Chapter Two

Outside in the Square, where even the spindly leaves of the casuarinas seem plumper after a week of heavy summer rain, it’s still too early for the January holiday crowd and the chaotic early-morning offshore commuter dash is well and truly over. A couple of elderly tourists are installed at one of the picnic tables, sipping café coffee out of cardboard cups. On the foreshore, a lone dog walker struggles with a sleek and self-satisfied mutt the colour of toffee, tugging on a lead. A cyclist zooms in and out of sight. Two joggers flash by. Otherwise there’s no one. It’s almost nine o’clock and Sam is virtually on his own.

He fronts up to the community announcement blackboard. Skips past a few wind-chewed, mostly out-of-date notices (House to Rent. Moving Sale. Reliable tinny – Reasonable price. Babysitter available. House cleaners wanted.). Hones in on screaming red letters plastered on a poster-size sheet of paper: BRIDGE. RESORT. SPA. And shouting loudest: EXCLUSIVE DEVELOPMENT!

Sam swears. Moves closer to read it carefully, paying particular attention to the small print where, he’s learned through painful experience, the real information is found. The notice has the stink of authenticity. This isn’t some die-hard Island prankster gristing the local rumour mill to see how far it runs before someone susses it’s a joke. Some anonymous bastard is serious about trashing Cutter Island.

A bridge from the mainland to the west-facing foreshore of Cutter Island, Sam thinks darkly, feeling a twist in his gut. All this bloody beauty of place and people with fine instincts and some philistine plans to blitz the golden sand, turquoise waters and a fresh-water creek that rushes over mossy boulders from the knobbly peak of the Island for . . . what? A bridge and a freaking resort. As far as he’s concerned, the world is already brimming with resorts. Lined up next to each other so even if you scratch around you can never find the paradise that titillated the developers in the first place. Not that he’s ever been a paying guest in one, of course. But he’s seen pictures of tropical destinations where blank-faced high-rise shockers – with a couple of token palms at the front – are lined up closer than a Briny Café knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin. The palms replaced, no doubt, after the originals were ripped out. They don’t need a resort ’cause no right-thinking Islander wants an influx of visitors pushing Island resources to breaking point. And who needs a bridge when ninety per cent of the pleasure of going home comes from crossing the water in a boat with the wind in your face and your lungs full of sharp, salty air?

‘Sam! Where ya bin? Bin waitin’ on the barge. Me and Longfella. We got a job on, remember? The steel beams, Sam. They’re due in Blue Swimmer Bay. Doc’s house. Remember?’ Jimmy, the Mary Kay’s sartorially colourful deckhand (lime-green shorts and a purple T-shirt today), heads towards him at a cracking pace, his fluffy black-and-white Border Collie pup close on his heels.

‘They’re going to build a bridge, mate. A bridge and a bloody resort on Cutter Island. It’s enough to make a grown man weep.’

Jimmy skates to a stop, dances and prances with anxiety. ‘Ya sure?’ His sunburned face (clashing puce against the purple) is earnest.

‘The bulldozers first,’ Sam says, his emotions running hot. ‘Then landfill. The contours of the site will be moulded to some wanky architect’s vision of nirvana.’

‘Ya sure?’

On a roll, Sam continues: ‘The beach will be lined with glass and steel. Then the racket of jet skis and high-powered boats dragging screaming water skiers . . .’

‘What about the turtles, Sam? And the stingrays?’

‘And the jellyfish? The constellations of starfish?’ The kid nods violently, in full agreement. Sam, angry now: ‘This whole magic world, mate, is going to be ripped and gutted by tourists here for a week or two before roaring off, never to be seen again. Everything the Cook’s Basin community holds sacred wrecked forever. And that’s aside from the trashing of the park.’

‘Ya sure?’ the kid asks again, teary now.

On the verge of another tirade, Sam notes Jimmy’s growing distress and bites his tongue. Jimmy’s already fragile hold on the basic routines of daily life, all that keeps him balanced, is threatening to snap altogether. Sam fixes an easy smile on his face, places a comforting hand the size of a dinner plate on the kid’s bony shoulder, lowers the tone of his voice: ‘Relax, Jimmy. It’s early days yet. Nothing to worry about. You had breakfast?’ he asks, trying to switch the kid’s head from mayhem to manna before he has a complete meltdown.

‘’Course. Mum put out twenty-four Weet-Bix when I told her about the steel beams. Reckoned I’d need me strength.’

‘Right. So let’s get going, eh? Before we miss the peak tide.’

‘What are they gunna rip up the Island for, Sam? When’s it gunna happen?’

Not quite back on track yet, Sam decides, scrabbling to come up with a new distraction. He pulls out the book from his back pocket. ‘On your mark, get set, and it’s time for history lesson number one.’

‘Aw gee, Sam.’ The kid slumps, scrapes a toe along the ground like he’s about to sign his name. ‘I thought ya were kiddin’.’

‘Education, Jimmy. It’s the key to self-improvement. Now. Did you know that it’s taken nearly six million years for you and me to end up with shorter arms, longer legs and a bigger brain than our primate relatives?’

Jimmy shrugs: ‘What about me dog, Sam? How long’s it taken for him to grow four legs insteada two?’

Sam sighs. Snookered at the opening gambit. But the kid’s head is back in neutral territory, which has to count for something. As the two of them march across the Square to board the Mary Kay, Sam wonders if educating Jimmy is his ham-fisted way of disguising an attempt to better himself so that when he and Kate sit down politely to a candlelit dinner (presuming he wasn’t being turfed off the premises for good last night) complete with meticulously ironed and folded cotton napkins (not serviettes), he’ll be able to impress her with little-known but exciting facts. There is, he admits wryly, more than a pathetic grain of truth there. Yep, love does your head in. True as night follows day.

Beams craned aboard and on a swollen tide, the Mary Kay sedately cruises to one of a hand-spread of blue bays hemmed by golden beaches and crowned by towering eucalypts, their leopard-spotted trunks washed clean by the recent rain. The sea drifts from navy blue to turquoise. The barge comes to rest deep in a corner where mangroves are a corps de ballet on a stage of shifting sand and sea. Sam kills the engine. Listens to the whispery song of cabbage palms while tree ferns, delicate as lace, spread like giant umbrellas in a damp green gully. The high humidity hangs like a bridal veil. Mysterious. Magical. Wondrous. ‘Over my dead body,’ he whispers, so the kid doesn’t hear and get knocked off his hinges again. In his ears, though, it rings like a war cry.

On the way back to Cook’s Basin, Kate veers off the road home and heads towards the retirement village where Emily lived, presumably loved and took her final breath. Was she deep in a pleasant dream when the Grim Reaper came to claim her? Or did she wake, a pain so sharp in her chest she was unable to find the strength to press the emergency button strategically placed by the bed of every resident in a place where each night – she’d once told Kate – she could hear the discreet roll of mortuary vans creeping in to spirit away their once-in-a-lifetime clients. Hardly inspiring, being forced to consider death on a nightly basis. Survival of the fittest – law, according to Emily.

By the time Emily moved into her neat little unit, though, she’d run out of options. Kate had questioned the rationale of the red button. Better to roar off into the great void of death than hover at the edge in pain and anguish, she’d said. Wait until you’re old, then you’ll understand the will to live gets stronger and stronger. And yet, seventy wasn’t a great age any more, not by ‘forty-is-the-new-thirty’ standards. So Emily must have slept peacefully through the point where she quit one world for another, depending on your school of spiritual thought. The bottom line was always the same, though. Everything that is born must die – one of the rare absolute truths.

The village looms. She swings into the pretty driveway with the pretty herbaceous borders before she can change her mind. She unlocks the door and steps inside. Emily’s heavy perfume, trapped in her pink frills – chairs, clothes, curtains, lampshades – hits her like an assault.

Here to empty the unit so village management can erase any lingering traces of Emily with new carpet, a fresh paint job and a new stove top before offering it as new to the next cab off the mortal rank, she stumbles for a second. She’d planned to ask Vinnies, the provider of luxuries small and large in Sam’s impoverished childhood, to blitz the place but kept putting off the call. Now, with the lawyer unable to shed any light on her mystery brother, she’s glad. Somewhere in the detritus of seventy years there must be a clue.

Kate takes a deep breath and enters the bedroom to open the wardrobe. Suddenly finding it hard to breathe, she leans against a wall, slowly sliding to the floor. Eyes closed, she scrolls through the past like a black-and-white movie show, searching for hints, clues, answers. Or even a flimsy link she might be able to follow up.

She remembers conversations between her parents that suddenly went silent when she, still a little girl, entered the room. She remembers her father’s quiet acceptance of Emily’s frequent absences. Once, when she plucked up the courage to ask where Emily had gone, he simply said, ‘Out.’ She knew the question was off limits forever after. Sometimes Emily’d be gone only a day and night. Sometimes a week. Once, she heard her father ask, ‘The money ran out, did it?’ Her mother’s response a murmur too low to catch.

Out of the blue, Kate remembers being dragged along on a flight to the city to tour one of the few Australian navy battleships in operation. It seemed so weird at the time. Emily, a battleship nerd? Even weirder in hindsight, unless one of the sailors – no, never a sailor, Emily was a snob – one of the officers, then, was the father of her child. Or maybe her son had joined the navy? But why drag her daughter along? For appearances? As an equaliser? To prevent a nasty scene?

Kate’s head is beginning to throb. It’s not called rotgut for nothing, Kate, so don’t bother buying me the cheap stuff, I’ll only throw it out. Birthday and Christmas gift law, according to Emily. Kate goes into the kitchen where a used coffee mug sits on a bench that needs wiping. She scours it, fills it with tap water, drinks thirstily.

Revived and back at the wardrobe, she gingerly fingers clothing arranged fastidiously in strict colour order: red, green, blue, turquoise, yellow and pink, pink, pink. Underneath, a rack of shoes reflects the same colour code. She counts twenty cardboard hatboxes stacked on the top shelf. All of them almost certainly crammed with over-decorated hats representing the most outlandish fashion fads for the past fifty years. Kate had never considered her mother capable of such forensic order.

‘The Secret Life of Emily Jackson,’ she murmurs.

How her mother adored hats. It didn’t matter what style she placed on her head, it always looked fabulous. I’ve got the right bones, Kate, very few women do.

She opens a hatbox and, against her will, finds herself impossibly seduced by a gauzy emerald-green fascinator with a jaunty little feather (no doubt from an endangered species – survival of the fittest, Emily would poo-poo) propped on top in a swirl of silk. It must have cost a bomb, she thinks. And suddenly she can’t bear the thought that her mother’s great passion for outrageously glorious hats will end up on Vinnie’s crowded and shabby shelves. She puts them aside to take home in what she hopes isn’t a bout of grotesque sentimentality. The Island Players, she tells herself, might be able to use them for their next theatrical production.

After a while, Kate stumbles on a plastic supermarket bag stuffed with old photos of the blurry, bleached-colour kind, and her heart leaps. Unable to bring herself to sit in one of Emily’s frilly floral armchairs, she sinks to the floor again and sifts through the shots. Her journalist’s eye is tuned to pick up odd emotional nuances among groups of wedgie-wearing, frizzy-haired 1960s diehards in washed-out psychedelic shirts and skirts who smile mechanically into the lens. Were they all saying cheese back then? Or had that free-love generation invoked sex to loosen lips? She has no idea. Nothing leaps out at her. There’s not a baby in sight. She finds two pictures of her father and puts them aside with the hatboxes.

Late afternoon. Hot. Sunlight corkscrews off the water but not for much longer. Soon shadows will lengthen, casting a gentling haze over sea, sky and landscape. Back onshore in the Square, Sam and the rest of the Cook’s Basin community is gathering in groups of growling dissent. News of a luxury resort planned for Garrawi Park has rocketed around the Island. Even isolated bay residents, usually the last to hear the gossip, have been alerted to a travesty that everyone agrees will scar an already ecologically vulnerable coast beyond redemption. No bridge. No resort. Agreement is universal.

Sam licks his lips, tasting the last of the beer on them, sticky and yeasty, leaving a gluey film on his tongue. He vows never to leave an emergency stash of the amber ale on board again. His head feels woozy. Thick and slow. He wanders over to the tap, turns it on full bore and shoves his head under the water, hoping the cold will shake off the booze. What kind of a warrior gets pissed before the battle even begins? The cold feels like a sharp blade cutting through his scalp. It’s all he can do not to yelp.

‘You OK, Sam? You forget to wash your hair after work?’

‘I’m good, Jimmy,’ he fibs. ‘Just clearing my head for business, mate. How’d you go this afternoon? Did you do a good job for Frankie?’

‘Yeah, Sam. I was the best.’ Before Sam can inform him that self-praise is no recommendation, the kid goes on. Bouncing up and down in his mucky sandshoes, his iridescent clothes subdued by grime, spiky red hair gluey with the gel he applies in an almost religious ritual every morning, he points across the sun-struck water. ‘See her, Sam. She’s a beauty now. Better than a facelift, me mum says.’

Sam squints into the distance. The Seagull is riding higher than usual after a three-day overhaul that knocked about a tonne of hitchhiking crustaceans off her underbelly.

Sam turns back to the kid. ‘She looks good for another century, mate. Does Frankie need you again tomorrow or are you back on board the Mary Kay full-time as first mate?’

Jimmy’s beams. ‘I’m with ya, Sam. Me and Longfellow. Reportin’ for duty. What time, Sam? What’s on?’

Sam looks at the pup tucked in the crook of the kid’s arm. ‘Give your mum a hand in the morning and then report on the afternoon high tide. And give that mutt a bath when you have your own tonight. There’s enough marine life stuck on him to make a meal.’

Jimmy studies the pup. ‘You reckon?’

Sam sighs. Turns towards the crowd. ‘Three o’clock sharp,’ he says, giving the kid’s hair a rough-up before he walks into the thick of a ropeable community with violence and bloodshed up front in its mind. Metaphorically speaking, of course. He wipes his sticky hand on his shorts, checks his watch. No sign of Kate. No word from her either. Even putting a good spin on it, the signs aren’t too auspicious. He’d at least expected an I’m OK call after she finished her tricky legal appointment in town. Serious couples communicate. Real couples support each other. Committed couples share even the most boring minutiae of their lives and find it fascinating. Or pretend to. He’s getting the distinct sense of being an accessory good for occasional use but inessential in the greater scheme. She’s going it alone on the big stuff. He shakes drips of water from his hair. Get busy, mate, he tells himself, or you’ll fry what’s left of your thumping head. If only he hadn’t off-loaded Jimmy for the afternoon. He’d never dream of getting pissed in front of the kid. Lead by example. Not as easy as it sounds. His kingdom for a couple of painkillers.

Fast Freddy, kitted out for his night-time taxi shift in fluoro orange, appears out of the throng as if by magic. ‘You look awful, Sam. Migraine?’

‘Nice of you to put it so politely, mate. Tied one on. Fell asleep. Now I feel like someone’s ramming a boot into my skull.’

Fast Freddy reaches into his pocket and comes out with a couple of small white pills. ‘Good old-fashioned aspirin. You’ll be right as rain in a tick.’

Sam grabs the pills like a lifeline, swallows them dry.

‘Er, they’re meant to be dissolved in water,’ says Fast Freddy, who’s a stickler for following instructions. ‘You might experience a bit of fizz making a rocket-fast return trip from your gullet.’

‘Feel better already,’ Sam insists, punching Freddy’s shoulder in thanks and honing in on Lindy Jones, the shapely real-estate agent who seems to be able to discover the secrets of the universe by clicking on one in a row of bewildering graphics on the bottom of her computer screen. He wonders nervously whether it’s time he embraced the new technology. ‘It’s been around for thirty years,’ Kate had lectured him the other night when he made some disparaging remark about the invasion of electronics and the abandonment of nature for what seemed to him to be a load of time-wasting trivia. ‘The web,’ she replied – almost impatiently, now that he looks back on the conversation – ‘means no one needs to suffer in silence and ignorance ever again. Used correctly, it’s the tool – the weapon if you like – of the masses. All you have to do is hit one key and you can galvanise an army to march for the common good.’ He was unconvinced. Now he wonders if her words were prophetic. If ever there was a time to galvanise an army, it’s right now.

But army? He checks out the beads, sarongs, shorts, T-shirts, thongs and bare feet; kids splashing about naked in the shallows; the same old Island die-hards glued to their seats in their regular corner, fists curled around stubbies dripping condensation like a dodgy hose. He marches up to Lindy, pushing aside Jason, her good-looking, always-amenable husband, with a business-like shove. Squashing down a ping of envy for this bloke who has it all, Sam kisses Lindy on both cheeks to show he’s up with at least one of the current social fads. ‘We need to do a bit of research, love. Find out where this shower of . . .’ He pauses; Lindy’s two excellent teenage kids are in earshot. ‘. . . shinola emanates from. You got any ideas?’

‘For god’s sake, Sam. Keep up,’ she replies impatiently. ‘Why do you think everyone’s here? The developers stuck up a sign at lunchtime to say they’ll answer any questions at six o’clock. Or, in their words, bring the community up-to-date and on board. They’re distributing plans and prospectuses so we’ll all be absolutely clear about what’s happening. Considerate, eh?’

Sam fights down the queasy sensation of being caught wrong-footed. He looks around at the crowd. To an outsider, it might appear to consist of aging hippies, yobbos and beach bums, but they’re people he’s laughed with, drunk with, eaten with, grieved with, worked alongside and even battled. They’d never let you down. You could get arrested for knocking off your mother-in-law and they’d risk smuggling a frigidly cold beer behind bars before giving you a quiet nod of understanding: Must’ve been having a crap day, eh? Right now, they’ve gathered to protect everything they passionately believe in and damn the consequences. ‘The law on our side or theirs, Lindy?’ he asks.

‘Too early to say but it’s not looking good. Just so you know, that shiny-headed stirrer with the filthy temper who lives on the eastern side of Garrawi has bought all the bordering properties over the last couple of years. My guess? He’s in this up to his eyeballs and not the temporary blow-in we thought he was.’

Sam scans the crowd, searching for light bouncing off a baby-pink skull. ‘How’d he manage to get under your radar?’ he asks.

‘Company names. If there was a connection I failed to see it and I look hard when people buy stuff over the internet because there’s no knowing who might pitch up as your next-door neighbour. There were eleven separate organisations. I thought they were one-offs triggered by the current volatility of the stock market. The grey brigade funnelling retirement funds into property. Big mistake.’

Sam thinks back. ‘Nah. Don’t blame yourself. The signs were there for all of us to see. We just didn’t take them seriously.’

Two years ago, Eric Lowdon had turned up in his deeply eccentric golf-course clothes to take up residence in the waterfront house left vacant when Joycie Bancroft broke her ankle rushing for the ferry and decided that at the relatively young age of ninety-three, it was probably time to give up offshore living. Eric descended on Cutter Island like a puffed-up parrot, accompanied by six flashy barge loads of glass-and-chrome furniture that outshone the bay on a blaster of a day. Making enemies from the start. ‘One chip in my glass table top,’ he told Glenn the removalist, ‘and I’ll personally hold you responsible for a replacement. Seats thirty. Twenty grands’ worth.’ The thick plate glass, beaded with coloured sparkles that skewered the eyeballs of anyone brave enough to look at the thing, hung over the front and back of the barge by two metres. Eight men moved it into the house. Sam included. All of them tempted to chuck the glittering monstrosity overboard and let the bastard sue. Glenn didn’t have a cracker anyway. But a bloke had his pride. Glenn couldn’t let a runty little arsehole with no taste win a single round.

Not long afterwards, Eric Lowdon began appearing at the fireshed fundraiser dinners. Scraped his plate clean of top nosh cooked by noble, sweaty volunteers before he whinged about the lack of value for money. ‘It’s a fundraiser, mate, not a loss leader,’ Sam told him. ‘And tell me where else would you get a three-course dinner for fifteen bucks?’ Lowdon ignored him and banged on about how it was time to bring Cutter Island into the twenty-first century. A bridge, he preached, cafés, restaurants, sparkling new marinas, a helipad. Glamour: the word presented like a gift on a silver platter. And they’d all laughed smugly in his face. Explained patiently that the whole point about Cook’s Basin was the fact that it was managing to hold back the over-regulated, over-crowded, over-stressed, glamorous current world. They’d thought he’d up and go one day without a peep, like the deluded weekender who’d bolted when he found out what the community thought of his idea to upgrade the fire tracks into major access roads. Jeez. How did you fight an enemy when you couldn’t see it coming?

‘Here they are,’ says Lindy, tipping her chin towards three very clean, sleek black sedans purring up to the Square and coming to a standstill on the sandy track. All eyes turn and fix on the six hard men who emerge from the soft leather innards of the vehicles. They’re wearing suits and ties, dark glasses that hide half their faces but not their smirks. The murmuring crowd goes deathly quiet, like the curtain’s just been raised on a Greek tragedy. One hundred pairs of accusing eyes track the movement of the men but not a soul moves to ease their way to the seawall, where they eventually line up to sit like well-fed crows on a country fence. Oozing power and arrogance, protected from any possible rear-guard action by a tide that sloshes lazily behind their backs, they (bizarrely) fold their hands primly in their laps like schoolgirls at a class photo-shoot.

‘They think it’s in the bag,’ Sam says through clenched teeth. He grabs Lindy’s hand and pulls her forward with him, turning sideways to squeeze through narrow gaps in the crowd. ‘They think we’ll just roll over with idiot grins on our faces while they tickle our tummies, not notice when they bully us into submission and destroy everything we believe in. Are they dead-set morons?’

‘No sign of Eric,’ Lindy says, on tiptoes, searching the heads. ‘But I know he’s the lynchpin. Every instinct in my body tells me I’m right.’

‘He doesn’t strike me as a man who likes to get his hands dirty. But I’m with you. He’s got to be up to his eyeballs in this.’

Two of the dark suits are handing out pamphlets and flyers, smarmy, touching shoulders, arms, like they’re trusted friends spreading comfort and hope at – given their weird black outfits – a funeral. A few people flinch. Some look at a hand laid on their body like it’s a violation. Others grab the written material and retire to the far end of the seawall to get the facts in black and white. The suits forge on, immune. Sam has to fight the urge to roar. ‘They have no idea what they’ve just stepped into. No freaking idea at all,’ he mutters to Lindy. ‘I’ll fight this to the death. Trust me on this, Lin. The only way I’ll give up is if I’m dropped over the side of the Mary Kay wearing concrete boots.’

Before she can reply, he snatches a copy and stomps off towards The Briny. He doesn’t trust himself not to hurl empty bottles at those unblemished black cars, or slam his fist into the even rows of sparkling white teeth. At the last minute, unable to contain his anger, he spins on his heel and marches back into the crowd. He picks the closest suit, and twists the bloke’s designer silk tie as tight as he can without totally cutting off his oxygen. His face so close he’s almost knocked flat by a shocker dose of halitosis, Sam hisses: ‘You can’t do this.’

With the sixth sense of professional thugs, the other five blokes dump their pamphlets and converge on Sam. Close around him like a cloak. ‘Are you taking us on?’ They make hee-haw sounds. Grin. ‘Are you taking us on?’ they say again. Fingers pointing, prodding the open air, then making circular motions at their temples like Sam’s a full-blown loony.

The locals step forward, edgy, spoiling for action. ‘Bring it on,’ says Glenn, puny fists raised to his face like a boxer.

‘Kids and dogs splashing about, Glenn,’ says Bill Firth, the mild-mannered, art-loving president of the Cook’s Basin Community Residents’ Association, who materialises behind Sam. ‘This is not the time nor the place.’ Fast Freddy, a newly practising Buddhist, spirits Glenn away before the goons turn him into fish food. Bill says soothingly, ‘Let it go, Sam. Save the fight for when it matters. Punch-ups never settle anything.’

Sam hesitates, eyeballs the buffoons one by one, his reflection bouncing back from the blank screens of their mirror sunglasses. Under his work shirt he’s shaking with rage. ‘Yeah,’ he says, dredging up a careless grin from god knows where. ‘Sure.’

The suits shake their heads like Sam’s a tragically lost cause and break away. One holds his hand in an L-shape against his nose. ‘Loser,’ he whispers, like a kid in a schoolyard brawl, making it sound like a deadly disease. Sam watches their backs. Pinheads. No necks. Wide shoulders. Narrow hips, legs descending into steel-capped Cuban heels. Satiny carapaces. A plague of freaking cockroaches. He stares. Remembering details. Still as the air before a terrifying storm breaks loose. It’s on, he thinks. It’s bloody on.

The sun is low in the sky. Kate feels drained and defeated. She scoops Emily’s leaky cosmetics from the bedside table into a bin and strips the bed, shoving the linen into a garbage bag and knotting it tightly. Twenty bags in all and a few of Emily’s picnic baskets filled with crockery and glassware. Picnic baskets? She racks her brains trying to remember going on even one family picnic. Draws a blank. The Secret Life of Emily Jackson.

She’s decided to keep her father’s old writing desk, where he sat and instructed her on important financial matters: Red means debt, Kate, black means credit – aim for the black and you’ll always have choices. The law according to Gerald Jackson. Emily never caught on. Aside from the designer hats that she supposed were couture back in the day, and one crocodile skin handbag circa 1970, judging from a race book she’d found inside (was Emily a punter? Is that where her windfalls came from?), she can’t help thinking it’s a lacklustre tally after a lifetime of avid consumption. Did it make her mother happy? Not as far as Kate could tell. For a moment she seriously considers simply taking the money and forgetting the possible existence of a half-brother. But the truth, no matter how awful, can never be as bad as your imagination. Law according to Kate Jackson.

On a hunch and feeling vaguely absurd, she goes back into the bedroom she’s stripped bare and runs her hand under the mattress. Why not? After all, Emily was a woman who thrived on melodrama. Spun it out until long after her audience lost interest or, in the case of Gerald and Kate, admitted defeat. And there it is. Cold metal. A box, perhaps. Certainly not part of the inner workings of the bed. She pushes aside the mattress. A dented old container sits dead centre on the bony metal springs. A cash box of the kind country shopkeepers once kept hidden under the counter with the key hung on a string around their necks for safekeeping. It might have belonged to her father. Kate stares at it for a long, long time, as though she’s waiting for it to either speak or explode. Eventually, she pulls Emily’s house keys out of her pocket and checks each one. Nothing is small enough to fit the tiny lock.