‘Why was she being brought back?’ Jake asked.

‘She’d had a fight with … her … and said she wasn’t going to stay anymore. She was sent to bed without dinner that night, but in the morning she was gone.’

‘Did Ms O’Brien search for her?’

‘I don’t think so. We asked her where Sam was and she didn’t answer. We all thought she must have sent Sam to hell, because that’s where she said girls who disobeyed her went. But then Mr O’Brien turned up with this other man and brought Sam back.’

‘Do you know who the other man was?’

‘No. I’d never seen him before, and never saw him again.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Just big. He had dark hair and Mr O’Brien acted like he was in charge.’

‘Did Sam tell you where she went?’

‘She said she’d gotten up in the middle of the night, taken food from the kitchen, and walked the road into town.’

A young teenage girl alone in Dunton’s wild countryside in the middle of the night … Jake could now imagine what had driven her to leave the relative safety of a warm bed. ‘How long was she gone?’

‘She said after she walked into town she wasn’t sure what to do.’

‘And?’ Murphy prompted.

‘She said she found bins behind the supermarket where the staff dumped a lot of food. She said there was heaps, and it tasted really good, probably because we never had enough to eat at the home. She said it made running away worth it. But after a few days a woman found her asleep near the bins and got angry.’

‘Did Sam tell anyone she came from the girls’ home?’

‘She said she refused to talk to anyone, but the woman said she was going to call the police. Sam said the woman wouldn’t let her go, and then Mr O’Brien came with the other man and brought her back.’

Which all suggested that someone in Dunton knew exactly who the girl Sam was and where she belonged, even if she hadn’t spent much time in the town.

‘How did Ms O’Brien react to Sam being brought home?’

‘She locked Sam in her room around the clock. We could only talk to her under the door at night. The rest of us even had to sit in the kitchen when Sam went to the toilet.’

‘She must have been let out again at some point?’

Lilith shook her head, her Mohawk swaying from side to side. ‘After a while we realised Sam was gone again. We thought she’d run away, but now I assume she was dumped in Melbourne like me.’

‘So, we’ll be looking for a girl named Samantha who was about twelve or thirteen years of age at the time, and who may have appeared in Melbourne around twenty years ago?’ Jake said.