There was a picture of Stacey, too, a teenage girl with the overly layered type of nineties hair we’d all had then, in her school uniform. Smiling, pretty. She had been found with her jeans and pants dragged off round her ankles, the reports said. Her top still on. She had fought hard – her nails were broken, her arms and hands bruised – but someone had been stronger, had overpowered her. Choked the life out of her.

I drew in a deep, shaky breath. All this time, I had been hiding my past from Alex, and I had no idea he, too, had been accused of murder as a teenager. The difference was that Alex had not been found guilty. Did that mean he was like me, the unfortunate innocent person who was the last to see a murder victim alive, or who found their body – or did it mean something worse?

My phone buzzed, earning me a severe glance from another librarian stacking books nearby. It was a text from a number I didn’t recognise.

I think we might be able to help each other, it said. I’m the person Anna was seeing. Can we meet?

Casey

Casey

APRIL 2001

‘Ms Adams, I will have to ask you to look at the photographs.’

The prosecutor stared down at me as I cowered on the stand.

I was almost in tears. ‘I can’t.’

‘You’ll be in contempt of court if you don’t.’

I was almost hysterical. The trial had taken the best part of six months to begin, which they told me was fast, but it didn’t feel fast to me, stuck in that overcrowded county jail. Garrett Cooper had warned me I’d be shown the crime-scene photographs if I took the stand. He had strongly advised me not to, but I couldn’t just sit there and let them all talk about me while I stayed silent. He also told me to appear sad, but not overwhelmed. If I lost it on the stand, he said, it would make me look guilty. But who could be confronted by photographs of dead people, people you had known so well, let alone a dead child you’d cared for, and not lose it?

Abby was first. Her body was splayed out on the kitchen floor, eyes open and staring up, a wide gash across her throat, the lips of the wound gaping. A large puddle of blood, which appeared dull red in the picture, had spread out around her head. Garrett Cooper had, rather half-heartedly, claimed I didn’t have the strength to make that slash across the throat, but how could you prove something like that? In the photographs I saw how several of her long nails were broken, as she’d fought for her life.