‘You’d need to talk to them. I get confused in the details,’ he says, ‘but it made me think, things have changed since then. If the police looked at it again, they might find something now that they didn’t then. All that fancy DNA stuff or something. They might ask questions. Why would I have done it? I wouldn’t hurt anyone. I wouldn’t do that to a wee girl. What he did. That monster. I’m not a monster.’

His voice is shaking with emotion. He has put his mug down and is wringing his hands. I can feel his legs jiggling nervously under the table.

He takes a deep breath. ‘I know I don’t have brains, you know. I’m not smart. And I’m a wee bit different. I never fitted in. It was just so easy for them to blame me for it all, wasn’t it? As soon as they knew I had been out on Halloween night – that I’d no alibi – they just decided it was me and that was that.’

‘Where did you go on Halloween night?’ I ask, knowing that this was one of the key factors in the prosecution’s case.

Jamesy Harte liked to be outside, but he rarely left the safety of his front garden. Mass on Sundays, maybe. A walk with his mother into town. But he was a loner. He didn’t go out with friends.

He fidgets in his seat. ‘I told everyone where I was,’ he sighs. ‘But no one believes me. I liked the costumes. I just wanted to see more of them, so I went for a walk up and down the streets. Up Greenwalk and down Broadway. I wasn’t even gone very long. Maybe fifteen minutes. But Mammy was asleep when I got back and she couldn’t back me up.’

‘And what about her wand?’ I ask him and he pauses. ‘They found it in your house, didn’t they? Her wand from that night. And a bobble from her hair. One of her dolls.’

‘I didn’t take them,’ he says, sitting up straight, his voice tight and angry now. ‘I knew nothing about them. I’ve no idea how all that ended up in my house. Someone must’ve put them there,’ he sniffs. ‘Someone set me up.’

That was the substantial evidence, you see. That he couldn’t get away from. The wand – the simple little accessory covered in tinfoil that Kelly had carried around with her, a bobble from her blonde hair, a Barbie doll – they had been found in his house. His fingerprints had been found on both the doll and the wand – which he said were there from when he had found and picked them up, from behind the sofa.