As Abby stood poised to turn out the light in the garage, a terrifying question occurred to her: What next? What would she do if the luminol revealed blood on Ray’s clothing? Would she run to the police and turn over the evidence, or carry her husband’s secret with her wherever she went like a tumour? What was a wife supposed to do? How far was she expected to go for love? Another thought shot to the surface like a cork. Was her husband a killer? Even with the mysterious phone call, the secret stash of gay porn, his recent defensive behaviour, she couldn’t imagine him ending another man’s life.

But that isn’t quite true, a dark voice whispered. You can imagine it, because you’ve seen the Switch.

‘Do all men have a switch?’ she asked aloud, as if this wasn’t a conversation taking place in her head. Her voice, echoing off the walls of the garage, sounded like a stranger’s.

And do all men act like Ray when that switch is thrown?

Abby and Ray argued occasionally, like any couple, but rarely loud enough to bring neighbours to fences. He had never hit her. Never come close. But he did have a temper, and she had seen it boil over into something mean and sharp-toothed.

She called it the Switch. The last time she’d seen it thrown was on a hot summer night a long time ago, while she was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with Lori. The memory slapped over her. It became a trapdoor, and Abby tumbled through it, falling backwards in time, until suddenly it was

seventeen years earlier, Abby and Ray were on their way home from Belport Medical. They had rushed to emergency because Abby had been convinced she was in labour. As it turned out, she’d been having false contractions, or ‘a belly full of farts’ as the doctor had described it.

It was a stifling night. The aircon in their old Datsun was broken – the car would be scrapped six months later when Abby slid off the loose gravel shoulder of Old Harbour Road and right into Les and Kathleen Bale’s brick letterbox – so all the windows were down. Warm air filled the car, carrying the smell of bonfire parties.

It was the middle of January. Bay Street was jammed with traffic. Sandwiched between a yellow BMW and a silver Benz, they stop-started towards home, barely six inches at a time. The footpath was full of sunburned tourists. A gang of teenage girls in bikinis attacked each other with water balloons. The line outside The Dreamy Ice-Creamery snaked into the street. The sound of David Bowie spilled out of the Belly. Inside, as usual, middle-aged men and women would be tearing up the dance floor.

Ray watched all of this from behind the wheel of the Datsun and grumbled.