‘I thought about coming by your house to tell you this,’ Bobbi started. ‘But then I thought it might be easier without the kids around, and Ray. But the real reason I wanted to do it here was that I kept thinking about my parents. Whenever Mum and Dad had a big decision to make, they’d take a long drive, no matter what the decision was – figuring out what sort of car to buy, deciding if it was time to put Nan in a home, anything. They’d drive and drive with no direction in mind, and they wouldn’t come back without a clear plan.’ Bobbi smiled. ‘Ironically, the final drive they took was to decide if their marriage was worth saving or not. It wasn’t, FYI.’

She drank. Abby waited for her to go on.

‘I asked my dad about the long drives one day,’ Bobbi said. ‘I thought there might be something about movement and momentum that, I don’t know, made it easier to think. He told me I was overthinking it. He said what it boiled down to was: you don’t shit where you sleep. There are some things better left outside the home.’

‘So you’re shitting where we drink instead?’ Abby asked.

Bobbi chuckled. ‘Yeah. I suppose I am.’ She leaned back in her chair and shoved her small hands into the pockets of her windbreaker. It was warm in the bar, but she hadn’t taken it off.

‘It’s about the murder, isn’t it?’ Abby said. ‘You know I’ll always be here for you, Bob, and I get why you can’t open up to Maggie, but surely the police force offers some sort of counselling service or—’

‘This isn’t about that,’ she said. ‘It’s about the murder, but it isn’t about that.’ Bobbi sipped, nodded and resigned herself. ‘We’ve been looking into the victim’s phone records,’ she started. ‘And by we, I mean the detective running the case. There was a printout on the front desk and I wasn’t supposed to see it, but I thought I’d sneak a look. I was curious, and I thought I might recognise some of the numbers. He didn’t make many calls. A total of six in the two weeks before he was killed. Of those six, I recognised two. The first was Speedy Pizza. He called them four days before it happened. The second…’

A Paul Simon song came on over the jukebox, and for a moment Bobbi seemed lost in it.

‘… Yeah?’ Abby prompted her.

‘The second call was made on the day he died, at eleven-sixteen am, and lasted four minutes and forty seconds,’ she said. ‘And, look, I didn’t come here to scare you, or to accuse anyone of anything. I just wanted to give you a heads-up. There are a dozen explanations and all they’ll need is one good one.’