‘I don’t know.’ She stretches her free arm above her head, arching her back. In the eight weeks and three days since her last drink, she has been sleeping like the dead.

‘Shall I call back later?’

‘It’s fine. Is everything ok?’

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ he says. ‘Your mother doesn’t know I’m calling. She went into town.’

She sits down on the carpet. This is the thing she couldn’t put her finger on, that she should have known was wrong from the start. Her dad hasn’t called her in the decade she’s lived in London. It’s her mum who makes the phone calls, leaves messages on the answerphone. Her dad writes letters. He hates the phone.

‘What is it?’

‘I didn’t want you to hear it from your mother. She hasn’t taken it well. I wanted to tell you myself.’

She drops her head between her knees. She thinks, if he’s going to die, I’ll need a drink. Cold, practical thoughts: she will finish this call and she will put her clothes on. There’s an all-night takeaway at Clapton Pond where they sell six-packs of beer under the counter.

‘The police came to see me,’ he says.

‘The police?’

‘They’re looking for a woman I used to know.’

Isla lifts her head. She’s sweating. She runs her hand through her damp hair. ‘What woman?’

‘She was a neighbour of ours, back when we first moved to Sydney. You wouldn’t remember.’ He coughs. ‘It looks like she’s been missing a long time. Nobody’s seen her in thirty years.’

The police car crawls past outside, swinging its blue light across the walls.

‘What’s this got to do with you?’

‘The police think her disappearance is suspicious,’ he says. ‘They think I was the last person to see her, before she went missing.’

‘And were you?’ She tries to sound calm. ‘Were you the last person to see her?’

‘I can’t have been. She moved away with her husband. I told them there must be some mistake.’

He lights a cigarette, exhales. She thinks of Dom, smiling behind a flame.

‘Is she dead?’

‘They think she must be.’ His voice is quiet. A bad news voice. ‘There’s no record of her at all, in all that time. Her father died last month, left her most of his estate, but she hasn’t come forward. Her brother’s been asking around, trying to trace her. He turned up a few things that the police are looking into.’ He laughs unconvincingly. ‘One of those things is me.’

Isla finds a line of stubble along her shin. She runs her thumbnail over it, back and forth, until it hurts.

‘The cops are searching through their records,’ he says. ‘They keep records of people who died without being identified.’

‘What if it turns out she was killed?’

‘That would be the worst-case scenario, love,’ he says. ‘That would mean a murder enquiry.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Look, I don’t want you to worry.’

‘But if you were the last person to see her –’