I was crying. Sobbing. Tears and mucus from my nose running down my face. I couldn’t bring myself to rub them away. I was shaking so violently.

‘You don’t want me to go to jail because of an accident, do you?’ he’d said.

And no, I didn’t want him to go to jail because of an accident. I wanted him to go to jail because he was a violent bully.

‘It would kill your mother,’ he’d said. ‘And there’d be no one to earn any money. You would be out on the street. That’s not what you want, is it? I can sort this out. Just you wait and see.’

And he had. Him and the friend he had gone to for help. Both of them taking it in their stride as if death and cover-ups were nothing new to them.

I’d cried, sat on the ground beside Kelly and held her hand while I had waited for my father to come back with help, and while he and his friend – Ryan Murray – had planned what to do next. I’d willed her to move. I’d willed this to be a nightmare. When I realised it wasn’t, truly realised that, I had slipped the small bracelet from her wrist and dropped it into my pocket. I don’t know why. Maybe to remind me that life could be cruel and horrific.

It was relatively easy to convince myself my father was telling the truth when he said Jamesy Harte was a very bad man, who did bad things to children and who the police had never been able to catch before now. I came to hate Jamesy and everything he stood for. I think a part of me even started to believe that Jamesy was guilty, after all, and those things I’d seen that night on the banks of the reservoir were just echoes of a nightmare.

I realise now, of course, that I had needed to hate Jamesy Harte so deeply so that I could live with myself all these years.

We have all lost so much. Suffered so much. It’s hard to think of that. To think of how my relationship with Declan has been fractured. How my mother has suffered over the years, when she could have been free of him. To think of Jamesy, taken from his house and led to his death by some connection of the man I called my father.

So many people destroyed by one night of the year.

I kneel at Kelly’s graveside – a place I have refused to visit all through my life – and I tell her I’m sorry before I place her coloured plastic bracelet on her headstone.