Nothing, and here’s why: he had nothing to tell them. They were prodding him and saying, ‘Dob in Snow! Dob in Snow!’ But by this stage, even my own lawyer, Barrett, was on my case about it, and especially after what happened to Mark he kept saying, ‘Why not talk to the police, Snow? Make things easier on yourself. How much of what happened was really his fault?’

I could see what he was doing, trying to make me turn on Mark because Mark was dead, but there was nothing to turn on Mark about because we didn’t do anything. So I said, ‘No, I’m done talking to the cops. The stuff they want to pin on me is ridiculous. They can go to hell.’

I told Barrett, ‘I’m not saying another word, not about Aunt Beth, not about Agnes, not about anything.’ And I’ve kept my word on that. I said not one more word to police since then and the only thing I said in court when they brought me up on those stupid child-abuse charges was a big ‘NOT GUILTY’.

Barrett said, ‘You understand that the judge will go harder on you if you don’t plead guilty and you refuse to show remorse?’

I said, ‘You’re talking like I’m guilty of something!’

Then as soon as I got into court on the first day of my trail I could see what he’d been getting at, which was that I was gone. There was a mob up on the steps, hysterical people jeering and carrying on, mums from all these disabled groups who had brought their kids along to chant about rights for the handicapped, like I hadn’t been working for handicapped kids all my life.

Kids all propped up in wheelchairs, howling at me, while the police and Barrett were trying to get me from the prison van into the court.

As soon as I saw that mob I knew they’d find me guilty. There would be no point speaking up because people see kids like that and they think it’s not fair for them to have to live like that and somebody has to pay, so why not me?

Anyway we got inside, and that’s where Barrett started off on his plan to object to having any women on the jury. ‘No, I’m sorry, I must object, Your Honour,’ he’d say, ‘that juror is not acceptable to us.’ The prosecution isn’t silly. At one point, their senior counsel stood and said, ‘What is the basis of your objection, Barrett? Is it because the juror is wearing a skirt?’

So the game was up, and as you probably know, Jack, being an award-winning journalist and all, you only get to make so many objections without actually having a valid reason. So we ended up with four women on the jury, all of them completely biased against me from the start. Not that the men weren’t biased against me too. One man who turned up to court on the first day, for example, hadn’t trimmed his beard for at least twenty years, and was wearing a brown knitted jumper and wash ’n’ wear slacks, and he glared at me like I was dirt. And that was before even a day’s worth of evidence had been taken.