The man behind the counter looked surprisingly ordinary. She didn’t quite know what she’d expected—some sort of gangster vibe, perhaps. What a cliché, she chided herself.

There was nothing of Robert De Niro or Harvey Keitel about this inoffensive bloke, nor was he a fat, aggro-looking MAGAtype. He was neither Middle Eastern nor Italian nor EasternEuropean, as far as she could tell. He was just a sales assistant in the kind of shop she had never thought she would enter.

She tugged the collar of her puffer jacket higher around her face and smiled apologetically. ‘I’m just looking, thank you.’

He raised an eyebrow at her response and she blushed. A gun shop wasn’t like the upmarket boutiques she was used to, and just looking’ was probably not an acceptable response here. Ina boutique it meant ‘give me time’, and that was exactly what she needed—time to absorb her surroundings, to calm down enough to do what she had to do.

The door of the shop opened again, and another customer entered—a man who looked much more at ease in these surroundings than she felt. The new customer met her gaze and she looked away quickly, afraid she might be recognised.

It was an irrational fear—no one knew her in Wollongong; that’s why she’d come here. She stood back from the counter and gestured to the sales assistant that he should serve this new customer first, but the bloke who had entered—older, big-bellied and wearing a cap with a logo of some kind on it—decided to be chivalrous.

‘No, the lady was here first.’ The man in the cap walked to the back of the shop, examining the rows of lethal weapons displayed in locked glass cabinets. The sales assistant smiled at her, his manner as mild and professional as if he were selling her a coffee. ‘Made up your mind yet?’

She had the urge to turn on her heel and run, but she knew that if she did, she would not come back. It was now or never. She put her hand in her bag and felt for the official papers that allowed her to purchase a firearm legally. She had ticked all the boxes—and there were a considerable number of boxes to tick. Then, summoning all the faux confidence of her rich lady persona, she stood up as straight as she could and said, ‘I’d like a Smith and Wesson nine-millimetre, please.’‘You got the paperwork?’

Miriam handed over her Permit to Acquire and her firearms licence. To the man’s credit, he checked them both carefully…