He started shouting for his father, wrenching open cupboards looking for something with a bit of weight to break the door open, and found another small fire extinguisher strapped to the wall at the foot of the bed. There wasn’t enough room to get a good swing at the lock, but he threw the red cylinder with as much force as he could manage. The thin wood shuddered, and he landed against it a couple of times, recoiling at the heat coming off the surface.

‘Hey!’ James shouted, rattling the handle. Nothing but the sound of burning came back to his ears.

Soon enough, the door would open as it disintegrated, unleashing a wall of retribution that James might not make it through alive.

He fell back onto his cousin’s bed, feeling the plastic envelope inside his shirt. If Tony’s keepsakes melted into his heart as everything burned, so be it.

James’s name would be added to this deadly timeline. Brian Fryer would remain just another face in a police photograph, a young man who’d jumped his way out of life. Mark Beaumont would just stay quiet in the city and never speak of what happened to him. Andy Jones would get back to shore and lie to cover his tracks, an innocent man asked to appraise a yacht for a grieving family, the only survivor of a terrible accident after retired Senior Constable Brandt insisted on burning documents onboard.

Lies to cover more lies, stretching back as far as anyone could remember.

A sudden blast lit up the edges of the door and smoke started to leak through several gaps. James shoved himself against the wall to get away from whatever was about to come through it, but when the smoke started getting sucked back through the cracks, he started kicking at them.

They splintered apart, so he grabbed the extinguisher again and aimed it through a gap and pulled the trigger. The light of the flames dimmed a bit so he swung the tank at what was left of the door and burst through into the passage. It was so hot and dark there was no point in looking anywhere but upwards, where daylight showed between gusts of smoke.

James started coughing but managed to find the outline of the hatch and the remnants of the rope ladder, checked the plastic envelope and its sacred contents against his chest and heaved himself up onto the deck.

Once he was through the dark barrier the harbour revealed itself, lit by the sun shining unimpeded above the headland. But the terrible heat wasn’t coming from above, it was in the threads of smoke that rushed past James as the yacht started belching smoke.

James ran along the edge of the boat as it shuddered under his feet. Mr Jones stood in the tinnie, failing to untie the rope. At the bottom of the stairwell, smoke partially obliterating him, was Dad.

‘Get up!’ James shouted.