He spread his fingers on the steel table and stared at them, as if feeling for vibrations from long ago. ‘To tell me David Stemple’s widow had died.’

‘Annabel,’ Kate offered.

‘She was younger than me, but she had issues with her lungs. Pulmonary something.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘I wasn’t sure myself for a while,’ he admitted. ‘It wasn’t until after John left that I figured it out. I think he wanted me to know her suffering was over. Not just the pain of her illness, but the pain … the pain I caused her.’

‘John knew something about the murder, didn’t he?’

Ray glanced over at the next table. Kate recognised the woman there; it was the motorbike rider who had followed her off the freeway on her growling, overstated machine. With her helmet gone, a head of stark white hair hung down over one shoulder. She sat across from a stocky inmate, who was leaning forward on his elbows, holding the woman’s hands tightly in his own. Both had stopped talking and were staring at her.

She lowered her voice. ‘He had information about David Stemple. He witnessed something or knew something somehow.’

‘What makes you say that?’

She thought about John’s night terrors, about the Visitor, and said, ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m right, aren’t I?’

He closed his eyes and took his hands off the table, placing them under his legs. The white-haired biker at the next table was crying softly now, working up to a goodbye with the stocky inmate across from her. Ray watched them for a moment, frowning, then turned back to Kate.

‘I was never a big reader before,’ he told her. ‘But when I came here I started to read a lot. There’s not much else to do here, and not that many options in the library. I tried reading Tolstoy but couldn’t get into it. Vonnegut and Salinger were both pretty good. Didn’t mind Jane Austen either – bet you’re surprised to hear that one?

Kate said nothing.

‘Right. Well, lately I’ve been having a read of some Greek mythology. Have you ever heard of Orpheus?’

Kate shook her head.

‘In this story, Orpheus is married to a beautiful woman named Eurydice, but she’s bitten by a snake and dies, so Orpheus travels into the underworld to save her. Hades, the god of the underworld, agrees that Eurydice can follow Orpheus back to the realm of the living on one condition: as they walk through the caves, Orpheus can’t look back. Not once. So guess what old mate does?’

‘He looks back?’ Kate offered.