Her profile picture was of two children, a boy and girl, dressed in school uniform and smiling at the camera. It was the same school uniform that Beth had worn when she was at primary school. The same that Molly would wear the following year. Was it possible I’d seen Laura at the school gates when Beth was still a pupil there? I tried to count backwards, guess the age of her children.

If I had seen her at the school, I hadn’t paid attention. I was fairly sure we hadn’t spoken. Or if we had, it had been small talk, the way anyone would talk to a stranger.

I clicked into the profile, dormant since 2016. There wasn’t much to see, except that it appeared that she’d sent me a friend request, to which I still hadn’t responded. I didn’t even remember seeing it. But there it was, with an option to accept it, or not.

My finger hovered over the button. It would be wrong to accept now. What good would it do? But would I see more of her profile? Get more of an idea of who she’d been?

I shivered. I didn’t want to dig deeper, so I closed the Facebook app and slipped the photo album into my bag. What I’d do with it, I didn’t know. But there was a part of me thinking of the look on her face when Clare had tossed her book into the bin. There was a part of me that wondered whether I’d sensed her vulnerability then, or had the knowledge of what had happened since coloured my faded memories? Was there more in our past that I’d filed away to the deep recesses of my brain? Was I an unknowing guilty party in whatever had driven Laura to take her own life all these years later?

It seemed absurd, and yet the police believed there was a link between us all now. That whatever had happened to Laura may well be linked to what had happened to Clare. Where did that leave Julie and me?

I was still on edge when I woke the girls; caffeine was surging through my veins to try to keep me focused on what I needed to do. We’d decided they still needed to go about their daily routine but that Paul would drop Beth at school and I’d pick her up. We wouldn’t leave her to walk on her own.

Beth had rebelled against it, of course. I couldn’t blame her, but I didn’t want her to be home when the police came to fit the panic alarms. If I could get just one more day of normality out of this madness, I would.