They’d arrived at the Doherty house when it was still reverberating with grief and shock and had removed some of Kelly’s belongings to plant in Jamesy’s house. They’d told Liam to tell the police that Jamesy had been inappropriate with his daughter. ‘Obsessed with her.’

They’d told Liam, who was broken and struggling to find the strength to exist, that they had no doubt Jamesy had done it. That he was a dangerous man. A pervert. They’d planted horrific images in his mind and left them to fester. They’d told this father, living through his worst nightmare, that if he didn’t agree to helping them plant evidence, Jamesy would get away with it. He might even kill again.

But over the years Liam’s doubts had grown. He’d found himself in a hell of his own making, guilt nagging at him that it was because of him that Jamesy had his freedom snatched from him.

He’d seen Frankie Heaney, still thinking he was the big man, walking about laughing and joking without a care in the world.

When Councillor Duffy had arrived at the Doherty house at my behest and told them it was time for them to speak to the press – and for Liam to say what a monster he thought Jamesy was – well, Liam had just broken down. He’d refused to do the interview. Bernie thought he was just grieving, but the truth was he was no longer able to lie. He couldn’t look himself in the mirror knowing what he’d done.

He couldn’t look himself in the mirror without knowing who had really killed his daughter.

There was something in Frankie Heaney’s demeanour, though. For all his bravado, he couldn’t look Liam in the eye.

When Frankie had heard Liam had been at The Chronicle office, drunk and shouting the odds about wanting to ‘do the right thing’ now, he’d decided it wouldn’t do any harm to send a warning. He insists things were never meant to get violent but refuses to tell the police the names of the attackers.

‘They were only supposed to scare him a bit,’ Frankie told DS King.

Guilt that I had unknowingly been a part of it, that I had pushed the Dohertys to talk, now lived in me. As did my guilt about telling Ryan where Jamesy was living, thinking I was just a reporter confiding to her editor and not feeding information directly to the enemy.

And my contacts book that had gone missing and turned up in Ryan’s office? Well, it seems you can find anything you want in one of those. Even Jamesy Harte’s mobile number. I had been so very, very stupid.

‘You couldn’t have known,’ DS King had said, and I’d seen the compassion in her eyes.

But I should have known. It was my job to read people.

I had failed.