Ryan stared.

Where Abbey was pointing was to a farmhouse, but it wasn’t what you’d call the home of the landed gentry. The farmhouse was a simple cottage, set back among encroaching tropical wilderness. It looked as if it had been built a hundred years ago and nothing much had been done to it since.

There’d been a sugar plantation here once, but not now. Straggling lantana grew wild almost right to the door. There were a few cows in the paddocks around the house. As Ryan turned up the drive poultry scattered in all directions, and a red-headed toddler was pedalling a tricycle along the verandah, scattering hens and feathers in the process.

As the car drew to a halt the toddler stared openmouthed, bolted inside and reappeared, clutching the hand of someone who had to be his grandma.

The lady he’d produced was in her seventies, still with traces of the child’s red hair but bent and weathered with age and Queensland’s fierce sun. The woman came down the verandah steps slowly, hobbling with the aid of a walking stick and clutching the small boy to her side in the manner of someone expecting disaster.

This woman had seen disaster, Ryan thought fleetingly as he watched her face. The suffering he saw there was a deeper version of what he saw behind Abbey’s eyes. Who was she? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember anyone living on this place when he was young.

The expression on the woman’s face had given way now to open fear. Ryan turned off the engine, but Abbey had the door of the car open before Ryan could move.

‘It’s OK, Janet,’ she called urgently. ‘I’m OK. I dislocated my knee but it’s fine now.’

Ryan was right. The woman had been expecting trouble. The elderly woman’s face cleared, as though she’d just won a reprieve, and she limped the last few steps to the car with a tread that was as close to a bounce as someone who obviously had a damaged hip could manage.