Finally, she was listening to him.

‘Am I too overbearing?’

‘Seriously?’ He managed a vaguely teasing tone. ‘Not everything’s about you.’

‘Well, how about—after you’ve had some time down there to think—we come and visit you? Tassie’s beautiful, right?’

Too dangerous. ‘Can we play it by ear?’

‘Sure.’

Jake could hear the injury in her voice. But he couldn’t lie to her for long, face to face. She’d push and prod until she pieced together what forced him to transfer, and he couldn’t do that to her.

‘Nic, I …’

‘I have to go. Pete’s putting dinner on the table. I’ll call you again later.’

When she did, Jake let it go to voicemail.

*

Jake had experienced the cold before, at temperatures far lower than those in Dunton. He had climbed three of the higher mountains on the planet, for goodness’ sake. So why was the cold in Dunton eating through to the bone like nothing had before? He tried adding a pair of gloves as he prepared for bed in the hopes that the nerve endings in his hands would not complain in the morning.

After an interminable night of broken sleep, woken constantly by shifting blankets and his racing mind, Jake dragged himself to the shower and pledged his undying soul to any being—celestial or demon—who supplied him with decent coffee and a hot breakfast this morning.

Half an hour later, shovelling a spoonful of cold, soggy Weet-Bix into his mouth, he reviewed the growing list of questions he needed to answer. Between Ava O’Brien’s death, the mutilation of both the old woman and Amelia, and now an apparent attack on Mason Campbell, everything looked as though it centred on the girls’ home. He needed to know more about it.

Once Murphy arrived he set the constable on the trail. ‘I need you to find something on that girls’ home. Anything official that shows us who owned it, where the money to run it came from, the origins of the girls in it and where they ended up, how they were schooled …’

‘So not much then,’ Murphy said with a dejected chuckle, slumping his lanky form against a doorway.

‘It seems there were at least ten other girls who passed through there,’ Jake continued, ‘so there have to be records of them. Doctor Gill’—Jake noticed Murphy’s nostrils flare at the mention of the pathologist’s name— ‘can’t find any trace of them, so we need to start looking at Royal Hobart and other Tasmanian hospitals for records of children from the estate.’

‘What will you be doing?’

‘I’ll head over to pick up Liam O’Brien, take him to check out his sister’s house, then to the morgue to formally identify Ava. You checked his alibi?’

‘Yep. Jenny who works behind the bar at the pub said he was there all night drinking, then rented a room upstairs to sleep if off, like he said.’

Jake pinched the end of his still-frozen nose. ‘Any security camera footage to confirm he didn’t go out during the night?’