‘It seems their main source of income was selling boys born at the home to adoptive parents. I’m not sure if the money they made from it was sufficient to cover all running costs, but certainly it could have covered the majority of them.’

‘So where was the rest coming from?’

‘There was another financial backer. Someone referred to only as “M”.’

‘You’re thinking that’s Mason Campbell?’

Jake nodded. ‘O’Brien seems to have kept all the players involved separate from each other, so I don’t think Ava knew Campbell was a financial backer for the home.’

‘Campbell’s a kook, but he doesn’t throw money around,’ Kelly said. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘Going on what’s in their diaries, Ava and Liam O’Brien both believed it was their duty to curb “Satanic desires” in the girls by removing from them any temptation to enjoy sex. Their warped reasoning—for want of a better term—was that this would protect their eternal souls. They did this with genital mutilation soon after a girl started to menstruate.’

Which explained why Charlotte hadn’t been attacked by the time the home closed—she hadn’t hit puberty yet.

‘The process Ava describes is feeding the girls strawberries laced with a sedative, then leaving the room while her brother mutilated them. She then kept them in a locked room under sedation as they healed.’

‘But none of that ties them to Campbell.’

‘I’m getting to that. O’Brien’s diaries talk about his belief that powerful men deserved to benefit from his work.’

‘You don’t think he meant gardening?’

‘I think O’Brien’s beliefs went further than his sister’s. I get the sense he believed the girls in the children’s home were somehow less than human.’

‘I see,’ Kelly said.

‘And I’m certain that the “M” in his journals is Mason Campbell. From what I can tell he seems to have met Campbell when working as a gardener at the St John of God compound in Castlemaine many years ago. Somehow they agreed on the idea of a girls’ home on Campbell’s property. Campbell seems to have paid for both Liam and Ava O’Brien to move here and set up and then promised O’Brien some getaway cash if he ever needed to skip town as a result of their activities.’

Kelly shook his head. ‘But why? Why any of it?’

‘Once the girls had recovered from being mutilated, O’Brien would send Ava out of town on her annual holiday and’—Jake swallowed—‘drug them again to give Campbell access to rape them. I can’t quite figure out if it was O’Brien or Campbell who removed the girls’ fingernails at the time. Ava mentions being shocked by it at first then realising it was another way God could protect the girls from appearing sexually alluring to men.’