I held my arms out for a hug, fell into his squashy softness, noting his laboured breathing and sweaty face. Jeremy was not in good shape, and no wonder since he spent about eighteen hours a day glued to a screen of some kind. He was filled with theories and speculation about Anna’s murder, as if he kept forgetting that this was my life, and the death of a real person I had known, or that I might once again go to prison for something I didn’t do.

‘I’ve been thinking, I really should start a podcast,’ Jeremy said as he opened the door of the taxi I’d decided to splash out on, files slipping from his arms on to the road. I stooped to pick one up and recognised a police photo of Abby. Dead. I tried not to look as I passed it back. ‘These kids that do them, they don’t even bother checking the facts. I mean, I could do that. I actually know things.’

I didn’t like to say you needed more than facts to hold an audience.

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘So how are things?’ I was very aware of the taxi driver in the front, a quiet man in a turban. I hoped Jeremy would have the sense not to say too much during the drive.

‘Oh, ticking along,’ he said. ‘We got the Tulsa police to release the tapes on that case I was researching.’

Jeremy ran a website and forum for true-crime enthusiasts, including documents and artefacts from old cases. The Murder Squad was the name, as if they were serving police officers, not just randoms in their living rooms. They prided themselves on being armchair detectives, finding people like me guilty, but really they were ghouls, raking over dead children, murdered women, the more horrific the crime the better. I couldn’t bear to look at it – it upset me too much. In every ‘irrefutable fact’ I saw just another angle, another way to explain what happened. Like the forum post I wrote back when I was struggling with the kids, especially a difficult five-year-old whose own mother couldn’t handle her. Anyway, is there a correct amount of time to wait between finding your entire household dead and calling the police? I’d spent a lot of that time hiding in the cupboard with Carson. Saving the baby’s life was all I could think about at the time. But to these people online, these complete strangers, it was all just proof of my guilt.