He climbed the steps, built of gumtree roots and driftwood, to the recycled-timber gate. Fragments of sea glass were set in a glistening mosaic in the wood. The name of the mansion – Safe Harbour – signposted the gate, the theme continued by the red-and-white life rings that lined the sandy path beyond. The back door was surprisingly simple and seemed too small for its casing, but it was surrounded on both sides by giant floor-to-ceiling windows that angled slightly backwards, like the prow of a ship.

Like many buildings in Shacktown, Safe Harbour had begun life as a shack – structures built back in the forties and fifties by owners who had no skill in construction, just glorified tents erected to claim free land. In Tasmania, the name ‘shack’ carried with it suggestions of a lifestyle of simplicity and escape – shack towns had grown to become holiday communities that flooded in the summers and turned into ghost towns in the winter. You could have a surgeon living next to a docker next to a receptionist, all enjoying their time off, drinking together around campfires, mixing in circles that would never form in real society. Shacktown grew from this ideal, and held to it stubbornly.

For her part, Ivy Dempsey was the matriarch of the criminal dynasty that was Shacktown’s protector.

He didn’t go past the gate of Safe Harbour. He’d been told in no uncertain terms what would happen if he ever did again.

Not that he was scared. He just wasn’t stupid.

‘Ivy!’ he shouted.

Movement behind those windows. The door opened and Ivy stepped down onto the path, brushing down her apron, which was smeared with flour and dough. For a grey-haired, round-faced, sixty-something woman in a tartan dress, it was strange how Ahab found her more dangerous than a great white shark.

‘Ahab,’ said Ivy, making her way along the path. She stopped a few paces from him, tapping her foot impatiently. ‘I’ve got something in the oven. What have you heard?’

‘Same as you.’ He kept his voice carefully neutral. ‘Forest won’t say what happened to him. No sign of Jesse or Alexandra.’

Ivy nodded, pulling a wooden spoon out of her apron pocket. Ahab couldn’t say for certain that it was just a prop, as it was covered in flour, but he mistrusted it all the same. Something in the oven? Just another mind game.

She was a decade older than him. His own dearly departed mother, Miriam Dempsey, had married a Stark, whereas Ivy had married into the Dempsey dynasty. When Jesse, Ivy’s eldest son, disappeared, the multi-million-dollar family business had fallen to her next son, Davey.