I say ‘interview’ yet really there was nothing much to say. Mark had been to the station with Joe and told them where I was. Joe had confirmed that he’d been at the house with the big puddle next to it with his mummy and that I’d driven ‘for lots of hours’ in the car to get there.

Though Isobel is the one who called them, I saw in her eyes those last few moments in the room that she regretted what she had done.

Still, none of that matters now. Rather than anger or fear or bitterness, I feel a deep sense of calm as I walk down the lifeless corridor, a sense that the running is over now. This is where all the pain ends.

‘Just up here to the left,’ grunts the police officer, and as we pass another series of glass-fronted rooms my eyes are drawn to a person sitting at a desk in one of them. A slight, elderly man with curly grey hair and a pale thin face looks out at me as I pass. The vicar.

I stop for a moment and our eyes meet. And then something strange happens. He presses both his hands together, as if in prayer, nods his head and smiles at me. It’s a warm, gentle smile, one that penetrates my bones and seems to say that everything will be all right. It only lasts a few moments before the vicar turns his head and the officer and I continue along the corridor, but it is enough. It is enough.

‘Here we are,’ says the officer, stopping outside a blue-framed door at the end of the corridor. ‘You’ve got twenty minutes.’

He opens the door and a familiar face looks up at me. My heart sinks. I’d hoped that Mark might have brought Joe in to see me. But then why would he? After everything I’ve done.

‘What are you doing here?’ I say, taking a seat at the small square table.

‘I just wanted to see if you were okay,’ says Jimmy, leaning forwards, his hands clasped to his chest. ‘It’s all over the village what happened.’

I don’t answer him. Instead I just shrug. What more is there to say?

‘We just couldn’t believe someone so nice and respectable could be capable of that,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Crikey, you think you know a person and then … wham!’

‘You don’t know me, Jimmy,’ I snap, irritated at his presence, that it’s him sitting opposite me and not Joe. ‘We only met a few days ago.’

His face reddens then and he sits up straight.

‘I wasn’t talking about you,’ he says. ‘I was talking about her. Isobel.’

‘Isobel?’

‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘like I said just now, it’s all over the village. It wasn’t the daughter who killed the mad soldier. It was Isobel.’

‘She confessed?’ I say quietly, aware of the officer sitting in the chair behind me.

‘Apparently she confessed it to her dad years ago,’ he says, leaning closer to me. ‘But old Reverend Carter decided to keep it to himself. Probably told her to do some penance, three Hail Marys or something. Oh, hang on, that’s Catholicism, isn’t it? What do they do in the Church of England world when they’ve sinned? I’m not religious, see.’