Jessie Else disappeared the summer the Lambs came to Magpie Beach. Not that the two events were connected at all, in reality; only in my own head, in my own world. They marked for me the end of a certain quiet time and the start of a more complicated living.

They didn’t find Jessie until long after they’d stopped looking and moved on to other things. Seasons passed and there wasn’t much of her left by the time a second winter fell, so what they found, in the end, was not a little girl, only what remained of one. The body, the newspapers called her then. The victim. The missing child. She stopped being Jessie Else.

When the Lambs arrived, she’d been gone only a fortnight. The police had come to the library with a sheaf of posters they put on every wall and window. Have You Seen Jessie Else? There was a colour photograph, a list of clothing she’d had on the day she disappeared, and a twenty-four-hour phone number to call. Catherine said they’d brought extra officers from Townsville to help with their investigation, but they sent a local out to Magpie Beach. I recognised him but wouldn’t have known his name without the badge.

‘You’ll have heard about Jessie Else?’ He handed me a photograph tucked into a plastic sleeve, greasy at its edges and soft with well-feeling. It was the same picture that looked out of every shop window in town: Jessie’s smiling year three portrait. Her second set of teeth were just coming through, the front ones, only halfway down, still frilly on their edges. I imagined Mrs Else fumbling blindly through desk drawers and photo albums, or maybe not. Maybe Mr Else only had to slide it from his windowed wallet.

‘Do you recognise her?’ asked Constable Pike.

I did.

‘Not from the news, I mean. Do you recognise her from before all that? Had you seen her before?’

I nodded. She came into the library with her mother, who would never come again. She liked books with a splash of glitter on the cover: ponies with wings, fairies with magic, schoolgirls with secrets.

‘Did you know her?’

I shook my head. Not really.

‘When was the last time you saw her?’

They came in when their books were finished, and I wasn’t always there. They’d already had Catherine check the records. He wasn’t asking if I’d seen her at the library; he was asking if I’d seen somebody take her.

‘She was wagging.’

She’d set off for school on a pink bicycle with a plastic basket and strips of ribbon on the handlebars. It wasn’t far for her to go, but they found her bike in the car park of St Anthony’s church, opposite the supermarket, in the centre of town, and quite a lot of people had seen her outside Woolworths with a notebook and a pen and a rattling tin of change that turned up months after her little body, in among Who’d-Done-It’s things. Key evidence, they called it then, because there weren’t very many tins the same. It had come from Scotland long before, full of shortbread, with a pony and a thistle on its lid. She’d been selling cookies. There was a prize on offer for the girl guide who raised the most money and perhaps her mother hadn’t taken her door to door. How would that feel now? I wondered.

‘Do you remember where you were on February fourteenth?’

St Valentine’s Day. I wondered if Mr Else had given his wife a card, kissed her on the cheek or on top of her head as she buttered his toast that morning; made love to her before it was properly light, before the rest of the house woke up. I wondered if they’d had dinner reservations that evening, who had called to cancel, and what they might have said.

I still remember where I was and what I did that Valentine’s Day, because of Jessie Else, because Constable Pike came all the way out to Magpie Beach to make me think about it so soon afterwards.

It was a Monday and I cleaned the henhouse. I scraped crusted chicken shit off its wooden floor and rustled fresh straw in the boxes while Jo, Beth, and Amy scratched around the bush. I patched up a split I worried a fox might find, and then it started to rain and I went inside and made myself a cup of tea. I drank it with my feet up on the bed, Mrs Robinson purring beside me, and Oscar and Lucinda open in my lap. The sounds around me were too familiar to have meant anything unusual. I would have heard a little girl calling out. I’d have bought a box of cookies if I’d had a chance.

‘Did she come out here? Out to Magpie Beach?’

He knew as well as I did that she didn’t. I didn’t get the pie-drivers or the free-quote pest controllers or even the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but he was ticking his way down a list. He’d written my name at the top and got me to sign on a line at the bottom as a formality, so they could catch me out if I lied.

‘Thanks for your help,’ he said, though we both knew I hadn’t been any. He asked me to call the number on a card he gave me if I thought of anything else, ‘anything at all,’ as if there were different types of anything.

‘Is there a road?’ he wondered then, pointing his clipboard vaguely towards the point.

There was a road to the Englishwoman’s house, unsealed and twenty or more kilometres down the highway, winding up from the south. He set off on foot as everybody did, along the narrow track that cut across the headland, through the bush, to ask her all the same questions he’d just asked me. He pretended to switch papers from his car first, but he was only making sure he’d locked it. Worried I might steal his screwdriver, his extra shirt or one of his Monte Carlos.