The knowledge that I didn’t kill him doesn’t ease the guilt that keeps me awake at night. I’m still responsible in a lot of ways. I don’t suppose the guilt will ever go away. Guilt that I ran, instead of staying to help Ben that night. If I’d stayed with him, waited for him to come round, maybe he’d still be alive. Maybe it would have just postponed the inevitable. Maybe not. Maybe it was fate. Either way, the police opted not to charge me with assaulting Ben in the car park that night, in exchange for my full co-operation in building a case against my wife and her lover.

The police have since discovered a number of fairly elaborate plans – drawn up by Beth over the last year – to get rid of her husband. Mercury poisoning over a period of months. Tampering with the brakes of his car. Staging a botched burglary-turned-murder was another, in which Ben would end up killed in bed with one of his own shotguns. She also had a plan to spike his drink and push his unconscious body into the swimming pool. But she had never quite seen the right moment to turn any of those plans into reality – until I came along. Until the day William spotted his mother’s car in traffic and we followed her to a hotel. I provided the opportunity, by stumbling into the middle of something without any idea of what was really going on.

Alice saved me in the end. Even though she was the one with the most to lose. Both her parents gone. She’d tried in her own way to warn me of her suspicions that week – the emails from bret911 – but I hadn’t joined the dots. She’s living with her grandmother in Sunderland now, but I’m trying to stay in touch so that one day I can start trying to repay the debt I owe to her.

And me? I’m still in rehab for my leg. I don’t suppose I’ll ever run the hundred metres in twelve seconds again, but it’s been a long time since I could do that anyway.