‘Aha! Then you’d want the digitised archives. We have a subscription to all the UK newspapers, and Irish.’ Enthusiastically extolling the wonders of the archive, he set me up on a computer in a quiet side room, the shelves lined in large bound copies of the local paper, the Lakeside Courier. If there was something to find out about Alex, it would be in here somewhere, surely. Trouble was, I had no idea what I was looking for. Jeremy hadn’t given me many details, and I’d refused to ask, turning on my heel and leaving him there in Holmdale, walking the rest of the way back to Coldwater. I wasn’t sure I would ever speak to him again.

The archive was easy to use – you just set your date parameters, and typed in a search term to the blank bar. Feeling intensely disloyal, and glancing nervously at the door to make sure no one came in, I entered a name: Alex Devine. Immediately, results came up. Hundreds of them. It was a common name – would it even be the same person? Heart in my mouth, I clicked.

An hour or so later, I came back to myself. My wrist ached from scrolling and my eyes burned. No one had told me the internet was so addictive – I felt I could not look away, no matter what I found, how awful it was. And it was awful. One article summed it up best, from April 1994. Long before my own troubles began.

LOCAL BOY ACQUITTED IN STACEY DONNER MURDER

Alex Devine (18) was today acquitted of the murder of Stacey Donner (16) in August last year. Alex, a schoolmate of Stacey’s, has always denied involvement, though he was seen leaving a party in the woods with her. He insisted she was drunk, and he had walked her to the gate of her parents’ house, leaving her there. Stacey never returned home, and was found strangled and sexually assaulted three days later, her body left in undergrowth in Coldwater Wood. Lawyers for Devine, who had minor convictions for drug use and theft, claimed he had been scapegoated while the real culprit went undetected. After three days of deliberation, jurors returned a verdict of Not Guilty. ‘Justice has been done,’ said the boy’s father, local farmer John Devine. A spokesperson for the Donner family said they were ‘devastated’ by the verdict.

At first I had thought it was some other Alex Devine. But no, the age was right – he was born in the late seventies, a little older than me – and there was even a grainy black-and-white photograph of Alex on the courtroom steps, flanked by various people I assumed were his lawyers and parents. His father, a stocky man with a clear resemblance to Alex, stood with a hand on his shoulder. Consoling, or controlling?