Before it all happened, when I was young, I hated getting up early. I would have slept till eleven every day if I could. But that had been beaten out of me, and I had changed, in so many ways. Now I woke up every day with the dawn and lay there in bed, usually alone, stretching my legs out to feel the width of it, feeling grateful I wasn’t in a narrow metal bunk with the sounds of women screaming outside. Listening to the silence of the house, birds in the trees opposite, Brandy stirring downstairs, the odd quiet woof to check if I was awake and had remembered she needed breakfast. I tried so hard not to take these things for granted, but in the end, maybe it’s just human nature to do exactly that. Lately, I had become used to Alex lying beside me some mornings, and I would quietly watch him for a while, the way his lashes quivered on his cheeks, how he slept with an arm thrown over his forehead. The weight of him on the other side of the bed, anchoring me down. I shouldn’t have got used to it. It might never happen again now.

Forgetting myself, I had snapped on the radio as I fed the dog, only for the news bulletin to come on, starting with, ‘The body of a woman has been found in woodland near Coldwater, in Cumbria. She has been named by police as Anna Devine . . .’ I turned it off. It would do me no good to follow the coverage of the case. I didn’t take Brandy for a morning walk that day – I couldn’t face going past the same spot where Anna had lain, and as we left the house for work, Brandy trotting on her lead, I averted my eyes from the entrance to the forest. A strip of police tape hung from a tree, and the white-suited people were still coming and going, various police vans parked nearby. They had taken her out, I assumed, if her father had identified her. What a thing, to see your daughter dead and butchered on a morgue slab. I tried to keep hold of that amid my simmering panic. This was not about me. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I’d done something stupid, but not fatally so. For Alex, and Sam, and Anna’s parents, this was the worst thing imaginable.