Page 95 of Murder in the Family

There’s a superficial resemblance, certainly, but enough to get away with using his passport?

BILL SERAFINI

Think about it – that passport must have been in quite a mess by the time Fulton got his hands on it. It may not even have been in one piece. All he had to do was send what was left to the Australian authorities and get them to issue him with a new one—

HUGO FRASER

—supplying a picture of himselfthis time. Hey presto, a spanking new identity,with an official passport attached. The only other thing he needed was a passable Aussie accent. Hardly insurmountable, as such challenges go.

BILL SERAFINI

Right. And it’s quite possible he didn’t only take the passport – maybe he stole the real Luke’s bag as well. Who knows what else there was in there – photos, letters – enough to fake a whole new life.

ALAN CANNING

You’re forgetting about Fulton’s family – aboutRyder’sfamily.

BILL SERAFINI

Well, Fulton was listed as killed in the bombing, so no one was about to start looking for him. As for Ryder’s family, I guess that must have been a risk worth taking.

JJ NORTON

(nods)

And he was probably right: people don’t end up in war zones unless they’re trying to get lost. Or on the run. Which, as we know from Mitch, the real Luke Ryder might well have been.

LAILA FURNESS

But Fulton couldn’t have known that.

JJ NORTON

(shrugs)

Takes one to know one.

LAILA FURNESS

You think Fulton was on the run too?

JJ NORTON

Has to be a possibility.

MITCHELL CLARKE

(nodding)

I agree. A bomb’s gone off, there’s bodies and screaming and complete mayhem on all sides and what’s the first thing this guy does? He goes ferreting about in a dead man’s baggage to stealhis passport. That’s not ‘normal’ behaviour, not by any definition of the term.

But I’m not a psychologist. What do you think, Laila?

LAILA FURNESS

Well, I agree with Diana Moran that it’s always perilous to attempt any sort of diagnosis at second or third hand. But with that proviso, the switching of the passports does suggest to me that changing his identity was an urgent, maybe even a desperate, priority for Fulton at that time.

So much so, that immediately the bomb went off, and even though he himself was injured, he saw it not as a disaster, but a golden opportunity.