‘I’d never been to a beach before, I’d never been to a city before. It was so noisy and full of people—I didn’t know what to do. There were all these people screaming, but no one was scared. I worked out they were screaming from fun, and I could see lots of people walking and eating.’

‘How did you feel?’ Jake asked.

‘Terrified, but also like I was on some kind of adventure.’

‘How did you come to be in police custody?’

‘I was hungry, so I went to where I could see people coming out of a building with food. I went in and saw some of them were leaving food on their tables, so I grabbed it and ran outside. No one stopped me. I thought I could maybe live that way, but after the third time someone caught me and made me sit until a policewoman came.’

‘Your file says you refused to say where you came from,’ Murphy said.

She sipped from her cup. ‘I honestly didn’t know I came from Tasmania until you called yesterday.’

If that were true, there was no way Lilith could have been involved in Ava’s death. ‘Surely you could remember the names of Ms O’Brien and the other girls?’ Jake said.

Lilith was very quiet. ‘I didn’t tell them about … her … because I didn’t want to go back.’

‘You must have known your own name?’ he pressed.

‘When they asked me I said Lilith.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s from the Bible, one of the passages I had to learn. “There shall the Lilith repose, and find for herself a place to rest.”’ She leant back in her chair in a mockingly languorous pose. ‘I always liked that idea—that perhaps one day I would find a place that was safe and warm where I could rest. So I called myself Lilith.’

‘And how did you get your last name, Haverstock?’ Murphy said.

‘I totally lucked out with my foster parents. I didn’t have biological parents …’

Jake raised an eyebrow.

‘Well, I must have had them, of course.’ She gave a short, throaty laugh. ‘But I have no idea who they were. She always told me they were dead. I didn’t have a last name, I didn’t have a birth certificate—and it’s impossible to do anything without one—so we applied for one when I was sixteen, and I took my parents’ last name.’

‘And it was legal?’

There was a twinkle in her eye. ‘Well, we got it through the system …’

Jake waited.