‘Get up,’ Bili says, and he struggles to his feet. He looks for a tap. There isn’t one.

Bili’s done whatever it is she had to do to get him out. And the others, all of them. There are no charges, but the boys from the mountain – and Napo, who wasn’t even there when they were arrested – must leave that morning, back over the Kokoda Track. All of them. That’s the deal. As they come out of the cages, they stand in the concrete yard rubbing their eyes while a police sergeant shouts at them. Their heads are no better than Jericho’s.

‘It can’t have been too bad, if they didn’t charge us,’ Jericho says. He’s in the ignominious position of having to sit on an old towel in the back seat of her car.

‘You know nothing,’ Bili says. Her jaw muscles are set grim.

Outside the window, the hills are glowing a pale orange in the early sun; as they come over the saddle to the harbour, the water glistens, calm and beautiful. Out on the horizon there’s a low band of cloud. Through the windows, open against the smell of him, Jericho tastes a tang of salt in the breeze.

‘You owe me one,’ Bili says as she dumps him at Laedi’s door.

JERICHO RETURNS TO HIS BOOKS. WHAT ELSE CAN HE DO? HE SKULKS out of sight at the back of Laedi’s house, avoiding everyone. Even Simeon makes a joke of it – ‘Hey, shitman’ – and when he’s finished every le Carré in the house, he takes a deep breath and goes back to the beginning. Whose beginning? Bili’s voice is lodged in his head. A beginning, the beginning of this hot, stifling town.

At the back of Laedi’s house is a slab of concrete, two laundry sinks, an old laundry copper. Below the slab is a small stretch of grass where washing is dried, before the wall of the garage next door. There’s an awning over the copper and next to it, in the shade, a hard seat. Sitting there one morning, Jericho reads that when Captain Moresby sailed into the harbour in February 1873, he found ‘well-fed, contented-looking people’. Ships had been seen passing out to sea beyond the reef, but the Basilisk was the first to find the deep passage into the harbour, and when it did, the canoes came out to take a look. Captain Moresby invited the men aboard, recording in his log that they took great interest in everything, bringing out ‘rushes carefully knotted together’ with which they measured the decks.

In exchange, the men from the canoes invited the captain and his men to a large village consisting of ‘two rows of well-built houses separated by groves of cocoa-nut trees’ on the edge of the harbour. During their five days anchored in the harbour the captain and his men ‘visited often’. The women ‘seemed to busy themselves much in pottery’, Jericho reads, ‘and moulded clay into large globe-shaped jars, which they baked slowly among the embers of wood fires’. He reads a description of ‘a vegetable porridge’ cooked in one of these jars, ‘with cocoa-nut finely shred over it’. The captain ‘found it excellent’.