I sighed. ‘Yeah, in the pot.’ I’d started doing this after I was released from prison – some kind of residual horror at the idea of not being able to open my own door. I saw now it was stupid. I wasn’t that careful at work either, I left my bag on chairs in the office all the time. ‘Did you have any luck tracing people? I was thinking of Ruth. You know, the sister.’

I hadn’t seen Ruth since the trial, hard-faced, red-eyed, refusing to look at me. Maybe she had cared about her brother and his children, in the end. I’d never forget the way she described my clothes and my behaviour – I think she actually used the word wanton. It was a bewildering feeling, to be hated so much by someone I hardly knew. The Abby and Madison she described – happy, beloved, content – bore no resemblance to the people I had known.

‘Yes!’ Jeremy exclaimed. He wiped a hand over his mouth, smearing tomato sauce. ‘I have something here . . . wait.’ He got up and rooted in his rucksack, the same fraying rucksack he’d turned up in America with almost twenty years ago, when I had never been so glad to see someone in my life. He brought back a folder of notes. ‘Right. Ruth Janet Safran, born 1954, that was her, yes? Texas?’

‘It must be, yes.’

‘She died. Two years ago.’ Jeremy sat back, pleased with himself.

‘Oh.’

Ruth with her beady eyes, tissue balled in her hand on the witness stand. Wanton.

I shouldn’t have cared – she had hated me and helped condemn me to death – but some part of me mourned her. Was it because I would never be able to tell her the truth now, prove my innocence? Did some part of her know I’d never have hurt a child? Why else had she lied so much in her testimony? Hand on the Bible that she pretended to live by, selling me down the river, the jury frowning at me as this respectable Christian woman detailed all my faults. And now she was dead.

‘So not her then,’ I said dully.

‘Can’t be. She had cancer.’ Jeremy slapped the file with a sort of jolly energy.

‘She’s dead, Jer. It’s not a good thing.’

His face fell. ‘Oh. No. But it means we can eliminate her as a suspect.’

‘But then who did it? She was the only person I could imagine doing something like this. That means – what? It’s someone I haven’t even thought of? Some stranger? How am I supposed to fight this?’

‘Come on, we’ll solve it.’ He laid his hand over mine, sweaty and heavy. I pulled away. I wasn’t so sure.