Bran opened his mouth to answer.

“In prison,” Amanda said. Bran’s eyes widened.

“You spend every second of the day together for a couple of years, you pick up each other’s habits. You met in prison. That’s how you knew to put them on their stomachs to incapacitate them, fingers interlocked. You’ve done it plenty of times yourselves under the order of guards. You, you’re the weak one.” Amanda tried to point with her shoulder toward Bran. “You were probably in for identity fraud. Burglary. Possession of stolen items. Nothing face-to-face. You don’t have the gumption for face-to-face crime. You were going to be dead meat in the can and you knew it. You needed someone strong. Experienced. You were lucky you got him for a cellmate.” She looked at Jay. “You were in longer. You’ve got more shitty tatts. And that ugly collection of scars in the crook of your elbow—that’s from heroin. Not neat little track-mark scars. That buckshot look is the kind you get from using on the inside where you can’t get needles, so you use a shaved-down bike pump spike. I’ve seen it before. You came in a heroin user. Which probably means you were a thief. You’ve got to steal to feed that habit. That’s how you knew to wipe your prints from the safe. And the extra time, that means it wasn’t just burglary. It means you were probably in for a violent cri—”

Jay’s face had reddened steadily. Before Amanda had finished talking he grabbed her by the throat and pinned her.

“You’ve got a big fucking mouth,” he snarled, lifting her by the neck and banging her head against the floor. “But you’re not telling me what I want to hear.”

“About the money.” Amanda struggled to sit up again when he let her go, then reeled as the room spun. “You heard the story after you became cellies. A smart crook would have kept something like that to himself. But you both heard it at the same time. Sticking close to each other for protection. Someone chatting to you in the chow hall. Talking shit. Talking about corrupt cops in the 1970s. Maybe it was an old lifer. Someone convincing. Someone who was there. They told you about Police Commissioner Tom Songly, the top dog. How all the money flowed upwards from the beat cops on the street, and he was one of the few people to come out of the train wreck of a royal commission unscathed.”

Amanda looked across the living room at Victoria Songly’s body, the reeking, stiff half-mummy with the blue hands.

“It would have been a lot of money. He was in power during the key years. And a couple of his lieutenants, they might have asked him to take care of their shares while they went away so they didn’t have to leave it with their wives. A big honey pot that no one believed in, no one was brave enough to go after. They told you the old man was dead. That he’d become paranoid in his twilight years and concreted his cash into the garage floor. They told you that there were millions waiting for the right person to come along. Nothing standing in your way except a sick old lady. An easy job.”