‘That,’ she said, putting a finger to it, ‘that’s the one that got away.’

Barnes came forward in her seat, laying her legal pad down on the table next to her, trying her best to make out Jo’s handwriting.

Under the address were three lines.

Gabriel Wilzon. Donald Klein.

Acid. Bathtub.

Vale?

‘The thing is, though,’ Jo said, her throat taut, her emotions much harder to suppress now, ‘you have to make a decision. I still think about this case now. I think about what I might have missed, what I could have done better, how I might have wasted time chasing the wrong person for the wrong crime. But that debt you talked about earlier – that commitment you feel to the dead – at some point, if you don’t want it to rip your family apart, you have to make your peace with it and let it go. As hard as it is, and it’s hard, you need to accept that you’re not going to be as effective as a cop, you’re going to be twenty, thirty per cent less engaged than you should be, but you’re going to have a kid that actually talks about you as if you exist, and looks at you like you aren’t a total fucking stranger.’ She paused. ‘I just realized it all way too late.’

‘Because you were working this case?’

‘It definitely contributed to my blindness,’ Jo replied. ‘The whole time I was trying to figure out the truth, even years later, I overlooked things I shouldn’t have.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like, periodically, all the way through those first six years of Ethan’s life, Ira would complain about these headaches he was getting. I just thought it was his job, or working from home, or looking after Ethan during the day, so I told him to take painkillers and then left him to go to the next crime scene, and the next one, and the next one. Two months after he gave me that photo album, I got home one night, and Ethan wasn’t asleep in bed, he was lying on the floor of the living room, just sobbing.’

‘Because of Ira,’ Barnes said delicately, shuffling back in her seat.

‘Right.’ Jo nodded. ‘He’d suffered a brain aneurysm.’

Jo pushed a smile to the surface, an attempt to show some stoicism, but it was a phoney reaction, one that didn’t belong, and it vanished almost as soon as it formed.