For a long moment, they said nothing. The silence between them grew like the distant scream of an air-raid siren. Abby read her husband’s face while processing everything he’d just told her. A single word emerged suddenly, breaking through the surface of her mind like a breaching whale.

Bullshit.

She didn’t believe his story. It wasn’t that she was in denial – at least that’s not how it felt. She knew it in her bones. Just as she had known he was lying to her at the foot of the fallen gum tree, she knew he was lying now.

‘Promise me something,’ Ray said.

‘What?’

‘Survive. You, Lori, Eddie. Promise me.’

‘If there’s one thing this family knows,’ she said. ‘It’s how to survive.’

On her way out of the station, Abby noticed the woman she’d sold cigarettes to at the Buy & Bye. She was standing in a dimly lit alcove beside the front entrance, feeding change into a vending machine. A young boy was with her, clinging to the pocket of her jacket with one hand, with his other pressed against the glass, gazing in wonder at all the confectionary that hung beyond it. He couldn’t have been more than five or six, with jet-black hair and a ghostly face.

‘What can I get, Mum?’ he asked in a small voice.

‘Whatever you want, Marcus,’ the woman told him.

As the boy scanned his options, his eyes widened. They were luminol blue.

25

THE WIDOW

After dropping Fisher at the train station on the mainland, Kate carried on to the highway until she reached the exit for South Hallston. She had been behind the wheel for almost four hours. When the colossal concrete structure of South Hallston Correctional Centre appeared on the horizon, she felt a rush of nervous energy sweep through her until she could feel it in her fingertips.

There was a line of vehicles banked up behind a bright-red boom gate built into the perimeter fence. A sign above the glass booth read: VISITOR SECURITY CHECKPOINT 1. Kate joined the queue. A motorbike with exaggerated handlebars pulled up behind her. The rider was a middle-aged woman in a tattered red leather jacket. She met Kate’s eyes through the rear-view mirror, then gave her engine a few obnoxious revs.

The line moved slowly, as each driver’s ID was checked against the visitor list by a prison guard at the booth. Kate had called ahead to have her name added to the list, but there was still no guarantee Ray Gilpin would agree to meet with her. She might have driven all this way for nothing.

‘Good afternoon,’ Kate said when it was her turn at the booth. The prison guard was a chunky man in a black, short-sleeved work shirt and a white baseball cap with Corrections printed across the peak. A heater glowed behind him.