Lori made a show of rolling her eyes. ‘One of Mum’s true crime books is happening right here on the island and my brother is sleeping through it.’ She plugged her mouth with a forkful of pasta, swallowed hard to get it down, then said, ‘You know who the killer could be? Denny Chow. You know him, Eddie, he’s in your year at school.’

‘Oh yeah that guy’s weird,’ Eddie said. ‘He’s schizoid or something. He came to class last week with a big stain on his butt. It looked like he’d shat himself and was just walking around with it in his pants.’

‘Well that rules Denny Chow out, then,’ Abby said. ‘Whenever they interview the neighbour of a serial killer they always say, He seemed like such a normal guy. It’s never: Yeah, I knew he was a deranged killer because he had shit in his pants.’

Lori laughed. It sounded unfamiliar, like an exotic bird call. Abby hadn’t heard it in far too long.

‘I’m serious,’ Abby said. ‘Whoever did this will seem normal.’

‘I guess that rules you out,’ Lori said.

‘Ditto.’

‘Maybe it has something to do with the Melbourne mafia,’ Lori said. ‘The victim might have owed them a gambling debt and when he wouldn’t pay it off, they, you know, made him sleep with the fishes.’

Abby rose to fetch herself a beer. Her legs spasmed with pain as she pulled herself upright. She’d overdone it on her run. On her way to the fridge, she turned to Ray. ‘Biller told me something sort of weird about the ferry terminal out near where the body was found. He said it was a gay beat. Have you heard about that?’

‘That was the rumour when I a kid’ he said with a shrug. ‘But people also said there’s a crocodile in Blue Lake, a drug ring operating out of the lighthouse, and a family of dwarves with giant heads that live in tunnels under the saltmarsh and come out at night to eat children.’

‘The Melonheads,’ Lori said, nodding. ‘I’ve heard that one too.’

‘My point is, around here, rumours are like holey buckets. They don’t hold water.’

‘I don’t know,’ Abby said. ‘I’ve been thinking about all this gay beat stuff. If you have something to hide you have something to protect, and if you have something to protect, you have something to kill for.’

‘A person died,’ Ray snapped.

There was a subtle shift in energy in the room; suddenly there seemed to be a little less air. Abby, Eddie and Lori all turned to Ray in unison, like schoolchildren who’d just been caught smoking. He looked at each one of them in turn but held Abby’s gaze the longest.