I’d promised that. Caleb’s night terrors had come back the past couple of years. Now he was too big to soothe like that, and his conscious world contained horrors that I didn’t understand. Jack talked about how long and difficult the recovery from trauma could be. Time made little more difference to trauma than it did to anger. And with the passage of time, people grew more angry, not less: ‘After Iraq, it’s something I’ve seen.’

I inhabited a world of injured men, lives sullied by disappointment and nightmares, a chain beginning with the fossicker, far from home, throwing his life on a gamble whose result had been determined millennia earlier when all the gold that the creek would ever contain was deposited. Eventually, he’d retreated, so defeated he didn’t even take his pan. That was one way of telling the story of this place. Another way was through the story of fire and false accusation.

Stories help people recover from trauma. Scheherazade used stories to postpone the future. In bed, mentally I rearranged clues Caleb had drawn and left. I needed a different story from the one told in court. I’d be there in seven hours’ time, for the final day of prosecution attacks. I couldn’t remember things properly. Sleep was meant to achieve that, I’d read, somewhere. Ironically, I didn’t remember where. Had insomnia damaged my brain?

No. I knew that people always forgot things. Memory being the business of lawyers as well as historians, Genevieve often discussed the different memories people had of one event, vivid and inconsistent. Someone in Brunton must have forgotten something important.

My insomnia was a time machine, dragging me to a past I could never escape. Did I doze? In my front yard in a different season, I saw a set of keys (mine), Rosie’s once neighbourly face settling into lines of betrayal, Sean heaved into an ambulance, Caleb shocked, my descent into the original madness of needing to prove his innocence, offering money to have his urine sample lost. I had let him down… My eyelids sprang open. No wonder Caleb had nightmares.

I forced myself to concentrate on the day of the fire. There was something I needed, a clue I’d forgotten. What could it be? The police decided, so early, that Caleb was responsible. They concentrated on finding evidence to prove that. There must be evidence they missed. Was anyone looking, except me? Had anyone else gone through CCTV footage again and again, peering through the windows of now-destroyed shops for faces, zooming in on pixilated vehicles, attempting to read number plates, to find evidence of someone in the wrong place, who couldn’t have seen Caleb when they said they did, who might have been doing something illicit themselves?