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blue tinge. He placed his damp handkerchief gently onto the scratch. She reached to take hold of it, her hand touching his briefly. After a few moments, she took the handkerchief away. The scratch had stopped bleeding. She looked at the cloth with its small concentration of blood and then at him.
    ‘Why did you do that?’
    He slipped his arms around her. She leaned against him, shivering despite the heat. He put his hand on her hair.
    ‘I’m not sure myself. Don’t tell anyone you saw me lose it like this.’
    ‘No,’ she said, moving back and looking at him. ‘You tell me. Why did you do that?’
    ‘It’s what I saw up at Pittwater,’ he said finally. ‘I walked in on a massacre. Four people dead at a table out on a patio. Three of them had been shot. One of them was a nineteen-year-old kid.’
    ‘Then we find a way to deal with that. But you can’t do this again,’ she said softly.
    ‘It’s not going to happen again. I’m not going to let myself down like that. I don’t want to do that to you and I don’t want to be like that to myself.’
    She was still standing back, looking at him.
    ‘In there, you said “I’m not dead”. Who were you talking to? I can’t deal with you when you’re like this if I don’t know what’s going on.’
    The noise of the night insects, the distant sound of music, filled the air around them. He heard a fainter sound, waves breaking against the weathered sandstone retaining wall at the end of his garden, ripples generated by a boat passing the mouth of the bay.
    ‘Come inside and I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘I need to clean myself up first.’
    In the bathroom, she washed her cut and dressed it. He showered and changed. They came downstairs. He swept up the scattered glass. She arranged the lilies in one of his aunt’s vases.
    ‘Thanks for the flowers,’ he said, considering that in the scheme of things he was supposed to give such things to her.
    ‘Do you like them?’
    ‘I do. I always do.’
    ‘Good. It’s all part of having a bit of fun and sparkle in your life,’ she said, looking at him with a glint in her eye.
    ‘Maybe you should have bought white liliesinstead of pink. White lilies in a wreath with a sash that reads Harrigan’s Career, Rest in Peace.’
    ‘What are you talking about?’
    He shut the kitchen door.
    ‘I’m going upstairs to get something out my safe. It’s a tape and I need privacy to play it. Do you want to smoke? Go ahead. I’m having another whisky.’
    He got her an ashtray. They exercised this unspoken tolerance towards each other’s vices. He had once smoked heavily and now loathed the taint of cigarette smoke. She had once had the choice between drinking alcohol and staying alive. These days just the smell of it made her ill. She kept beer in her fridge for him; he supplied her with ashtrays that had been unused for years. When he came back downstairs, he put a small audio tape on the table and poured himself a second whisky. She looked at the tape but didn’t touch it. He sat opposite her and watched her light up. No one else smoked in his house.
    ‘Have you heard any of the news coverage?’ he asked.
    ‘I was listening to it in the car. Four dead. Two were men but they didn’t give any names. The other two were Natalie and Julian Edwards. They said the minister found them. I thought Edwards didn’t have anything to do with his ex-wife. He didn’t want her reputation damaging his.’
    ‘He was seeing her about their son. One of those bodies was someone called Jerome Beck. I’ve never heard of him before. But I can tell you the other one was Mike Cassatt, dead as a dodo. Almost mummified. We couldn’t even tell how he died.’
    ‘You’re joking! What would he be doing there?’
    Harrigan sat over his drink for a few moments without touching it.
    ‘Throwing a time bomb into my life,’ he said. ‘You see this tape? Mike gave it to me about a year ago. I came home one day and found him sitting in my