Sergeant Scanlan sent now-Senior Constable Pike to find me. He stood awkwardly outside the caravan, leaning across the cinder block Eddie had set there for me rather than standing on it. His hat was back in his hands, but he hadn’t the nervous look on his face this time.

More than eighteen months had passed since he’d come to ask me whether I’d seen Jessie Else, neither of us imagining that when time and weather turned her up, I would be the one to see her first, and I wondered, knowing now how close he’d been back then, what he might wish he’d asked me.

More, I think.

Less of the had I known her, had I seen her, and more of the anything else at all.

‘Sergeant Scanlan thought you might be able to help us,’ he said this time. ‘They don’t seem to be in the system.’ He shrugged as if it happened often, but the way his fists turned his hat like a steering wheel suggested that it didn’t. ‘Their names,’ he went on, ‘well, they’re not—weren’t—who they said they were.’ He took a short breath then, and held it while he tidied his thoughts. ‘We need to find out who they were, Mrs Cooper. Sarge said you might be able to help. Off the record,’ he added. In secret. I owed Mike Scanlan that, and much, much more. He wanted me to help him look through Lily’s things. Help him figure out if she was Lily-short-for-Lillian, and whether there were next of kin who could be called to come and sort the mess of Norman out. ‘You were friends, weren’t you?’

‘Do you want me to fetch Rosemary?’ I asked him, though I doubted she was home. I’d seen her set off earlier to visit Tom in hospital. A few short weeks, doctors had warned them, weeks ago.

Pike shook his head, and I watched his jaw stiffen as his teeth set. Had he been the one to ask Eddie his questions? Had he too readily accepted answers that would have crumbled with a nudge? ‘Did you know her? Have you seen her?’ Anything else would have cast a better light. If he’d lingered just a moment longer, probed a little deeper, caught some small inconsistency or something too familiar. Had he thanked Eddie for his help when he should have taken him in for further questioning? Did that keep him awake at night?

‘Would you help us then?’ The shadow of an accent, and I knew something of him, this Senior Constable Pike. His mother had come to the library often, brought him for his picture books and, later, for books with words like train and pterodactyl. She had the same flecks of hazel in her eyes and Irish lilt, though his was faint. Catherine told me they’d all gone home to Ireland, when the strength of family was needed.

‘I was sorry to hear about your mother,’ I said.

He gave a tight nod but his thanks were warm, and I thought: You will be good at this, after all. This will be what shapes you. You will catch something that others miss, and something will not happen because this happened to you.

We walked single file, scattering lizards like beads. A brown snake wove a whisper of a trail across the path and as I stopped to let it, Pike put a hand on my shoulder in surprise to stop himself. He hadn’t seen the snake. He didn’t know why we’d stopped all of a sudden and I wondered how many miles away he’d been.

‘Is this it?’ he asked, knowing of course that it wasn’t but needing to fill the space.

Another twist, another turn, and there stood Lily’s house against the blue and I wondered—not for the first time—what it was the man who’d built it painted here, away on this fierce little point where the ocean must have spat at him the way it salt-burned Lily and the patches of her English flowers.

Such a short time it takes to leave a place feeling deserted. Birds had dropped long green-white streaks down windows. There was a grimy film of salt dust on the front porch, the honeyed crust of a cicada lay on the mat that begged us to wipe our feet, and cobwebs tangled the cheddar hunks of Lily’s shoes. Pike nudged one to stop the front door closing, but fresh air did not thin the smell inside.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ the paramedics had told Rosemary and me, so we’d sat together on the edge of Lily’s creaking deck and stared out over choppy water, waiting for the second ambulance and the police who kept us out there while they took their photographs and measurements and eventually zipped Lily into a stretchered rubber bag.

She still stained the bedcover. The pillow a nest for her head.

‘Shall we start in here?’

Touching everything, Pike began by pulling out a bedside drawer. Creams and tissues, prayer cards and peppermints.

I opened Lily’s wardrobe to her winter coat and a rail of dresses that I knew.

‘Let’s take everything to the table in the other room,’ Pike said, so he knew there was a table. He must have been before, though he’d not been in the car that came to start with.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. Names and dates and details, Pike had said. ‘Bank stuff, insurance stuff.’ There was stuff in Lily’s pockets: details of the day she’d worn the coat, had a cold, seen a coin and picked it up. Pike must have noticed the loss about me because, ‘I’ll finish off in here,’ he said. ‘You check the other rooms.’

There was stuff in the bathroom: soap in a margarine container, a towel on a hook, a toothbrush in a mug and salt in a greening spoon. A roll of paper hung on a string between two nails on the back of the toilet door, and a small, laminated verse unseen by men who leave doors open. Romans 12:20: If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

‘Anything?’ Pike called.

Was it something?

‘No.’

More stuff in kitchen cupboards: powdered soup and long-life milk; a biscuit tin, a teapot, ants in sugar and, in a drawer, a large, square photo album, the blue-black of deep water, gilt-edged, its corners stubbed. This I pulled out and up onto the kitchen counter, feeling some guilt as I eased it open, prying eyes expecting Lily’s life in pictures: friends and families, first days, front doors, weddings and holidays.

Not expecting what I found.

Instead of photographs, the album was swollen with newspaper clippings, some full pages folded into quarters, others cut and splayed, all long-ago yellow, with bolder headlines faded to blood-brown. Many had been attacked with pens and pencils. Pictures scribbled on so hard that holes were torn in faces. Words and sentences angrily underlined.

Pike carried through a shallow case and set it on the small round kitchen table, snapping it open to reveal a bed of red-and-blue-trimmed aerograms, frost-windowed envelopes, and handwritten notes. ‘Bingo!’ He nodded at the thick book in my hands, ‘Anything?’

Everything. But I couldn’t answer.

Cutting upon cutting told the story of seven little girls across two states. Seven little girls, each taken by a man who’d promised something wonderful then driven off the quieter roads and left them there when he was done, lost and afraid, in tatters and in tears, their little worlds torn up and tangled around their ankles.

Seven stories, similar enough that ‘anything else’ must have led someone to tie one man to all of them, and there was his picture, ringed in furious pencil in The West Australian, wanted for questioning. A younger, brighter Norman, but not named Norman, as it turned out. His name was Trevor Haxby, and pages later, head down, collar up, Lily—short for Lillian or Elizabeth? we had wondered, when, after all, her name was Helen.

Had she known? Reporters speculated. There was a page on wives of criminals, what made them stay, how many turned a blind eye and the other cheek.

For all the nurses’ wondering how Lily could have done the things she did to Norman, no one thought to wonder why. What tiny seed had grown into such fury. What she was punishing. What she had stopped.

The West Australian had a tip that they’d returned to England. Scotland, someone else suggested, and I stopped reading then.

Some small inconsistency. Something too familiar.

Pike glanced up as I reached into the kitchen cupboard, but he was poring over a letter with fine paper and an airmail envelope, shaking his head and pulling his bottom lip in between his teeth. He nearly had it. I could tell from the sweat on the back of his neck, where a nervous thumb was kneading flesh.

This would not keep him awake at night.

Not any longer.

I knew the weight of a packet of biscuits; the dull thud that comes when they slide to the side of a tipped tin, and this one rattled. A pony and a thistle on its lid, and of course it rattled, though I set it very gently in the young policeman’s hands.