I’d told Val about my guilt at not being able to stay and continue the case with Amanda and Sweeney, that I had to head back down to Sydney to make an official statement on Melanie Springfield’s accusation. At precisely seven that night, Stories and Lives was going to air my interview, complete with the snippet about a “predatory relationship” with her eight-year-old sister and my response. I’d glanced at my watch a hundred times that day already, counting down the hours until the next chapter of my nightmare began.

In time Val wheeled out Andrew Bell’s body from a room behind two huge swinging doors. A couple of friends and family members who couldn’t make the funeral had decided to come and view the body, so Val had asked the funeral director to come in early and dress Andrew. He was dressed in a neat black suit with fine pinstripes, expensive. The tie was an oddly joyful floral print, pink and red. The director had done what she could with his head, but the back of Andrew’s skull had been obliterated during the shooting and she had been forced to shave the rest of it to document the injuries. In stark contrast to his suit, Andrew was wearing a Brisbane Broncos football team beanie, the rearing horse emblem pulled low on his smooth forehead. As per custom, Val took a white sheet from the shelves beside a rack of tools and spread it over the body only seconds before a buzzer announced Stephanie’s entry.

The receptionist brought her in. Stephanie walked weakly, her steps shorter than usual, the hesitant tread of someone struggling under the physical weight of grief. She burst into tears at the sight of the figure on the gurney, hardly seeming to question my presence in the room at all.

I went to her and held her. It seemed the only real option when I realized Val wasn’t going to. Val had probably realized long ago that hugging the families of her victims wasn’t worth the emotional toll it would take on her later as she lay awake at night, remembering their shoulders shuddering in her arms, the intimate feel of their gasping breath on her skin. They tell you not to hug victims in your initial training in the police. When you hug you cross the professional barrier, the one that’s supposed to keep you safe from the horrors of your job.

“Are you sure you need to do this?” I asked. “There are other ways you can say goodbye to Andrew.”

“He’s not going to look how you’re used to him looking,” Val said. “It might affect your memory of him when he was alive.”