Angie handed me my coffee. I took a sip. ‘So, Carmel Millard?’

‘In the beginning, when Carmel wanted to see Crystal, it was too hard. She was the mother of the guy who killed my sister—but Crystal couldn’t know that, because she didn’t know her mum had been killed.’

‘Small town,’ I said. ‘No one’s told her?’

He shrugged. ‘Not so far. And you know what? She’s not curious about it. She used to be but then she stopped asking.’ He took a sip of his own coffee, then looked into the flames of the fireplace. ‘Do you think I did the right thing?’

The question caught me off guard. Deep down, I didn’t think he had, but I knew as well as anyone that decisions made on the spur of the moment could have consequences which couldn’t be undone. Rather than answer his question, I asked one. ‘Do you think you’ll ever tell her?’

He let out a long sigh. Stared into the fire. ‘Yes … maybe.’

I felt for him in that moment. Teen angst was hard enough without adding a murder to it. My mind caught at the word murder. After seeing the screen door, that’s exactly what I thought it was. But Russell didn’t know that yet.

‘Did you ever doubt that Brett did it?’

‘What?’ His gaze moved from the hypnotic fire to me.

‘I mean, it must have come as a shock.’

Russell’s brow furrowed. ‘We always thought he just … snapped.’ His voice trailed off while his mind processed my question.

I had to be really careful here. If Brett and Shayna were murdered, Russell was just as good a suspect as anyone else in town. This nice-looking man sitting near me might be a murderer. ‘Did they have any enemies?’

Russell laughed. ‘Enemies? Like in the movies?’ He looked around the cafe. ‘Do you think this is the kind of town where people have enemies?’

I immediately thought of the barrel of enemies I had accumulated in the time I’d been in this very town: Jack Barratt, Matthew ‘Shed Guy’ Bunting, Mayor Tippet, Principal Duncan Edwards, Sergeant Wheeler, probably Dimitri. I blushed slightly as I realised I would be a candidate for the Guinness Book of World Records if they had an Enemies category.

‘Yeah, I do think it’s that kind of town,’ I said.