Victoria Songly had been doing what she did every night. The television, the tea, her crossword book for the ad breaks and the old couch, the one by the glass doors, the one Tom had favored before he died that smelled a little like him. Through the doors, across the yard and through the gap in the fence, she could just make out the golden rectangle of the back door of the Barking Frog on the opposite side of the creek. If her eyes had been better she might have seen the light blinking now and then as people moved before it. A chef running here and there.

Victoria fell asleep in the chair as she often did, snoring peacefully as the chef disappeared, and the cars in the lot rolled away, the very last one taking Darren Molk, the postman, off into the night. The last man to see them alive. Andrew Bell had emerged at the back door of the Barking Frog. The red dot of his cigarette wavered as he paced. Pack-up time. The long, boring haul toward the moment they could shut the doors and drive off themselves, he and the glamorous British girl counting up the beer stock at the end of the bar.

2:45 a.m. Had they knocked at the front of the neat little house, or had they simply walked around the back, slid open the glass door, and stood over Victoria Songly as she slept? Amanda knew only that when Jay and Bran arrived there that night, the old woman had not reacted as they’d planned. Instead of quietly answering their questions, she’d fought. Withered fingers grabbing and slapping, thin wailing voice ripping through the air. It was almost certainly Jay who’d hit her. The mean one. He’d watched her stumble out into the yard, still howling, blood running in rivers down her white nightie and spindly legs. He’d finished her off on the lawn with one of the big, square rocks from the fish pond.

Jay had looked up when it was finished and she’d finally fallen silent. Up through the gap in the fence, almost as though he’d sensed himself being watched. He spied the glowing doorway of the pub across the creek. A young man in silhouette, walking forward as though in a dream, his eyes wide in the dark, struggling to process what he had just witnessed through the narrow gap.

Amanda wondered if Jay and Andrew had locked eyes. It had been a bright night. The moon high. She wondered who had run first. Andrew twisting back toward the pub, catching his foot in the damp earth, falling on his hands. Jay sprinting around the side of the house, down the bank, leaping the tiny creek in his panic. Bran shouting for him, horror-struck, standing over the body of Victoria Songly sprawled on the lawn, no idea where his partner had run off to, not until he heard the gunshots. Amanda wondered how the conversation had gone outside the pub after the deed was done, Jay perhaps smoking one of Andrew’s cigarettes, playing it cool while Bran berated him.