There was an irony to his father acting just like a court registrar, putting his journalist son on a short leash with a set of criminal documents. James scanned through the pages, just like he and his cadet colleagues had done at police stations and court houses, chasing stories on crimes in the suburbs.

But this was about Mum. He spied her signature and let his eyes trace its familiar loops, imagining how she must have looked writing it at the police station. Cornered. Unguarded. Exposed. Beyond help, or finally getting it?

James turned back to the front of the dossier and started seeking for the guts as though he’d been sent to file a story. If he didn’t, he might not get through it all before his father caught up with him.

The extraction sheet had two lines of charges — seventeen in all — and the date: December, 1978. Seventeen charges had resulted in seventeen recognizance orders. His mother’s name appeared in typed capitals at the centre of each crime. The only difference on each page was the stolen item.

There were no dates, only a bracket of time. Between March and December 1978, his mother had stolen children’s clothing and kitchenware: a hat, a pair of slacks; a skivvy; a singlet. All of it swiped from Wang Leong’s Department Store.

The angle of the story leaped out at him.

Stolen goods ‘gifts’ for dead child.

The amounts of money owed in compensation and bail were concerning. He did a quick calculation and came up with more than five thousand dollars in thirty-year-old money, without taking legal fees into account. That would be almost thirty-thousand now. If left unpaid it would have resulted in three months’ jail time. The perfect follow-up story took form.

Farm sale funds grieving Mum’s freedom.

A case like this could extend to three articles. James scanned through the charge sheets again, noticing the search warrant for The Mulgas, and skimmed through an account by a witness by the name of Mrs Nian Leong, who appeared to have allowed Mum to continue her light-fingered habits for nine months before finally making a complaint to the police.

At the back of the stack of pages, James found the court proceedings. Here, the clumsiest set of transcripts he’d ever seen revealed plenty about how things were done at Kippen, with entire lines of text erased using the ‘X’ key on the typewriter.

There was the guilty plea, and a few character references, one from Sal Beaumont. The psychiatrist’s report was clear and to the point, with recommendations for ongoing treatment and support. His eye was drawn immediately to its definitions about his mother, and the angle of the third story revealed itself.

Mother’s crimes a ‘cry for help’.