‘They most certainly do,’ he said. ‘A woman was executed a few months back in Arkansas. It happens. But listen, actual execution is rare. What you need to worry about is spending the rest of your life on Death Row. It’s not a nice place, Casey. It’s not even near here in this state, it’s out in the desert. You want that? To die in a hot steel box?’

‘Of course I don’t want that!’ I sat back in the plastic chair, bewildered and shaking, cold and sweaty and hungry. I hadn’t slept in days. I was shell-shocked by loss and confusion and fear. ‘I don’t know what else to say. I’m telling the truth. I took the baby out, I came back and they were dead.’

‘But you were in the house for at least ten minutes before you called the police from the closet. The neighbour saw you go into the house; she took note of the time because her soap opera was on.’

Mrs Bubchek, with her dyed red hair and suspicious glances, the kind of woman with nothing of value but who always thinks she’ll be robbed. I wasn’t surprised she would try to burrow her way into the case. She’d called to me from her lawn a few times when I was out with Carson, asking who I was and what I was doing on the street. A police officer’s dream, the local busybody.

‘That’s – how do they even know she had the right time? Her clock might have been wrong, or I, maybe I took a while to walk about the house, I was in shock! I was terrified! They were dead! I’d never even seen someone dead before. And Madison . . .’ Here my voice broke, and thickened. You can hear it on the interview tapes, if you want. They were leaked a few years after it happened, and have appeared on various podcasts. ‘I was so scared. I cared for her. I looked after her every day for three months.’

‘There are witnesses to you losing your temper with her.’

I thought back. That time at her school, when she wouldn’t get out of the car so I had to drag her, or maybe a neighbour had overheard me scolding her in the house or the garden.

I gritted my teeth. ‘Everyone does that sometimes! I was taking care of two kids and doing all the housework. I was stressed out, I hardly got any sleep. And Abby . . .’

He pounced on that. ‘That’s another thing. She’d complained about you to various friends. There was tension.’

I could just imagine it, Abby and her mom or actress friends, moaning about their help over iced coffees. Or maybe Ruth had said something; she clearly hadn’t liked me.