I smile as Joe carefully places a turret on the top of the castle. ‘Children need to feel secure,’ Lynn had told me at our first supervised session at the parent unit. ‘They need consistency, boundaries and an understanding that home is home, that it won’t suddenly be ripped away from them.’

She was right, I knew that. A loving, stable home is what every child deserves. I was thinking about that as I sat in a prison visitors’ room three months ago listening to my friend Grace tell me the story of her life. She is due for release this month, though, as always with Grace, she kept the details of the latest crime to have detained her a secret from me. ‘You don’t need to worry about me, Lisa,’ she said, grinning at me with those stubby, chipped teeth. ‘Like I told you when we first met, I’m a survivor.’ I knew that. After all, she had been my protector during my time in prison, a wall of steel that the others couldn’t penetrate. But I also knew there was a little girl inside Grace who had never had the chance to grow up, never had the comfort and warmth of a proper loving home. That was apparent as I prepared to leave and Grace leaned forward and told me to stick with the counselling and the parenting classes. ‘That bairn needs his mother,’ she said, fixing her dark eyes on me. ‘We all do.’ Then she had slipped a piece of paper across the table. It was yellowing and crumpled, and when I opened it I saw it was a letter, written in Arabic. It had been sent to Grace when her case had made the papers again after my arrest. Her family in Iraq had recognized her father’s name and decided to get in contact. ‘I got a friend in here to translate it for me,’ Grace told me in her gruff Yorkshire accent. ‘Apparently, my mother died of cancer in 2014. Though they tell me she never gave up hope that she would find me again. Fancy that, eh?’ She’d taken the note from me then and placed it in her pocket, a reminder of the home she never knew, the mother she had lost.

The draining of the lake gave the villagers of Harrowby plenty to gossip about. The roads around the house were sealed off while divers excavated the watery grave. As I read the news accounts I knew that Jimmy and Val and the rest of them would be waiting eagerly for a discovery to be made, for the sorry tale of Grace and Isobel and Sarge to come to some sort of resolution. Yet I don’t think anyone, not even Jimmy with his overactive imagination, could have predicted what came next.

At Isobel’s trial it was revealed that when the divers drained the lake, as well as the remains of Grace’s father, Michael Lightowler, they found another body, that of a newborn baby, born just a few months after Michael’s death. Investigations revealed it to be the child of Isobel Carter and Steve Markham. At the trial Isobel told how she had given birth to the baby, a girl, at the vicarage early one morning while her father was at the church. After a few minutes she realized the baby was silent and, though she tried to resuscitate her, it was clear that her newborn daughter was dead. Terrified and confused, she wrapped the baby in a blanket and walked through the woods to the house on the lake. Once there, she laid the baby in the boat and rowed out across the water. The transcript from the court makes for heartbreaking reading as Isobel describes how she sang to her dead baby as she unwrapped her from the blanket and dropped her into the lake. ‘She was a tiny little thing,’ she told the court. ‘No bigger than a doll.’