The more he talked, the more I could see the fantasy collapsing before me: there was no anarchy out here. No lawless bands molesting the shipping. The murderers and wreckers and plunderers were a figment, a tawdry sensation for the Sydney press. The islanders were a diminishing community of men in decline, men who’d taken wives from Van Diemen’s Land, mostly by agreement, and who made a modest living from hunting kangaroos, taking seals in their season and birds in another season. There were no laws that bound them, that much was true, but age and inertia were doing a fine job of keeping them civil. I had come to the view that there was no evil to be found out here. No Minotaur in his maze.

And then my father began to talk.

‘Mister Munro,’ he began, in a tone that made clear he intended a turn to formalities. He laid his fork down and turned his face to Munro, having fixed on his position through listening to him. ‘What is that structure you have used to roof over your pigsty?’

Munro looked baffled for a moment. ‘My pigsty?’

‘Yes, the pen where you came upon my daughter and me earlier. A sow and six piglets. What is it, the structure that shelters them?’

I could see Munro weighing the question and considering how to respond.

‘It’s a piece of flotsam, Mister Grayling. Off the rocks.’

‘Flotsam?’

‘Aye.’

‘Wreckage?’

Munro made an impatient motion with his hands. The atmosphere in the room had altered.

‘Wreckage, flotsam…what the tide delivers, Mister Grayling.’ He tried to laugh but an edge of irritation had crept in. ‘Big tides here. Turn up all sorts o’ things.’ No one responded so he continued. ‘We’d not have firewood if we didnae scour the beaches fer it. Y’re supping with knives from a brig, cups from a brig. Crivvens, that chair beneath ye’s from a sloop.’

The doctor looked down in amusement as Munro pointed a stubby finger at his seat.

‘Yes,’ said my father, ‘but that roof. Did you make any inquiries as to where it came from?’

Again, Munro’s face darkened. He did not respond.

My father continued: ‘Eighteen feet by twelve, thereabouts? Can’t be exact, of course…’

Munro only stared.

‘South coast cedar. It has a smell about it. My employer is looking for evidence of a lost boat, the superstructure was added locally. Made of cedar.’

Receiving no answer to any of this, he continued. ‘Hard for me, obviously, to assess these things, given my…’ He waved a hand towards his eyes. ‘But I would say the dimensions suit a cabin, likely a forecastle. A hundred-foot barque? It seems a reasonable inference…’

The old sealer drew a deep breath. Rage boiled visibly in him, but my father couldn’t see it and he wasn’t finished.