He put his hands into the pockets of his jacket and turned to head into his motel room. ‘Will you be ready to leave in the morning?’

‘I’ll ride over with you on the ferry and drop you at the train station in Geelong,’ she said. ‘But I’m going to stay for another day or two.’

‘Are you sure that’s the right decision?’

‘Marcus mentioned something I want to look into on the mainland. Do you remember the Post-it Note we found in the kitchen of the holiday house, S. Hallston, 2pm? Turns out, S. Hallston isn’t a person. It’s a place.’

She wasn’t through chasing John’s ghost yet.

24

THE WIFE

Abby was shown into a small, featureless room at Belport Police Station. The walls were stark and there were no windows. A single light globe buzzed overhead, locked inside a small metal cage. There was a steel table in the middle of the room, and two white plastic chairs on either side. She sat down and waited for her husband.

Ray was led in close to twenty minutes later, looking ghoulish, smelling of wet dog and week-old jeans. He was dressed in a faded grey T-shirt and loose-fitting trackpants – the clothes he was wearing at the time of his arrest – but his shoes were gone. Instead, he wore socks and blue paper slippers, which made him look almost whimsical. His eyes were like a rain-drenched sheet of glass.

He sat down across from her, frowned and said, ‘Hi, babe.’

‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘I just spoke to the lawyer, Bob. He thinks they’ll be moving me soon, ahead of the trial. He wants to sit down with you next week to go through everything, so I gave him your details.’

She was trying to listen to every word but found them hard to grasp. This couldn’t be their life. It was as if he was describing something he heard from a friend of a friend about an unlucky family whose life had been derailed.

She placed her hand on the steel table, open-palmed, waiting for Ray’s. He didn’t offer it.

‘How are the kids?’ he asked.

‘Confused, angry, but not necessarily in that order,’ she said.

He seemed reluctant to ask the next question but asked it anyway. ‘How are you?’

‘Confused, angry, but not necessarily in that order,’ she repeated. ‘I came in here wondering if I should apologise – for hounding you, for digging your clothes out of the garbage, for suspecting you in the first place.’

‘I took my own bucket down the well, Ab.’

‘You’re fucking right you did. I am sorry about those things, Ray, but what you did is so far beyond any of that. What you did is beyond real life and…’

‘… What?’

‘It might be beyond forgiveness, Ray.’