“We’ll see what she says when she pops up,” I said by way of parting. “She’ll have to say something.”

Amanda had asked me to pay a visit to the houses behind the Barking Frog to see what information I could gather. She’d said only that one of the houses had contained a “scary recluse woman” who wouldn’t talk to her, and that in the other was a dog who wanted to eat her. I’d started in the middle of the row but found the house shut up, seemingly with no one home. I wandered along the road to the northmost house, building up a good sweat by the time I reached it. I guessed I was half a kilometer as the crow flies from the back door of the Barking Frog.

The terrifying, man-eating dog Amanda had described was indeed there. But her owner Lila, a young woman in yoga tights and a sports bra dragged the animal away and locked it in a bedroom, allowing me to come inside.

“It’s all very sad,” she said briskly, crouching and rolling her yoga mat up on the floor. “I read it all in the paper. Two young kids. Well, not kids, exactly. Young people.”

She looked uncomfortable suddenly, brushed at her sweat-damp hair, shielding her eyes. I got the sense that she knew exactly who I was, thought she’d put her foot in it by mentioning children. I’d introduced myself as Collins at the door, but that was hardly mastery of disguise. It was more than likely that the local newspapers had heard about my and Amanda’s involvement in the investigation and printed a short article about my case.

“Did you want a coffee or something? I’ve got this really amazing matcha. Change your life.”

The dog was scratching at the door of the bedroom.

“Oh no. I’m fine,” I said, taking the seat she offered at the kitchen counter. “I won’t stay long. I know my colleague Amanda asked you some questions about what you heard the night of the murders. I just had some follow-ups.”

I ran through some general questions about her life, her interactions with the bar. She had a spiky, annoyed kind of response to the place. She didn’t like all the rubbish left lying around behind her back fence from drunks wandering through the rainforest to and from the bar, and the place got noisy on a Saturday night. She’d visited once and found it too dirty for her tastes. Lila’s house was the exact opposite of the dusty, rugged bar I’d visited on the morning after the murders. Her kitchen counters were almost bare, spare for the complicated-looking machine that made her matcha and a small cluster of succulents in pots the size of egg-cups. On the fridge, a single glossy magnet read “If it doesn’t challenge you, it won’t change you.”