Cooper eyes the card before taking it gingerly and sliding it carefully into his own wallet.

When he’s gone, Oli types up an overview of the first two days of the Housemate Homicide story. People start to fill the office, but Oli is lost in the past, the words flowing directly from her brain to her fingertips. A few times she hears O’Brien’s name muttered, everyone thrilled with the reaction to TJ’s exclusive.

Cooper returns in triumph with her coffee cup. ‘Here,’ he crows, placing it in front of her.

‘Thanks.’ She takes a sip, eyes him warily. ‘What?’

He squares his skinny chest. ‘I got an email from Miles Wu. Alex contacted him last week and told him about her interview with me and now he wants to talk.’

When Dawn thrusts a piece of paper at Pia, all the ruffles on her fuchsia blouse jiggle. ‘Get this up online as soon as possible. And see if this man or anyone he knows will talk.’

Oli steps out of Dawn’s office doorway so Pia can get past. ‘What’s going on?’

‘It’s breaking now.’ Dawn points at the screen. ‘TJ just called me about it.’

Oli glances behind her. The newsroom is unusually quiet. Cooper is still at her desk, his hands frozen over his keyboard, eyes fixed to the bank of TVs. A twenty-seven-year-old man has come forward claiming that John O’Brien molested him when he was a teenager. Oli eases her boss’s door shut and watches the TV on the edge of Dawn’s desk. A swarm of journalists accost a jowly lawyer as he clambers out of a taxi on Collins Street. Looking flustered, he pauses on the pavement and confirms the key points of his client’s claim. Now a tradesman with a family of his own, the accuser says he was thirteen when he helped his father complete some landscaping work at O’Brien’s house during his school summer holidays. He was just doing basic things, the lawyer stresses, like fetching nails and weeding. Sweeping. There was a pool on the property, and after they knocked off for the day O’Brien insisted the boy have a swim. O’Brien lent the boy some board shorts that used to belong to his son, and it was when he was in the bathroom getting changed back into his clothes that the sexual assault allegedly occurred. The boy’s father was outside having a beer with his employees, none the wiser. Afterwards, O’Brien told the boy that if he ever said anything, his father’s business would be ruined. Not yet in politics, O’Brien was working as a senior consultant at a high-profile corporate firm at the time.

Oli baulks every time the lawyer uses the word ‘molestation’. She focuses on the dark-purple skin tag that wobbles on his fleshy jawline.