‘You’re a good father, Fisher,’ Kate said. ‘Take it from someone who had a rubbish one. Whatever sins your dad committed ended with him.’

‘If that were true, I would have stopped John from coming out here. There must have been signs something was wrong.’

‘If there were, I missed them too.’ She drank. ‘Why do you think he came to Belport, Fisher? If he was lured here by the same person that lured him to Beech Tree Landing, why did he lie about where he was going?’

There was a stained-glass lamp in the corner of the room casting long, jagged shadows up the wall and over the ceiling. Fisher gazed at them and sipped his Scotch. ‘Did John ever talk to you about his night terrors?’

‘No.’

‘When he was a teenager, fifteen or sixteen, he started having nightmares. Terrible nightmares. He’d wake up in the middle of the night, screaming and crying and shouting. It developed into a full-blown sleeping disorder. He became an insomniac, his grades suffered, he started falling asleep in strange places. He started to see things.’

‘See things?’

‘Sleep is a funny thing. When you don’t get enough, it can do crazy things to the mind. After a month or two of barely any sleep, John started having hallucinations.’

‘What kind of hallucinations?’

‘He’d hear whispers that weren’t really there, see dark shapes and shadows out of the corners of his eyes. Then he started to see the Visitor. That’s what John called it.’ Fisher swallowed an invisible obstruction in his throat before he continued. ‘The Visitor would come mostly at night. He would stand in the corner of John’s bedroom, watching him. I asked John to draw him for me once. He drew a man in a long black coat. There was a big crack in his face, and falling out of the crack were dozens of—’

‘Moths,’ Kate offered.

‘What?’ Fisher said.

‘I found a notebook in the house. I’m sorry, I should have shown you, I just … Anyway, it’s in my room. All these drawings of a man with moths coming out of his head. It’s the same.’

‘No,’ Fisher said. ‘Back then, they were caterpillars.’

A sudden chill crept up her spine.

‘It was a long time ago. He took a whole lot of drugs – clomi— clomipra-something, then a year on Ambien. Eventually the nightmares stopped.’ He stood and topped up their drinks. ‘We never found out what caused them. It felt a little like putting a bandaid over a scab you just knew was set to fester. Pam was worried he’d been abused or molested or suffered some sort of trauma.’

‘Is that possible?’

Fisher shrugged. ‘If it happened, John either didn’t remember it or didn’t talk about it.

‘Do you think that has something to do with why he came to the island?’ she asked.