He doesn’t remember much from after that, except that was the point he did wet himself, and he threw up, undigested brown Bourbon biscuit splattering on the muddy ground.

Chapter Two

Ingrid

Wednesday, 16 October 2019

The archive room in The Chronicle isn’t anywhere near as grand as it sounds. It’s not a fancy library, lined with mahogany shelves housing every copy of The Chronicle’s 200-year-old history. I don’t select the bound copies I need and carry them to a leather-topped desk to pore over them under the gentle glow of a reading lamp.

Instead, I shiver as I try to make sense of a long-ignored filing system to find the papers from 1994. Twenty-five years before. When I was ten and Kelly Doherty was eight.

I got to grow up, though. Kelly didn’t.

I’d been nervous about digging out these files. Uncharacteristically so. Normally, the grittier the story or more gruesome the crime, the more eager I am to be assigned to cover it. But this was different. This was the anniversary of a murder that had shocked to the core the community in which I grew up. We’d been used to violence, of course, in Northern Ireland. Bombs and guns and masked men were something we were almost, but not quite, immune to. But murder, like that? Of a child? That didn’t happen. That changed everything. Changed everyone. I never really understood fear or grief until then. I’ve never forgotten them since.

I wish I’d lifted my grey cardigan from the back of my chair before I came down here. It’s ugly and not at all my usual style, but it comes in very useful during long hours in the archive room. I suppose I could walk back to my desk and get it, but I’m happy to hide out away from everyone.

I had a couple of glasses of wine last night and my head is the worse for it. I should know by now never to drink on a school night, and certainly never to drink cheap wine. The combination of the two is lethal, especially when faced with working my way through pages and pages of minute typeface, blurring against yellowing newsprint.

Sighing, I rub my eyes and wish the lighting in the archive room was better. I stop flipping over pages when I see her face. Angelic. Gap-toothed. The picture is black and white, but I can see her hair was blonde, ringleted. Just as I remember it. There’s a clip holding it back from one side of her face. She’s in school uniform – the same school colours I wore myself – and it looks like it was taken by one of those official school photographers who charge an arm and a leg.