Then came the photos from the crime scene – the front of the house, stretchers with body bags being carried out. Who would photograph such a thing? There I was, standing outside the ‘house of horror’ as the police searched it, clutching my elbows with white knuckles. No emotion, the paper had said, but really it was shock. I had even answered one or two questions from reporters, with no idea what I was saying, another thing that was used against me. Carson had been taken from me by then, carried away by police to be put into the foster care system, where he remained until Ruth arrived from Texas to take him. Ruth, who had barely even picked him up before. I had been arrested shortly after, once they’d finished searching the house and found all the nightmares it contained. I still remembered the slap of the handcuffs against my wrists, heavy and cold. My shock. This can’t be happening. But it was.

There was a photograph from the trial too. Me hustled by a guard from the police van to the courthouse, his fingers digging into my arm. I looked terrified. Sheer horror printed over my face. And I was right to be afraid, given what was coming. I clicked on a link to Wikipedia – I even had a Wikipedia page! Jenna might even have been impressed, although I wasn’t sure if she’d known what Wikipedia was. Casey Adams was a nanny accused of murdering the family she worked for in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, in October 2000. After serving four years on Death Row she was released on appeal and returned to her native UK. That was all – no one could have found me from that, surely. There was a lot more detail about the case, but I knew all that, of course. The bits of supposed evidence – my hair on Madison’s pillow, when I put her to bed every night. My fingerprints on the front door, when I had lived there and opened the door several times a day. More damning, my prints on David’s gun, although I had explained that. Without all this circumstantial evidence, would I still have been convicted? Maybe. There was no one else left alive to say what really happened, after all.

There was also my post on the nannying forum run by the Little Helpers company, which I’d made in the early, hellish days of my job. I had forgotten about that before the trial, but it too was damning. That’s the trouble with the internet and why I stayed away from it after my ordeal. Any of us can say things in the heat of the moment. I hate this kid. I’ll kill you. I wish I could run away. But we don’t mean it, and don’t expect our words to be set in stone, still there to condemn us some twenty years later.