There’s a lengthy transcript of the press conference, five columns long, accompanying it, which I read with trembling hands.

At one point the reporter asks Mark if he believes Joe is in danger. ‘I hope not, but then Lisa is so unpredictable, I can’t rule that out,’ Mark replies. At the end of the report there’s a summary of the case, of what had gone before and of the story I have spent the last few days trying to rewrite.

In January 2018, Lisa Ward was released from prison where she had served twelve months for assaulting her husband. Mr Ward was left with life-changing injuries to his face and torso after being attacked with a broken glass. He was granted full custody of their child, 3-year-old Joe, but had recently allowed Mrs Ward supervised visits. It was during one of those visits, on 9 December, that Mrs Ward abducted Joe. Police have advised the public not to approach Mrs Ward who they describe as a volatile and dangerous woman.

I stay sitting at the table, unable to move. Mark’s stricken face looks back at me from the newspaper, his words now imprinted on my brain: Please, just bring my boy home.

I hear Joe playing merrily in the room next door but his high-pitched lion roars set me on edge. I need to be with him now, I tell myself, as I close the newspaper and get up from the table. Now more than ever. The passageway is dark and I shiver as I think of the stories attached to this house, the mad father and the girl. Grace.

Arriving at the prison was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. The invasive body searches, so intimate and yet detached, as though the guards were dealing with a piece of meat, the screams and shouts from the other cells as I was walked to mine, flanked by two sombre-faced guards, the smell of bleach and excrement in the air, the panic as the cell door closed behind me. I felt like I had arrived at the gates of hell and that the only way I could possibly get through it was by shutting down. So for the first few weeks I did just that. I didn’t speak, barely ate, just lay on my bed with my eyes closed thinking about Joe’s lovely face.

I was so spaced out that I barely noticed the woman in the bunk above me until sometime in the third week, when I was crying myself to sleep yet again.

‘You got to toughen up.’

The voice was gruff, northern, and in my agitated state I thought for a moment that it was coming from inside my head.

‘If you want to survive in here you got to stop crying or they’ll ’ave you.’

It was then I realized the voice was coming from above me. I didn’t answer her but I did stop crying and after that something changed. The woman, who introduced herself the following day as Grace, became my confidante, a friend of sorts. Thinking about it now, I can’t imagine I would have survived prison if I hadn’t been put in her cell. Though we couldn’t have been more different, Grace got me through those first few weeks, she toughened me up, made me see that life was worth living and that I had to be strong for the sake of my child. I never found out what crime Grace had committed as she never told me much about herself or her background, though I could see that the other women were wary of her, this strange, straggly-haired woman with fierce eyes. They used to call her ‘Mad Grace’ or ‘the wild woman’, though never, I noticed, to her face. Nobody dared challenge her, that was clear. At the time, I was so focused on my own survival, on getting through the prison ordeal one day at a time, that I gave little thought to the crime that had brought Grace there. She was kind to me and, in my terrified state, that was all that mattered.