‘Please, just tell me why you’re here,’ she asks.

I can no more easily tell this woman her child is dead than

I could show her pictures of the corpse. I cannot tell her about Cemetery Lake, about a woman whose decayed remains look like

they belong to Rachel. I can’t mention the exhumation, can’t detail my swim with the corpses, can’t mention it’s the same cemetery I almost buried my wife in two years ago after the accident. I reach into my pocket and produce the small plastic bag with Rachel’s ring. She takes it without a word, then slowly sinks down into a chair opposite me. For a long time she says nothing.

‘It turned up today in an investigation,’ I say, and she finally manages to pull her eyes away from it and look back up at me.

“Do you recognise it? Does it belong to Rachel?’

‘Where did you find it?’ she asks. ‘Who had it?’

“Nobody had it on them,’ I lied.

‘But how, then?’

“Please, I need to ask you a few questions. The inscription, it says Rachel & David for ever.’

‘Was it David? Did he give you the ring?’

‘No. Nobody had it. I found it.’

‘Where?’

“Please, Mrs Tyler, can you tell me about David?’

‘How did you know to come here?’

‘The inscription,’ I say, but then suddenly realise my mistake.

The only reason I’d check Missing Persons would be if I believed the ring belonged to somebody who was dead. Mrs Tyler, thank

God, doesn’t make the connection.

“David gave it to her for her birthday.’

“Is David her boyfriend?’ I ask, careful not to say ‘was’.

“I’ve already told the police all I know’

‘But I’m not the police,’ I say, ‘and that means I can approach things differently.’

‘You think she’s dead, don’t you.’

I think of the flowers in the passenger seat of my car, and

I regret not driving out to see my wife first. I could have talked to her. Told her about my day. Told her how much I missed her.

Could have held her hand and told her everything.

“I don’t know,’ I say.

Then what makes you think you can help her?’

It’s interesting she has asked how I can help Rachel, and not her and her husband. Interesting isn’t the word. It’s devastating.

This woman isn’t just holding out for the possibility that her daughter is alive; she’s holding on to the reality of it. But the question is more than that. It makes me think of exactly what

I can do to help Rachel: nothing. Not now. I can’t even help the others who have followed.

“I would imagine Rachel wants as many people helping her as

she can get.’

She nods, then starts telling me about her daughter, and

I realise I could be anybody in the world and she’d still be happy to speak about Rachel. She’d probably be the same way if I was at the door selling encyclopaedias or God. She talks for nearly twenty minutes and I don’t interrupt her. I know what it’s like to have lost somebody. I know what it is like to hold out hope.

False hope is cruel, but perhaps not as cruel as no hope at all. It’s a judgement only those who have been there can make.

‘And David?’ I ask, after she has told me what she can about

Rachel’s life, including in detail the days before she disappeared.

‘What can you tell me about him?’

“I thought he knew what happened,’ she says. ‘For those few

weeks I was sure she was living with him. See, they were living together, but not really. All her things were here, are still here, but she wouldn’t come home for days on end. When we didn’t see

her for a week we tried contacting her, then him, but he said he hadn’t seen her. I thought he was lying, and that he was shielding her from us for something we must have done. But I knew,

I knew something wasn’t right. I don’t know how, but I just knew.

So Michael, my husband, called the police. We filed a Missing

Persons report. We hadn’t heard from her in nearly a week. It

wasn’t like her.’

‘What happened when the police spoke to David?’

‘Nothing. They said they had no reason to believe he was lying.

Still, I wasn’t convinced. I would go to his house at different times, but there was never any sign of her. I would knock on his door in the middle of the night. After a while I began to see that David was just as distraught as we were, and I started leaving him alone. I don’t know if he really believes Rachel is still alive.’

I throw a couple of names at her. Bruce Alderman and Henry

Martins. She shakes her head and tells me she’s never heard them, and asks me why. I tell her the names have come up but I’m

not sure where they fit into it, and that it may be unlikely they even do. She gives me a list of Rachel’s friends, places she liked to go, photographs of her, people she worked with, David’s

address. She’s giving it all some real serious thought, hoping for a connection, hoping she is going to mention a name that’s the key to getting her daughter back.

She walks me to the door. She seems reluctant to let me go. I

feel guilty I’ve deceived her, that I’ve given her more hope today than she had yesterday, and the guilt becomes a sickening feeling that makes the world sway a little as I make my way to the car. The police will identify Rachel Tyler. They will come here tomorrow or the next day, and they will tell Patricia that her daughter is dead. I can’t stop it from happening. I can’t prepare her for it.

It’s getting close to eight o’clock and within the next twenty minutes it will be dark, the thick clouds bringing the night earlier than usual for this time of year. The flowers in the front seat still look fresh enough to keep on growing. I start my car and pull

away, the small voice inside my head questioning what in the hell I am doing, and the bigger voice, the one I use every day to justify my actions, telling me I have no idea.

chapter eight

Perception is a funny thing. Especially when you’re dealing with luck. Somebody who survives a plane crash is considered lucky. Is he considered lucky to have even been on that flight? Or unlucky?

Does the bad luck of being seated on a doomed flight cancel out the good luck of surviving? I don’t get it that people are lucky to have lost only an arm.

My wife was lucky. That’s what people say. An inch here or

a second or two there, and things would have been different.

I would have ended up burying her, and the flowers I keep buying would be going to a grave. Inches. Seconds. Luck. Good luck for her. Good luck for all. It doesn’t add up. She wasn’t lucky. Not at all. Wasn’t lucky when the car ploughed into her; wasn’t lucky that her head hit the footpath at forty kilometres an hour and not fifty. Wasn’t lucky when her legs were shattered, her ribs broken.

Lucky to have lived, yes, but not lucky.

The care home is out of the city where suburbia kicks in and

city noise dies away. It covers five hectares of land, widi grounds scenic enough to be used for a wedding. The buildings are forty years old, grey brick with the occasional flare of polished oak windowsill — a combination of bad ideas or perhaps good ideas that didn’t work. The driveway is long and shaded by giant trees that flourish in the summer and look like skeletons in the winter.

I pull up outside the main office and for a few seconds try to imagine that this world hasn’t gone mad.

The main doors are heavy and made from oak, as if to stop the

weak from leaving or tempt the grieving to turn away. The nurse behind the reception desk smiles at me. Her dark red hair matches the sunset in the painting behind her.

‘Hi, Theo. What have you done with the weather?’

I fake a smile of my own, the type anybody with social skills

would apply when the weather suddenly becomes the topic of