‘Mrs O’Loughlin, if we can just go over your statement one more time,’ the kindly-faced police officer said to me.

He’d been lovely. So gentle in his manner. So sorry for what I’d been through, even though I wasn’t the victim here. Not at all.

‘I’m not sure I’ve anything more to tell you,’ I said, placing the cup on the kitchen table, the shake in my hand more pronounced than it normally was. ‘I can’t think of anything more.’

My brain was trying to process the trauma. I knew that. In my younger years I’d worked as a theatre nurse. Cared for many survivors of catastrophic traumas – the de facto warzone that Derry had been during the Troubles meant I saw more than most. Heard more than most. Lost limbs, blast wounds, burns, gunshots, a child who couldn’t be saved, whose body was broken beyond repair by the impact of a car bomb.

Images were coming at me now. Fast. Horrific. I shook my head to try to get rid of them, but they didn’t go. They wouldn’t go and now I had these flashes of that woman, her orange T-shirt and linen trousers – blood-soaked, mud-soaked, wet through. Her eyes, flickering, closed. That wound, jagged, vicious, intentional. The soft warmth of her last breath on my cheek. How gentle it had been for someone who was taken from the world so violently.

‘And you saw no traces of anyone else along the road? No cars passed as you were out walking?’

I shook my head. It had been so quiet. Blissfully quiet.

‘It’s a quiet road at the best of times, especially at that hour of the morning,’ I told him as one of his colleagues offered to refill my teacup.

‘I imagine,’ he said. ‘And she just said those two words? “Warn them”? Nothing more at all?’

‘Well, my hearing isn’t as sharp as it used to be, but no, DI Bradley, she didn’t say anything else. I don’t think she had the strength. The poor girl. Do they know who she is yet? Who she belongs to? Her poor, poor family.’

‘I believe they think they’ve identified her,’ he said, his soft blue eyes sad. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t give you any further information until she’s been formally identified by a family member. You know how it is.’

I nodded. I did, indeed, know how it is, and how it was. I’d stood with family members myself as they’d identified bodies of their loved ones. A matter of procedure. A formality that sometimes felt unspeakably cruel.

‘And you’ve never seen this woman before?’