At the office Oli heads straight to the studio, hoping to find Cooper so they can call a truce, but he’s not there. She tries his phone as she scans the dim room. Leaves a voice message. Since she was here yesterday, he has stuck two giant Post-it notes on the back wall and filled them with their movements since the morning Alex was found in Crystalbrook. On a third, Ep 2 is scrawled along the top with a few notes in bullet points. News headlines from Sun 7th/Mon 8th Oct. Mitchell Stanley and Miles i/views. Nicole’s parents? Oli to recount the police presser? Talk about her theories and what the public sentiment was back then? Would the case be handled differently now?

Along the bottom of the page, Cooper has written: interesting enough??

Oli smiles to herself and arranges her things on the desk. All she wants is to keep reading Isabelle’s notebooks, but she needs to see if she can corroborate any of Ren’s claims. She searches for mentions of a camera in the news articles and court records about the case, then checks her old notes. One of the party guests, Tanya Dukov, wrote a court statement in which she recalls Alex taking a photo in the kitchen early in the evening, but there is nothing else.

Frustrated, Oli gathers her hair into a ponytail. What happened to the camera? She thinks about Alex yelling at Ren, snatching it off him. Was she just sick of the guys coming over all the time, or was there something on there she didn’t want him to see? Cara said the girls were arguing about a computer. Maybe both leads have dead ends.

The quiet of the studio becomes loud, and Alex Riboni’s hanging corpse springs into Oli’s mind. She fumbles for her phone, playing the podcast episode again, typing away to her own voice and trying to emulate the style as she crafts the script for the next episode. She makes sure it flows on from the foundations they’ve laid down, writing about Isabelle’s press conference the day after Evelyn’s murder, the heated calls into talkback radio, the facts and the rumours, building to the moment in the newsroom when the call came through: Alex Riboni had been arrested.

Pausing, Oli lets her weight fall against the chair, rotating her sore shoulders as she reads over her work. The first episode is still playing on loop, and she tunes in to catch the end: Cooper signs off with a custom email address and appeals for anyone with information about the case to get in touch. Oli gets back to work, making notes from various interviews Evelyn’s mother has given over the years.