‘God,’ Kate said. She was leaning forward in the wooden chair that John had sat in just two weeks earlier. ‘I’m sorry.’

Marcus, who had nearly reached the bottom of his longneck and was glancing over at the fridge in anticipation of his next, looked back at her and shrugged. ‘What are you gonna do, right?’

Kate was struck with an unnerving idea: she might have been looking at a future version of her own daughter. Mia was older than Marcus was when his father died, but it was too easy to imagine her following the same path of substance abuse and self-destruction.

I should be with Mia, she thought, with a sudden twang of guilt. I should be home with my daughter and instead I’m out here in the middle of the ocean, chasing John’s ghost.

‘What happened?’ Kate asked.

Marcus drained his beer, found a half-smoked cigarette in the ash tray and lit it. ‘I don’t remember many details. That whole time in my life just feels like some movie I watched when I was a kid. I was ten or eleven before they told me he was killed.’

‘Your mum kept it from you?’

‘She refused to talk about it.’

‘Maybe she was trying to protect you,’ Kate said, and thought about monsters under the bed.

‘Maybe, but it’s never a good idea to keep something like that from a kid. All it does is send them off to find out themselves, which is what I did. Some of what I’ve learned came from family or looking at old newspaper articles, but mostly it was from talking to old-timers down at the Belly. Everyone remembers when it happened, and everyone remembers why he was killed.’

‘Why?’

He sucked on the cigarette hard and fast, as if he was hoping to develop lung cancer before dinnertime. ‘Dad got killed because he was a fag.’

Kate flinched. ‘Excuse me?’

‘His body was found floating in the water off Beech Tree Landing. He was killed in the old ferry terminal that used to be out there, then dumped off the jetty into the sea.’

‘Beech Tree Landing? Are you sure? That’s where John’s body was found. There must be a connection.’

Marcus raised his eyebrows. ‘If there is, you might not like it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The terminal was a gay beat,’ he said. ‘Men used it for sex. That’s what my dad was doing out there that day. Cruising for it.’

He sucked the last of his cigarette, stubbed it out forcefully in the ash tray and fetched himself another longneck. He popped the lid and sculled a third of the bottle before closing the fridge, then hovered in the next room.

‘Are … are you sure?’ Kate asked.