I was able to cope with the isolation before – I’d spent too many years caught up in noise and trauma and constant activity. I didn’t know if I could take it any more. I cursed Paddy for being dead. Laura for leaving me. Aaron, too, for running away and not working through his grief properly here.

‘Okay,’ Constable King nodded. ‘Now, Elizabeth, you’re aware that it seems to be the opinion of Ms Devlin that there’s a direct link between this murder and your daughter. What do you think?’

I shook my head. ‘I can’t see how that could be the case,’ I said. ‘And I told Ingrid as much. I think it’s just some twisted coincidence. Laura was never friends with Clare.’

‘Can you give me any names of any of Laura’s friends from school who’d have any information about the girls from back then?’

‘I don’t see how it’s relevant,’ I bristled. ‘It was more than twenty years ago. They left school in the mid-Nineties. Built their lives.’

‘Mrs O’Loughlin, the notes the other ladies received seemed to make reference to their schooldays. I know this is difficult for you, but any information, any names you can give us, may really help to close the net on who did this.’

I didn’t want to tell Constable King. It felt wrong. It felt as though I was betraying Laura. It felt as if I was telling the world she was anything less than perfect and worthy of love, which was nonsense. She’d always been perfect to me. She’d always been worthy of love. She’d been the sunshine in my life.

‘I can’t tell you the names of her school friends,’ I said, my heart cracking a little. ‘Because she didn’t have any.’

A couple of friends had come and gone, but Laura had struggled to maintain friendships. She’d tell me that people would like her for a few months but then grow bored. She wasn’t cool enough. She didn’t have the same interests. She preferred to stay at home on the farm. She didn’t wear her hair in a perm, or follow Bros or Take That or any of the bands her classmates did.

I reassured her as often as I could that it was okay to be her own person. That I was exceptionally proud of her for being so steady in her beliefs, in walking her own path. But I knew she was lonely at times. I thought things would get better – in that way mothers do. I thought she needed some time to settle in. To find her tribe. There was bound to be someone she could bond with …