Hades

Hades, known as the Lord of the Underworld, lives beyond the Utulla tip in a small wooden shack surrounded by discarded objects fashioned into animal figures. The prologue introduces him at the moment a stranger arrives carrying a child’s body, establishing both his fearsome reputation and the moral boundary that shapes his response to the dead brought to his door.

Identity and Setting

Hades is presented as a solitary, physically imposing man who appears to have anticipated the stranger’s arrival. His cramped kitchen, furnished with objects salvaged from the dump, is also where he receives the bundle and confronts its significance. The setting extends beyond the shack: the approach passes through heaps of rubbish and along a road lined with animals assembled from scrap metal and machinery. These surroundings connect Hades to the dump, but also make his home a place with its own stark order. He is not introduced simply as someone who disposes of bodies. When he sees that the bundle contains a child, he asks the stranger to explain what happened.

The Stranger’s Account and Hades’s Judgment

The stranger explains that he and five others had gone to a family’s holiday house in Long Jetty, intending to take the children briefly and arrange an exchange. He says they expected an easy operation and had brought games for the children. Instead, Benny interpreted the father’s behavior as a threat; in the ensuing confusion, Benny shot both parents. The group drove away with the children but had no one to whom they could sell them, and the stranger was sent to Hades with the bodies.

Hades does not accept the stranger’s account as an excuse. He asks what happened, then puts a notepad and pen on a table and directs the stranger to record the names of the others involved as well as his own. The stranger writes them down while explaining the failed plan; Hades tears off the page and pockets it. The request turns the visit into an effort to identify the group, even as Hades prepares to punish the messenger.

After taking the written names, Hades shoots and kills the stranger. He then considers where to bury the children together and where to put the stranger, separating the children from the criminals whose remains he says already lie around the dump. He resolves to refuse new clients: the regulars had brought him the bodies of people he regarded as evil, whereas unfamiliar visitors were bringing innocents. His distinction gives his fearsome role a moral limit, though his response is itself lethal.

The scene closes on a small detail that unsettles Hades’s assumption that the girl is dead: he notices that her toes are clenched. The observation introduces uncertainty into his plans for the children and makes the body at the center of the encounter more than evidence of the stranger’s account. Hades’s recognition of that detail is the prologue’s final turn.

Narrative Role and Moral Classification

Hades’s prologue establishes a stark division between the people he regards as evil and the innocents whose bodies strangers bring to his dump; the wider novel complicates any confidence that guilt can be read so plainly. Ted Conkaffey is never acquitted of the rape and attempted murder of Claire Bingley: the Director of Public Prosecutions withdraws the charges halfway through his trial, saying the evidence cannot satisfy a properly instructed jury beyond reasonable doubt, while leaving open the possibility of renewed charges if stronger evidence emerges. The withdrawal therefore neither establishes guilt nor clears him, yet the public treats him as guilty, and even Fabiana Grisham tells him that Australia does not consider him innocent. The contrast does not make Hades part of Ted’s case; it sets his forceful moral sorting beside a plot in which accusation, proof, and public judgment remain unresolved. In that larger pattern, Hades’s response to the stranger exposes both the appeal and the danger of drawing a firm boundary between the wicked and the innocent.

Justice Outside the Law

Hades’s response combines an attempt to expose the wider group with punishment delivered entirely on his own authority. The written names preserve a lead beyond the stranger, but the stranger is killed before any formal process can follow from his account. That gap makes Hades’s moral boundary consequentially unstable: he acts against a kidnapping party he judges culpable, yet his own verdict is immediate and irreversible. The scene leaves the reader with no assurance that his confidence in sorting the guilty from the innocent can make his justice reliable.