Lilith calculated using her fingers. ‘About twenty years, maybe one or two less.’

‘Could you describe what she looked like?’

‘Tall. She had brown curly hair and blue eyes. And she was really nice to the younger girls.’

Older children were generally described as tall by younger children, although that was also the age when girls often went through their growth spurt. It wasn’t much to go on. ‘Did any of the other girls try to run away?’

’No.’ She frowned. ‘From then on everyone stayed in line because none of us wanted to be locked away in our rooms the whole time. So we all just waited for time to pass. The oldest girls gradually disappeared as they were adopted—or at least that’s what she told us. I guess that’s what she said to Amelia and Charlotte when I disappeared?’

‘They both believed that you had been adopted,’ Jake said.

‘Do you think what happened to you—both the attacks and being brought to Melbourne—happened to other girls in the home?’

‘I have to hope so. She went to all the trouble of dumping me in Melbourne when she could simply have killed me. So if none of us were adopted I can only hope she dumped the others too.’

Is that what had happened to all of them? It would explain why Jake couldn’t find any adoption records for other girls from the home. It also opened the possibility that one of the dumped girls had found her way back to Dunton and taken revenge on the woman who had abused her. Did that mean Jake was looking at another ten or eleven potentially untraceable suspects in the death of Ava O’Brien?

‘And no-one else ever came to the house?’ Murphy asked again.

‘The only other people we saw were townies on our shopping trip each year.’

Although Charlotte had mentioned clothes shopping, Jake had been under the impression the girls had rarely left the house. ‘How did that work?’

‘Every summer we went to K-Mart to buy new clothes. It took hours and hours, and some of the girls threw up in the car, but it didn’t matter because it was the best day of the year. We’d drive into this huge underground car park, then ride up the escalator—which we called the escape-a-later.’ She smiled. ‘Then we spent the day in this enormous shiny building with sparkly things and food everywhere and music. And we got a new dress, shoes and a coat every time.’ Her face shone. ‘It was our favourite day of the year.’

‘Do you remember if Ms O’Brien paid in cash or used a card?’

‘Always cash. We did see people using cards—and we asked her what they were—but she said she didn’t know.’

‘Going back to the attacks …’

‘Yes?’

‘Can I ask about your fingernails?’