So I set up a meeting for when the ship docked in Rome. A little knowledge and a search engine goes a long way these days so it was piss-easy all in all, but Caro was acting like I’d scaled Everest and found Beatrice resting on the south-east ridge. All the way back to the ship she cried.

‘I can’t believe you found her. I can’t believe I will see her again. You are a wonderful person, Hilary, truly wonderful.’

‘It was nothing,’ I beamed, my head swimming with goldfish.

‘No, this is everything. This is unbelievable.’ But as the car journey went on, she grew quieter, more thoughtful. She stared more out of the window and picked at fingers. ‘She’ll be old,’ she said, more quietly than she had been talking. ‘I only remember Beatrice being young.’

‘Well, I hate to state the obvious but—’

‘I know I’m old too,’ she snipped, ‘but in my head, she’s twenty-five.’

‘My beloved Caro, she said,’ I reminded her. And she smiled like I hadn’t seen her do before – all broad and unashamed.

Her face lost about twenty years in that car ride. There were signs of the younger woman beneath. And weirdly, it made me happier. Not molten happiness, no orgasmic happiness, just happiness. Contentment that I had done something good for someone who’d shown goodness to me. And that lasted for the rest of the day.

Sad, innit? Even serial killers need cuddles.

Talking of which, by this point I was all over the news at home:

FARM SHOP KILLER’S AXE FRENZY: WHAT WE KNOW

FARM SHOP KILLER IS CELEBRITY CHILD HERO: Rhiannon Lewis was sole survivor of Priory Gardens Massacre

FARM SHOP KILLER MAY HAVE KILLED BABY TOO: Killer was eight months pregnant before murder

HOW DID THE DEADLY DUO GET AWAY WITH IT FOR SO LONG?

Flicking through the news channels got me all angry again. Nothing was momentous enough, nothing was loud enough. On all the channels I was the third or fourth news item down. No biggy, just some little isolated murder in some little town no one had ever heard of. The main news was all Brexit chaos, Donald Trump’s latest Twitter faux pas, the Tenerife plane crash and which Brits had won big at the Golden Globes. And why were they calling us a deadly duo? Like Craig was Clyde Barrow and I was his infatuated, simpering little Bonnie, still on the run. Why was he still the Charles Manson figure and I merely his brainwashed hippie acolyte? Fucking cheek.

One paper said he was on suicide watch.

God, it all felt like such a waste of time and effort. And where was my confession? I’d posted it on Christmas Eve – even with the holidays it should have reached you by now. Yet still nothing. I was still an also-ran in the contest for Most Evil Female in History, behind Rose and Myra.