‘And you do?’ Doyle stares at Abby. ‘What time did you arrive at the hotel, ma’am?’

Abby knows this is a trap and I can see she’s stalling. Numbers aren’t her strong point so I quickly work back in my head. I can’t get it to add up in any convincing way: whatever we say, there will be hours unaccounted for.

‘I was sick,’ I blurt out. ‘Chucking up. We stopped, someplace. I’d come into Brisbane that day, on the early morning flight from Denpasar, and I was rooted. Flight takes, like, eight hours and I’d hardly slept in days so –’

‘What time did you arrive at the hotel?’ Doyle doesn’t acknowledge I’ve spoken. He’s locked on Abby.

‘I guess it was nine or ten? Would that be about right, Charlie?’

‘Yep, I reckon.’ I sit back with one hand on the coffee table in an effort to seem relaxed, hoping she’ll register the need to do this herself.

Out of the corner of my eye I watch Dad. He’s figuring it out.

‘So to be clear,’ Doyle says, ‘you left Brisbane Airport around two after collecting the luggage from a flight that arrived on time at one o’clock, having changed planes after an hour’s wait at Darwin Airport, according to TAA staff.’

‘Yes, that’s about when we left,’ Abby says.

‘You drove till you got to . . .? You’d know where you stopped for your brother.’

‘Outside Dalby, maybe? I didn’t pay a lot of attention. I mostly didn’t want him to vomit in my car.’

‘You stopped there for an unspecified time before driving on to Chinchilla, where you arrived at approximately ten at night according to the publican.’ He pauses. ‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me, ma’am? Because those numbers don’t work for me. That would mean a four-and-a-half-hour drive to Chinchilla, five at worst, took you eight.’

She bites her lip as if thinking. ‘Well, I’m afraid the publican is wrong. We arrived in town at about seven o’clock, had a walk around, Charlie was sick again and then we decided he was too ill to keep going. So we went to the pub for the rest of the night. It was definitely before ten.’

‘It was after ten o’clock when you called me,’ Dad says.

‘Yes, Dad, but calling you wasn’t the first thing I did when we got there.’ Weirdly, her sharp annoyance feels useful and right this time. It makes her seem more solid, and her voice has lost any trace of a shake.

‘I see,’ Doyle says, obviously unconvinced by what he’s heard. He turns to me. ‘When did you first learn your father was engaged?’

The out-of-nowhere question seems to be his preferred tactic for throwing us off-guard. ‘Same time Abby did, the morning we showed up at the farm.’

‘And had you met his fiancée? Socially? She’s about your age.’

‘No. There’s a lot of people my age. And I’ve never lived in the country.’

‘She didn’t always live there,’ Doyle says, then he turns to Dad. ‘How was it you met her, Mr Scott?’