Abby’s instinct was to open her mouth and tell her everything was just fine, but if that was true, she wouldn’t be there. In the time it took her to think of an answer to that question, Bobbi exchanged a telepathic glance with Maggie, who quickly took the hint.

‘If you’ll excuse me now, I need to make my eighty-seventh daily trip to the loo.’

She hoisted herself out of the breakfast nook with a grunt and waddled into the bathroom, which was still steamy from Bobbi’s shower. Joe made himself comfortable in the warm space she’d left.

‘If this is about the call, it’s all been straightened out,’ Bobbi said. ‘I buzzed the office earlier. Ray went into the station on his lunchbreak and cleared it all up. I should have known the call was about a caretaking job. Sorry if I freaked you out the other night.’

‘That’s good,’ Abby said. ‘But it’s not why I’m here. Bobbi, I need to talk to you about something. But before we get into it, I need to know I’m talking to Bobbi the Friend, not Bobbi the Cop.’

‘I’m always your friend first.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise,’ Bobbi said.

‘I need you to give me a day, twenty-four hours to get my ducks in a row. Then Bobbi the Cop can do what she needs to do.’

A grave look came to Bobbi’s face. She sat down in the nook opposite Abby, forehead knitted with concern. ‘What’s going on?’

‘The other night in the church car park, you told me something,’ Abby said. ‘You said that in a town as small as this one, someone knows something. Do you remember that?’

‘A lot of that night is foggy,’ she said. ‘But yeah, I remember that. Why?’

‘Well, as it turns out, you were right.’

Gloomy afternoon was shifting into drizzly evening when Abby got home. She pulled the Volvo into the driveway, stepped out and winced when she spotted Dorothy Fancher coming towards her.

Dorothy was a slight woman, her face strewn with worry lines. She and her husband Teddy lived on their street. Teddy hardly said a word, but Dorothy never stopped talking. You could get caught talking to her for hours about absolutely nothing. Ray called her the human vortex. He once joked that all the people who went missing in the Bermuda Triangle really just got stuck talking to Dorothy.

Abby gave her a quick wave and started towards the house.

‘Oh, Abby,’ Dorothy called. ‘Do you have a minute?’

‘One minute?’

Dorothy strode across the front lawn, hunched beneath an umbrella. She cast a glance at the drooping she-oak in the front yard that she’d gently reminded Abby – six times – needed to be cut back. If it wasn’t the she-oak, it was the lawn they let get too long, or the bins they sometimes forgot to bring in after garbage day.