I racked my brains. I had been with the Safrans only a few months, not long enough to know their entire family tree. There was a grandmother, I knew, who I vaguely thought had lived in London, but she’d have to be dead by now. Abby had some siblings, but I didn’t know them; she’d done her best to distance herself from her roots and reinvent herself, and I didn’t blame her. I had been hoping to do the same.

‘I don’t know, Jeremy. They’d need to have tracked me down, and got into my house! I just don’t get it.’

He thought about it for a long time, and when he spoke I heard the note in his voice, the triumphant-theory tone he used when he’d forgotten I was a real person and that real people, including a child, had been murdered.

‘Babe! What about the intruder? You’re the only witness, after all. They could be trying to tie up loose ends.’

I sighed. ‘Right. Because we’d ever be able to prove that.’

Jeremy has always been reluctant to let go of his pet ideas. He’d spent close to five years trying to prove the ‘intruder’ theory in the Safran murders, travelling to the States and asking the neighbours on the street for their home-security footage. He even rented the actual house itself on Airbnb (it’s still available, since they assume tourists won’t know what happened there) to see how easy it would be to climb over the back fence and break in. I could have told him that the hillside plunged into an overgrown ravine, alive with spiders and snakes, and was a no-go. The front door had been ajar on my return, but no one had been seen going in that way, and it was in full view of the nosy neighbour across the street, Carol Bubchek.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Listen, I’ll come up, shall I? You need someone with you.’

It was dangerous, I knew, to let him back into my life like this, to give him hope, but he was right. I had no one else, only Alex, whose wife was the one murdered. ‘Please,’ I said, feeling a rush of gratitude. ‘Thanks, Jer.’ He promised to book a train as soon as possible, and we hung up.

On the internet you can get blueprints of the ‘Mary Poppins Murders’ house, diagrams showing the bedrooms and where each victim was found. Madison, in her bed, pink covers pulled over her as if she were asleep. She had been smothered with a pillow, which apparently is a common way for children to be killed. Her acting and pageant awards had not been disturbed; they were all still lined up on her shelves.