Both of them were dressed in the kind of clothes country men would assume was right for a day at the coast: short-sleeved shirts that were too small, shorts, boating shoes and light jackets. Mr Jones had spilled food down his front. Dad seemed to have bought himself a stupid new fishing hat.

‘Have you had a look?’ he asked.

‘Yep,’ James replied, and thrust out one hand, challenging them to enter.

Dad went ahead while Mr Jones paused and glanced along the length of the yacht.

‘Nice vessel,’ he said, nodding and obviously taking mental notes.

Below, their sounds of disgust about the stink were immediate. By the time James caught up with them the agent was rifling through the maps while Dad hovered around log books at one end of the table.

‘These charts are worth a bit,’ Mr Jones said, pulling reading glasses out of his shirt pocket. ‘Looks like he sailed all ‘round Australia, maybe Asia too?’

‘It’ll all be in here, if he kept proper records,’ Dad said.

‘Tony’s room is through there,’ James said, indicating the door at the end of the short passage to the front of the boat.

More light was starting to show through a translucent hatch in the ceiling above the bathroom door as James herded them through it.

Their view was even sharper than his own had been: the bedsheets, the unwashed underwear, the porn. Mr Jones immediately turned back and pushed past to get out.

‘Private family things,’ he said. ‘Not much of interest there.’

James let him go but watched as his father analysed the evidence.

‘See, Tony did have a life,’ he said.

Dad let out a dismissive grunt, prodding at paperwork with one arm of his sunglasses.

‘Look at it,’ James commanded.

‘This will take some cleaning up,‘ Dad said, pulling a box out from under Tony’s desk and dropping a pile of magazines into it. ‘Take this up top,’ he added, handing it to James. ‘I’ll open the hatch and pass more out to you. We’ll start with anything we wouldn’t want Bill and Doris to stumble on.’

‘Like what, the truth?’ James said, taking the box.

His father muttered something, but James was already passing Mr Jones, who was busy inspecting navigational equipment in the corner. At the top of the ladder, he saw the gold slash of sunlight shimmering at the horizon. He edged around the mast and found the open hatch, more magazines being thrown out of it, and started piling things away from the hole.

Dad followed and quickly searched the deck, finding what he wanted in a narrow sunken area right at the front of the Home Free.

‘I knew Tony’d have a barbie,’ he said, opening the lid of a rusted old barbecue and pulling out the grill. ‘Must be a gas bottle somewhere,’ he added, and went below to find it.