“What?”

“The birds.”

“Oh,” she said. “Good point.”

She walked away, through the porch door, letting it slam behind her. I lay on the floor and dreamed. I’d taken a few beatings in my time, in prison and out, and I knew the worst thing I could do right now was try to get up too fast.

Amanda Pharrell was my investigative partner, a strange tattooed pixie who could be brilliant in the throes of a case, but annoying as a poke in the eye in equal measure. I’d been working with her since I moved to Crimson Lake, my old life on the drug squad with the New South Wales police long forgotten. I guess you could say she “hired” me; I was technically employed by her private investigations firm, the only other person on the payroll. But our partnership had been more of a beautiful accident, the hand of fate pushing us together. When I fled Sydney, I’d stopped and decided to settle in Crimson Lake by chance. And by chance, there was someone in town who everyone hated just as much as me. It was my lawyer who had put us together, and somehow—I still struggle to understand how—it had worked.

Like me, Amanda was never going to be welcomed back into the loving circle of civil society. She’d stabbed a seventeen-year-old schoolmate to death after the two sat in a car in the rainforest together, about to walk up to a party. It wasn’t her fault, but like my crime hers was a one-way ticket out of the “normal” world.