I wasn’t brave enough to go out in it, but I’m okay where I am, on my sofa with a blanket over my knee and a cup of hot chocolate in my hands. I’m still bruised and sore after Sunday’s ordeal. My throat still aches every time I swallow. My cuts still sting in the shower.

I’m still shell-shocked, if truth be told.

But I know that I’ll be okay.

I still can’t quite believe that what started as a piece on the anniversary of a murder turned into something that has sent shock waves through the city, through the country even. Layer after layer of corruption and lies and the worst that people can be have been uncovered. And poor Liam Doherty, his life destroyed all over again.

It’s hard to make sense of something that is so very senseless. An argument between a father and son. A father with a brutal temper who hurt a little girl but who never meant to kill her. But what he did, this big man who is really just a pathetic coward at heart, was unthinkable. Sinking her body into the water. Threatening his son to keep quiet. Framing an innocent man – a man who had done nothing wrong except be a little different. Spending twenty-five years covering his tracks and making sure no one ever found out. Even if that meant making sure Jamesy Harte was dead. Even if it meant setting his heavies on me.

And Ryan? The man I had once respected, the man I had let into my bed? He’d helped. He’d told them I’d be alone in the office the night of the first attack. He’d told them where I lived. It scares me that when they came to my flat that day, they wouldn’t have had any idea if I was there or not. What would they have done if I’d been home? I feel sick at the thought.

When I think of Liam Doherty – what they’d done to him. Would they have done that to me?

Out of all of this, the attack on Liam is probably what will stay with me. It’s what had made no sense. Why him? Why a grieving father?

No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get my head around it. That is until DS King had arrived to talk to me and had filled me in. She told me that Liam Doherty had admitted he had known, almost from the start, that Jamesy Harte’s conviction was based on a series of lies. That Frankie Heaney and his cohorts – and yes, that included a young reporter called Ryan Murray – had conspired to make sure there was no way Harte would escape conviction.