‘Nah, but they could all be pretty moody. Sometimes they would get pissed at me and Matt even though we were just mucking about. I think they got sick of us coming over all the time. One time I remember Alex went right off at me for no reason.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘I don’t know. I just picked up her camera—you know, pretending to take photos or whatever—and she lost her mind. Told me to get out of the house.’ A mobile phone starts buzzing on the mantelpiece, and Ren looks up, suddenly alert. ‘Gotta get that.’ He disappears into another room, talking in a surprisingly assertive voice.

Through the window the charcoal sky is bloated, set for another release. Time feels warped, sluggish. Oli thinks about the housemates, the tension brewing between them, pressure mounting until suddenly Alex exploded and it was all over. Or was it? Have the same forces resurfaced now?

‘Sorry.’ Ren returns, his face sporting more colour as he shifts his weight from one foot to another. ‘Um. You might have to go soon.’ His eyes dart around the room. ‘Is that okay?’

Oli has zero interest in being there when his drug pals turn up. ‘No worries. I just want to ask you a few more questions, but I’ll be quick.’

‘Sure.’ He resettles on his chair but he’s twitchier now, and Oli can’t tell if it’s in anticipation of a hit or a sale.

‘You said the girls worked a lot, they had goals and wanted to do well in auditions and things, but what were they like? Were they wild? Did they drink a lot?’

Ren looks thoughtful. ‘Sort of. I think they drank a normal amount. They didn’t get stoned as much as we did. They used to sunbake topless in the yard, and if you opened the bathroom window you could see.’ Oli doesn’t say anything, and he rushes to fill the silence. ‘But they had their shit together, you know? They had plans. They had this big diary on their kitchen wall, and they always wrote down their uni assignments, auditions, stuff like that. We used to give them shit about it. They had weird rules and little codes and numbers next to stuff they wrote. I don’t know.’ He bites his lip. ‘When Evelyn died it totally fucked us. We couldn’t believe it.’

‘What sort of codes?’ Oli is tempted to grab his head and shake it until the right answers fall out.