‘I’d say so. He’s unwell, but I don’t think it’s serious. Where did you say you were from?’

‘It’s Sarah Finlayson from the tax office.’

Bridie takes her number. ‘I’ll have him call you as soon as possible,’ she says earnestly.

‘Great, thank you!’

Oli strongly suspects Miles’s sickie is related to his past hurtling so abruptly into his present, but hopefully Bridie’s right and he’ll be in tomorrow. Oli needs to find an edge to this case, something beyond the old facts.

There’s no phone number for McCrae in her old notes, just an email address. She searches online for current information about the psychology professor but again can only find an email address and she is pretty sure she won’t get a reply if she sends him a message. Maybe Dean can help her get in touch with him, via his contacts at the university, though she suspects he won’t like to be asked.

She quickly checks Twitter. It doesn’t seem like anything new has surfaced since she left the office, but Channel Seven has started promoting their interview with Geraldine Stanley. Dawn will be spitting chips.

Oli launches Facebook on her phone again. There’s an account for Mitchell Stanley. She enlarges the profile image, which is obviously very old, from his football days. He looks tanned and healthy, with white teeth and sparkling aqua eyes, a far cry from the clammy drunk who made such a scene outside Alex Riboni’s appeal. Oli sends a message explaining who she is and asking that he call her.

It seems none of the other party guests have online profiles. Oli finds Cara Horrowitz’s Instagram account, but it’s set to private. The profile picture shows her holding a baby.

Oli searches the Housemate Homicide groups that Cooper mentioned, her eyes widening as she scrolls through the swathes of comments. It would be easy to get lost in this world for hours: the pages and pages of speculation, the baseless arguments about what happened. She takes screenshots of some of the more impassioned posts, wondering whether she and Cooper can weave the commentary into the podcast. On Twitter, a handful of people are proclaiming sympathy for Alex, but the majority ascribe her suicide to guilt. Between the Housemate Homicide resurgence and the O’Brien saga, new tweets are loading faster than Oli can read.

Who were the other people Jo hustled to speak with back then? Parents, friends. University staff. Before long, their faces blur into one another in Oli’s mind.

She wanders back to Lygon Street and buys a Krispy Kreme doughnut from the 7-Eleven on the corner and takes a seat on the bench out the front. She eats as she reads her emails, feeling increasingly restless. Still ninety minutes until the press conference. She calls Cooper.