‘A spot where gay men meet up for no-strings sex. So what I’m thinking is, maybe this was a hate crime or a blackmail attempt gone wrong or, I don’t know, maybe it was a lover’s quarrel.’

‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘Why would anyone want to have sex in that cruddy old building, gay or otherwise?’

Biller shook his head. ‘Oh, Abby. Sweet, naive Abby.’

‘Well whatever this turns out to be, it’s the biggest thing to happen since Big Jenny beached herself.’

Big Jenny was the name locals gave a fifteen-metre southern right whale that beached itself on Belport Island back in ’93. The corpse was too big to move, so the council had to carve it up and cart it away, one truck-load at a time.

‘May she rest in peace,’ Abby added.

‘I think you mean rest in pieces, love,’ Biller said with a wink.

Abby looked out through the glass of the shopfront. Full dark had fallen over Belport.

‘I suppose it was only a matter of time,’ Biller said.

‘A matter of time?’

‘Before the real world reached across the water and took hold of us.’

‘A murder on the island,’ Abby said. ‘It’s tragic, but also sort of…’

‘Exciting?’ Biller offered.

‘Does thinking that make me a terrible person?’

‘Love, thinking that makes you human.’

The end of her shift came around surprisingly fast. After locking up, Abby tallied the receipts and counted the night’s takings, which, Biller would be happy, took a little longer than it had lately. She dropped the cash into a chute down to the safe, then ran her hands over the bank of light switches outside the staffroom door. The supermarket went dark.

Abby walked purposefully towards her rusty little Volvo, bracing herself against the chill. She scanned the shadows while she walked, half expecting the Belport Killer to lurch out at her from the darkness. Touching the pointy end of the car key in her pocket, she felt her senses becoming prickly and alert.

The quiet of wintertime in Belport had been a shock when she first moved here, but it didn’t take long for Abby to accept it. In fact, after the madness of summer, she had come to crave that peace. But there were times – being startled awake by a creak on the roof, the snap of a twig in the woods, her brief walk between the supermarket and her car when the island was convinced there was a killer on the loose – when it still all-out rattled her.

Safely in her car, she was about to start the engine when a pair of car headlights flashed once in her rear-view mirror. She swivelled in her seat to look through the rear windshield and spotted the silhouette of a Jeep Cherokee parked across the street, in the shadow of the Uniting Church.

Abby cracked a window, craned her neck, and called out, ‘Bobbi?’