‘Well, it happens. And I have to live with that until they want me dead.’ She shrugged again, capturing the insanity of it, that they’d dragged her back to life so they could have the privilege of killing her. Nowadays we’d probably say Rhonda had postnatal depression after the birth of her last child – same as Abby – or even psychosis, that her husband was coercive and threatening to divorce her and take the kids, that she’d been traumatised by a violent rape when she was fifteen. But in the nineties, she was just a black woman who’d done the unthinkable, the worst of the worst, beyond evil, and she had to die for it.

That day, in the canteen, she nodded to my untouched tray. ‘Eat up, honey. You need to take care of yourself if you’re getting out of here.’

I frowned. ‘I’m not getting out of here.’ I was almost angry at her for suggesting it, when I’d finally started to accept my fate.

‘There’s an appeal process, isn’t there?’ she said. ‘You haven’t had yours yet? And you said you didn’t do it, right? So there’s hope. There’s always hope.’

Hope. I knew from school it had been the only thing left in Pandora’s box when all the evils of the world flew out. So far I had not been able to find any. Instead, any optimism I’d had had been stripped from me, until I realised that my situation could in fact be that bad, much worse than I could ever have imagined. But Rhonda saying the word stirred something in me. It lit a kind of fire, and that kept me going until hope did reappear, in the most unlikely form.

Rachel

Rachel

Less than half an hour after talking to Marilyn I was back outside Alex’s flat. My heart was sinking – I had to admit it, there was no way back from this. Our relationship, all the hope I’d had in it, had ended the moment I stumbled over his wife’s body in the woods. The same woods where Stacey Donner’s dead body had been found in 1993 – I’d looked it up, the sites were less than a mile apart. Did the police know about this older case, that Alex had been tried for Stacey’s murder? They must do. I had to talk to him. I waited till a middle-aged woman came out of the flats – she gave me a double take that showed she recognised me – and went up the stairs and knocked on Alex’s door.