They lowered Tom into a coma from which he never regained consciousness. He did not live to see his son released. If he was told the charges against Eddie had been dropped, it was in whispers and prayers that may or may not have found him, but I like to think they did.

Perhaps in sleep he saw the tape that tangled around the house beyond the headland; the police whose hands reached into its narrowest cavities, whose boots stood on the steps of shovels to turn every inch of its surrounds.

Within hours of opening her biscuit tin of change, they found Jessie Else’s little backpack partially burned and buried beneath a clump of English flowers that hadn’t grown; and they found more than a ring trapped in the patch of shade-cloth cable-tied to filter the flush of the kitchen sink. Without it, two little fingers might have made their way into and out to sea.

Maybe Tom understood when Leonie pressed her lips close to his ear and breathed the news. Perhaps, after all, it was a mist of some weight being lifted that released him.

‘He knew you didn’t do it,’ Leonie promised Eddie, but that might not have been true. I’d hoped he hadn’t done it, but to say I never doubted would have been a lie. Even his wife had thought he might have done it. Most of Winifred would have bet their pensions that he had.

NEW SUSPECT IN THE ELSE CASE was the headline soon enough. There was no mention of Eddie. No one buried the bones they had so worried. The Courier didn’t write about the months he’d spent in jail, or that he was now free and had always been innocent. They didn’t tell the public they’d been wrong.

There was no shame at all.

No one came out to clean Rosemary’s windows, or scratch I’m sorry on the side of Eddie’s car. There were no reporters waiting when Rosemary brought him home a quieter man.

Eddie’s brother finally reached out. Sorry he’d been out of touch so long and so impossible to find. Sorry, but he wasn’t coming home just yet, things were busy and complicated, and his life was over there, but, ‘Well done, bro!’ he said. As if Eddie had won best in show.

‘Dad’s dead,’ Eddie told him, but nothing would bring Shane back.

‘His own father’s funeral.’ Eddie shook his head, anger time-worn into disappointment. ‘I can’t take it in,’ he said. That my father is gone. That my brother does not care. That a man I’d treated kindly killed a child and let me take the blame. That these people I grew up with thought I’d done it—believed I was capable of that.

But truth will out.

‘How well did you know these Haxbys?’ Sergeant Scanlan asked Rosemary and me.

These Haxbys, whose records were found quickly in the system.

We hadn’t known them at all. What was there to say? That she’d been someone else to start with? That she’d flattened coins on a train track as a girl, and chased the coal wagon, and cut wild rhubarb with a stolen pocket-knife, and kept a field mouse in a box beneath her bed. Would they have cared that she made burdock soup, and daisy chains, and perfume out of rose petals and rainwater? Would it make a difference if they knew about the river that froze in winter, or the brother whose school was bombed in the Blitz? Did they need to know that she cried the first time she saw the ocean, or that she learned to dance in borrowed shoes and a cold church hall?

They wanted only to hear about the woman she’d become—and what did we know of her, our Lily? That she was blunt, uncomfortable, and lonely; that she liked her coffee hot with cold milk on the side; that she scoffed at happy endings, looked after her pennies, hated thunderstorms and the thought of spiders in her shoes.

We didn’t want to know this Helen Haxby.

But Eddie did. Eddie wanted every detail, and the newspapers and magazines were full of them. They printed pictures of Norman taken in better days, when his back was straight. In a time when he’d caught the train, and worn a belt and shoes with proper laces. It wasn’t a young man in their photographs. He wasn’t so far from the man we knew that we wouldn’t have recognised his picture printed clearly. If we’d read a piece that asked us had we seen him, we would have realised. We would have rung the number. We may not have told the tax office, or the Department of Immigration, but once we’d read beyond the Have You Seen? and found the why, we would have told.

But back when they were looking, the pages that were folded square and read at breakfast tables passed through inky fingers in other states. People shook their heads in Western and South Australia, but of course they hadn’t seen This Man because he was no longer there.

The house beyond the headland belonged to a woman wealthy enough to know it only as an item listed on a piece of paper years before. Her ex-husband bought it in Brisbane, with a view to drinking and fishing with friends. Then came an affair and, on a lawyer’s mahogany desk, his weekends away were swept out of sight and kept out of spite. His wife had moved on and interstate and, ‘I’d almost forgotten it was there,’ she said. Living as she did in Perth, now, in a suburb where big houses backed on to a river, where there were private docks for private yachts and room enough for caterers in kitchens and money enough for a cleaner to come in three mornings a week.

‘I couldn’t fault her work,’ the woman said, ‘but obviously this has come as a tremendous shock. I’d never have imagined!’

She’d never have imagined Helen Haxby might have listened in to conversations, gone through papers filed in the cabinets she polished, understood the potential of what she found: a house beyond a headland on the other side of the country, fully paid for and shut up tight and never checked for squatters.

I’d never have imagined.

It’s what they all said: neighbours, friends, and colleagues. Journalists interviewed them all, and they interviewed the parents of the girls Norman had assaulted. Wanted for further questioning in Adelaide, but they’d wanted him for more than that in Perth. Questions they knew to ask by then ran deeper than Did you know and Where were you?

The girls were women now. Their faces blurred or covered by cascading hair. They asked that their real names be kept from strangers, but it didn’t matter what their parents called them, only what this man had done, and he’d done plenty—more than Lily had ever suspected enough to cut and paste. They numbered more than seven. There were girls who hadn’t told, and some whose people-they-told hadn’t wanted anyone else to know.

The police took Norman—Trevor Haxby—back to Perth as soon as he was well enough to travel, which was sooner than it would have been for the man they’d thought he was when they’d tucked him up in hospital in the first place: the abused husband. Who would do such a thing? After all, when they found out what he’d done himself, ‘The strain might be too much,’ was not a thing they said.

No nurses waved him off. They bundled the few things he had into a plastic bag that swung from the handle of his chair, and a policeman wheeled him out into a mob of microphones and cameras. Norman kept his head down and his hands together in a blanket on his lap while they threw their questions at him like eggs, not snowballs. They wanted more than his attention. They hit him squarely every time and covered him in shame.

‘Haxby? Haxby!’ they shouted. ‘You can’t hide from the truth! The public has a right to know!’

But despite everything the public knew already, I felt sorry for the man I watched through a battering swell of damp shirt backs and lashing tongues. When I closed my eyes, I saw him only lost and scared in a dark and messy soup of bats and gum trees.

‘He deserves everything he gets,’ Catherine said.

I had no doubt she was right, for all that Trevor Haxby had done to those children; still, it was hard to see Norman in this harsher light.

The Knew-the-Accuseds never say, ‘He was my friend.’ That part is set aside. Interviews full of ‘I had no idea’, because that is the only safe thing to be said. If they did not know, they could not have helped, and they are one of us.

But in the quiet away from tape recorders, they must unpack and mourn the friendship, if there was one. Could haves and would haves send a shiver, but care leaves some indentation, as in snow or sand or even mud. There is something that lingers longer than a shadow. Companionship that warmed and company enjoyed. There is grief that comes with He was my friend.

I wondered how his victims would feel when they saw him on the television, beaten and broken and brought to his knees. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, the Bible says—the old one, brimstone-burned and waved in anger—hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, stripe for stripe, but I don’t know that it works as tidily as that. Sometimes more feels better. Sight for an eye then, tongue for a tooth; arm for a hand, and leg for a foot. With burns upon burns and more stripes than a tiger, would it comfort them to know he’d suffered?

What of the Elses? What thoughts flooded them when they watched Norman on the evening news, arriving in Perth flanked by plainclothes officers who carried him down the aeroplane steps and wheeled him across the rain-slicked tarmac? They knew now with whom their little girl had spent her final hours, if not entirely how. Norman was not talking, and who else would tell? Not-knowing spawns imagining, but maybe knowing-every-bit-of-it is worse.

‘He doesn’t look as if he has it in him, does he?’ Rosemary said, as we looked at his photograph between us, a double-page spread in a magazine she’d picked up with her groceries, already ringed with a circle of tea.

She was right, of course—he didn’t look as if he had it in him, and he hadn’t for a long time.

‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said the night I found him. Six weeks after Jessie Else went missing. The night I took him home and handed him back to his wife.

‘No more,’ she must have made him promise in Adelaide, and again in Perth. Promises he broke. So, in the salt-whipped house beyond the headland, she’d put her foot down hard enough to crack a tile, and made sure, promise or no, that Norman did not work as well as he’d have had to if he’d wanted to catch a little girl and keep her still long enough to do what had been done to Jessie Else.

‘I’m sorry,’ he’d told me.

But sorry for what?

Certain things had not been done to Jessie Else; things that had been done to all the other little girls; things they had been taken to be done with.

Not all truths come out. What’s done is done. For better or worse, Norman would take the blame, because for all the coals that Lily heaped upon his head, she had cared for and protected him as well. The anger in her pockets made her scratch, but for a long time she had combed his hair, brought him to Eddie on her arm to sit on warm steps and feel the breeze blow through a shirt she’d pressed and buttoned. When she took him home, she sponged the red dust from his creases, boiled the kettle, and set good meals before him.

There was anger in her pockets, but once Jessie Else was found, and Eddie was arrested, and Rosemary’s chance at a Life Like That began to slip away, there were other things, lumpy things that could not be lost in corners. Fear and shame pushed pins beneath an old man’s fingernails, pressed the flaking stubs of cigarettes into papery skin.

‘Have faith,’ she’d said. In me, she meant. Have faith in me, Lily, Helen Haxby, wife, secret-keeper and pin-sticker. Friend. For all her bitter words, she was a loyal friend; and for all the secrets she kept, she stood by every promise.

‘I won’t do it again,’ Norman told her, the night I took him home.

Perhaps she promised him the same thing, waiting by the kettle in the creamy light of early morning. ‘I won’t do it again. Don’t run away. Don’t you leave me here alone.’

Why would he? How could he?

‘We’re alright, love,’ I hear her tell him. ‘We’re safe out here. No one’s coming.’

But oh, how her cup must have rattled on its saucer.