He was calling me that again. Maybe he was the one who’d leaked my identity. All these years, I had trusted Jeremy with my secrets, but perhaps I had been wrong to. Perhaps his goodwill had only lasted until I met someone else.

‘That’s ridiculous. He was with Sam all night! And why would he kill his son’s mum, even if they weren’t getting on brilliantly?’

‘You believe him, do you? You trust what he tells you?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake. You’re just jealous.’

He flushed even deeper. ‘Casey. It’s not the first time.’

A cold seam ran through me. ‘Not the first time what?’

‘Alex. He’s been arrested for murder before.’

I felt myself start to shake. ‘You’re lying.’

‘Look it up. It was years ago – a girl was strangled and he was the main suspect. Never told you that, did he?’

Casey

Casey

NOVEMBER 2000

‘I keep telling you, I didn’t do it.’

Still this was my endless refrain, but it wasn’t getting me anywhere. I had been in this jail for weeks already. The next step would be a grand jury trial, which I wouldn’t appear at. I had pleaded to be allowed to speak for myself, but my lawyer said that wasn’t a good idea. I gathered this meant that the prosecution’s case was strong.

If I couldn’t prove my innocence, they said, I was facing the death penalty. I had assumed at first they meant the electric chair, but the older male cop put me straight on that. In this state it would be lethal injection. He took a malicious pleasure in describing it to me in great detail.

‘What happens is, Blondie, you’re strapped down to a table. And there’s a machine that slides a needle into your vein, just here’ – a light tap on my arm. ‘First injection paralyses you, so you won’t be able to move or even breathe, and you’ll just lie there and think of those folks you murdered, that innocent little kid. Then the second injection kills you, just a vein full of poison moving all over your body, and the last thing you’ll see is the ceiling of that execution room . . .’

‘But I didn’t do it,’ I sobbed. It was all I could say.

Outside, an election was going on, history was being made, but my world had shrunk to this stuffy interview room and my cell that smelled of feet, and which I shared with three other women, one of whom screamed in her sleep all night long. Still I kept being questioned, by the police, by lawyers for the DA’s office.

‘Someone did it, Ms Adams. Just tell us who it was then, if it wasn’t you.’

‘But I don’t know! They must have left while I was hiding in the cupboard. The closet, I mean.’