I was slipping down that rabbit hole I had feared for so long. I went back to Google and typed in Casey Adams whereabouts. Nothing. Casey Adams where is she now. I tried to think what wording a post about me might use. Does anyone know where Casey Adams is now?

Bingo – a hit. My heart began to race as I clicked on the forum, a site about notorious serial killers. Someone had asked that exact question: Does anyone know where Casey is now? The name of the poster meant nothing to me, a string of numbers and letters. I scrolled quickly through the answers, but no one seemed to know my whereabouts. Let me know if you find out, a few had replied, followed by descriptions of the horrible things they’d like to do to me. Almost all of them assumed I was guilty. I had known, I suppose, that an exoneration on appeal meant nothing to most people, but this really hit home. But that was Casey Adams, not Rachel Caldwell. How had someone made the link between those two names? This time, I googled my new identity.

Very little. A few other people with the same name, a lot of trash about nothing, and then – the website of the dog shelter. I had never been on this site before. Marilyn updated it herself and it was charmingly shonky, with clip art of puppies and an array of different fonts. On the ‘news’ page, I found it. A picture of me posing awkwardly with a puppy called Flame. I remembered him well, a husky we’d rehomed from Liverpool, where it had been going out of its mind. Huskies need cold and four hours of walks a day. Central heating and indolence drive them insane, so we get a lot of them in. It was now rehomed on a farm on Skye, a happy ending. The photograph of me was illustrating a little post about not buying huskies unless you can look after them, part of our commitment to reducing the need for rehoming in the first place. At the bottom, Marilyn had typed: Flame pictured with our right-hand woman, Rachel Caldwell. Was this it? The piece of information that had led someone to me? I looked quite different, twenty years older, my hair darkened and short, a far cry from the vibrant girl in those earlier photographs, who attracted such hatred for her Sun-In-streaked fair hair, her low-cut tops, her alcopops, her smile. But had someone made the connection anyway?

‘Excuse me.’

A voice behind me made me jump right out of my chair, my bottom actually lifting. ‘Jesus!’

The librarian from the reception desk looked quizzical. She was young, with bleached blonde hair and those thick eyebrows the kids have now.

‘It’s just your time’s almost up,’ she said. ‘We do have people waiting.’

I’d been surfing for an hour already. Down the rabbit hole.

‘Sorry, sorry. I’ll go.’