I tried to steel myself as I sat down at the computer in the town library later that day. I purposely didn’t have the internet at the cottage as I knew my willpower was weak and I would soon spiral down rabbit holes I might never climb out of. The internet never forgets, and I needed to be forgotten, and to forget myself. I looked about the library furtively – would anybody recognise me? Would they know I was a suspect in a murder case? Over in the corner, a librarian was leading rhyme time, a group of children on their mothers’ knees – one dad too, looking dazed with exhaustion – clapping their fat little hands to the rhythm. I hadn’t held a baby since Carson, but my body remembered the weight of him on my hip, his head drowsing on my chest, trusting me enough to fall asleep in my arms. My little butterball, I had called him. I couldn’t think about that now. I logged on with the code they gave me. First, I couldn’t help but check the news, to see if I’d been identified. It just said a woman named as Anna Devine had been found dead in woodland, that police had opened a murder enquiry, and that a ‘38-year-old woman’ had been arrested and released without charge. Would people know that was me? Then, filled with dread, I typed my name – my real name – into the search engine. CASEY ADAMS.

Immediately, hundreds of hits. Thousands. I was famous out there. A variety of pictures of me, the ones that had helped damn me to start with – vest top, Smirnoff Ice in hand, draped over several boys from my sixth-form college. There was Ryan, my sort-of boyfriend, who’d never contacted me at all once I left for the States. One of them was Jeremy, who had hung about with us though never explicitly invited to. He’d been studying computer science, which at that point still seemed a slightly obscure subject. We didn’t know then how much they’d take over our lives in just a few years. He’d made much of this photo, to pretend he knew me better than he did. No harm in it, not really. Jeremy had only ever tried to help me. Based on these pictures, I was a good-time girl. But I was nineteen then. Every British girl I knew had pictures like these, dressed the same, drinking too much, flirting a little, having a laugh, wearing tight tops and short skirts. It was just that not every girl became a suspect in a multiple homicide, had her life pulled apart by the press.