Oli’s pulse starts to race again. The more she thinks about it, the more she finds the idea of listening to Alex Riboni giving her account of what happened all those years ago incredibly appealing. What will she sound like? Will she be defiant or confident, soft or loud? Will she really reveal the truth about what happened that night?

Even though part of Oli is still furious about the idea of the paper investing so much effort in this podcast when her team have been told they can’t have new laptops, she starts to plan out the interview, feel her way through the cadence of the conversation.

‘What’s the format of the podcast?’ she asks Cooper. ‘The structure, I mean.’

‘Well, Alex will be the first guest, so I’m still figuring it out. I see myself playing the role of narrator, you know, setting the scene and doing all the background stuff, but then interspersing it with Alex’s comments. And I want to get her to talk about everything she remembers from the night Evelyn died. And I want to track down some of the other people who were there, get their perspectives as well. My vision is to stitch the whole thing together like one of those old radio plays. I’ve done a few trial runs, and it works.’

Oli is still sceptical that something so ambitious should be left to a kid, but she simply says, ‘Have you got interviews with their friends and family lined up?’

He puffs out his cheeks. ‘No,’ he says sheepishly. ‘Not yet, but I will.’

‘Evelyn’s mother will probably speak to you,’ Oli surprises herself by saying. ‘She was always desperate to share information about her daughter.’

‘That would be cool. She reckoned her ex-husband was involved, right?’

An adjacent car changes lanes unexpectedly, and Oli brakes sharply, cursing under her breath. ‘Yeah, Mitchell Stanley, an ex-footy player. He used to play for Essendon, I think, before he injured himself and transitioned into coaching. After he stopped playing football, he got heavily into drugs and gambling, and lost all his money. And he screwed around a lot.’ Oli scrunches her nose, locating memories stored in far corners of her brain. ‘I don’t think anything suggested he was linked to what happened—Geraldine Stanley just hated him. They were going through a nasty divorce, and she blamed him for Evelyn wanting to move out of home at such a young age.’

‘That TV interview Geraldine did was so sad,’ Cooper says earnestly. ‘I watched it twice last week.’

‘I do remember that Evelyn and her father had dinner together the night before she died.’

Cooper is typing notes into his phone at an impressive pace, muttering to himself.

‘God, I can still remember Geraldine turning up at the house that morning.’ Oli shivers. ‘It was awful.’

‘How did she know what had happened?’