How was that possible, that someone had got hold of my knife? Unlike most people in the village, I locked my door every time I went out – I had more to hide than them. There was a dog flap for Brandy, though. It would be possible for a small person, maybe, to climb through that, assuming they could get over my back wall and into the garden without Audrey seeing. She was harder to get past than a prison guard. There was the key in the flowerpot too, which someone might have found. Or else they had picked the knife up while in my house, but I never had anyone over. Just Alex – and I was sure I’d seen the knife since the last time he’d been over. Think. And how did the police know it was my knife? Someone must have tipped them off – they wouldn’t tell me when I asked how they knew, when I couldn’t lie that it was mine, this knife they had apparently found near the body. Anna’s body.

Then I realised who it could have been. Someone who had stayed at my house, with plenty of access to my kitchen, and who had lied to me about his whereabouts. Who was still in love with me, as he had been twenty years ago, when he got me released and took me home, like some bird in a gilded cage. Maybe he still wanted me all to himself, safely behind bars, where I couldn’t be with any other man.

Had Jeremy done this?

Footsteps, the turn of a key in a lock. Sounds I had been attuned to for so many years, Pavlovian. My entire body contracted in fear. What now? It was the custody sergeant, here to take me back to the interview room. I followed him through the silent, carpeted corridors, my heart sinking at the thought of yet more questions. I had no better answers for them. Margaret Hope was alone in the room, leaning with both arms on the table. The sergeant retreated, leaving me there with her, the door ajar. My eyes darted about in panic. This wasn’t allowed, was it? Everything had been so above board up to now.

‘What?’ I said, terrified.

She just looked at me. ‘Very smart, aren’t you, Casey?’

I’d asked them before to keep calling me Rachel. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Good at getting away with things. Like those murders in America. All that evidence, and you still somehow blag your way off Death Row. Amazing.’

She wasn’t supposed to be saying these things to me, was she? I looked around for a camera, some kind of recording device. ‘I didn’t do it.’

‘You know, when you’re a police officer for as long as I’ve been, you get a sense for these things. I remember thinking back then, that girl’s guilty as sin, lying through her little white teeth.’