The question-and-answer session with the Innocent Ted people was draining. I’m not the world’s best public speaker. It was worse somehow that the strangers gathered here obviously felt so deeply for me, that they wanted so badly for me to find the answer and fix my life. Give them the happy ending they expect from tales as miserable as this. I’d got used to rooms packed full of hateful stares and whispered insults, the disappointed sigh of people I’d let down. There were older men and women here, more than I’d expected, who looked on me with the parental hurt one feels when their child is being picked on by a bully.

After the session, those who had not been game enough to raise their hand during the allotted time stood around me at the bar asking their own queries. The owner gave me a consolatory look and put another bourbon on the runner by my hand. I had to be careful I didn’t have too many, start to get loose-lipped. But the people wanted to know personal stuff now. How it was with Kelly. Whether or not I’d had any contact with Lillian since my arrest. Did prison leave me with PTSD? Had I had counseling? A woman put a peach-colored, filigreed business card into my hand. A psychiatrist. I was to call her any time, day or night.

I noticed, at the back of the crowd, the first one to arrive, Kevin, loitering. As he’d been there in those initial excruciating moments while I prepared for the room to fill with strangers, I guessed we had a kind of camaraderie now. He’d seen me through my ordeal from start to finish. He gave an understanding half smile, a shared jibe at the people peppering me with questions.

An old, bent-backed man in a plaid cardigan was the last of the crew to reach me. The others had moved off to Fabiana to tell her how good the event had been, to congratulate her on her work for my cause. The old man was licking his lips, squinting as he meticulously checked through his thoughts before he spoke them.

“A Ford Falcon XF ute, you were saying?” He pointed a gnarled finger at the chair I’d left abandoned at the front of the room. “See, I haven’t listened to episode seven. I have to have my granddaughter play them for me. She was the one who got me into the whole thing, the radio shows. Radiocasts. Podcasts. Whatever they’re called. You said it was a Falcon you were looking for?”

“Uh-huh.” I nodded. “The ute we were searching for was a Falcon XF. Pale blue. We know they never came in blue as standard, so we’re looking into that, checking to see if we can find some that were sprayed commercially.”

“Well, you know, it’s interesting,” the old man said, nodding, “because, back in the late 1980s, I seem to recall that Ford was engaged in a kind of rebadging arrangement. And it might have included their Falcons.”