Tartly, I said, ‘I don’t know what you think of. You don’t seem to take in anything I tell you.’ It was a mistake to sass him, me a young girl, a foreign girl. Men like him joined the police so that if someone sassed them, they could arrest them.

‘Smart-ass, hey? Well, we’ll see about that. Those cameras don’t show anyone else driving up, so you can kiss goodbye to the rest of your life.’

He banged on the door, and the guard came immediately. From her smirk, I could tell she’d been listening outside. As she came in to grab my arm again, I realised that none of them wanted to help me clear my name. For some reason they had decided already that a naïve British girl was capable of murder. Of pressing a pillow over a child’s face, slashing a woman across the throat, and shooting a man twice her size in cold blood.

Rachel

Rachel

I was paranoid walking through the streets of Coldwater, feeling so many eyes on me. I would have to leave this town, no matter what happened. I couldn’t bear that sense of being watched. It’s her. Racy Casey. The one who . . . All I wanted now was to never be recognised again, to be totally anonymous. And to think, all this happened because I’d dreamed of being famous once, a household name. Well, I was now.

Soon, I found myself back at the town library. It was an older librarian this time, a man with an impressive grey beard down to his mid-chest. He didn’t seem to recognise me, and I was glad – perhaps there were still people out there who didn’t watch rolling news or go online, who would not have seen my picture or know there was a former convicted murderer on their streets.

‘Hi,’ I muttered, approaching the desk.

‘Sorry?’ he boomed. ‘Can you speak up?’

Louder, I said, ‘I want to look up some old news stories. Is everything online now?’

‘Oh no, not by a long chalk. We have all the local and national papers, though, going back a hundred years – microfiche, or some of them are bound.’

‘Great.’ I wished he wouldn’t talk so loudly; weren’t librarians supposed to be quiet? ‘And if I didn’t know what year, but say I wanted to search for a particular name?’