The living room is illuminated by candlelight when I enter and the fire Isobel lit is still going strong. Joe is lying on his back holding a lion in the air.

I sit down on the armchair in the corner of the room, folding my arms across my chest to stop them from shaking. The yellow net curtain on the far window shivers as cold air blows in through the rotten frames. This place is the stuff of nightmares but I have no other choice now. I have made the news in one of the biggest national papers; most likely my face will have been splashed across the television and the internet too. If this place had Wi-Fi I could scroll through my phone, see what else is out there, but I figure that is a mercy. This way I can hide away, pretend it isn’t happening.

My thoughts turn once again to Grace. Now, sitting here in the house she shared with her father, watching my little boy playing on the rug, oblivious to it all, I think back to Jimmy’s words – but I can’t reconcile those descriptions with the woman I knew. Yes, Grace was eccentric and clearly troubled, but she wasn’t a killer, I’m sure of it. We shared that cell twenty-two hours a day for twelve months and during that time I’d opened up to her in ways in which I’d never done with anyone else before. Grace was my friend and she was good, I know that in my heart, and that goodness was reinforced by the gesture she made on the day I was released from prison.

When I left the prison gates there was nobody there to meet me, no familiar faces, no hugs, no reassuring voice telling me that everything was going to be all right. But why should there have been? Mark was still furious at what I’d done and had refused to bring Joe for visits the whole time I was inside. The idea that he would be standing outside the prison gates with open arms was absurd. My friends had disappeared, no doubt appalled at the story of this violent, dangerous woman and the frenzied attack on her poor, defenceless husband. And I didn’t hear from Beth and Harry at all. Beth, my oldest friend, with the watchful eyes, the one who had warned me about Mark and his controlling ways – even she had stepped away. As for family, well, there was no one left. My father had died and my mother had been so grief-stricken in the years that followed, she pretty much left me, a child, to fend for myself. My abiding memory of those years is of sitting by the fire in the living room of the Highgate flat eating cold rice pudding from a tin. That was my small link to my dad. He loved tinned rice pudding and we would often share one warmed up and spooned into two dessert bowls with a splodge of strawberry jam on top, on cold winter afternoons after school. After his death I couldn’t bring myself to perform the ceremony of the bowls and jam but eating the rice brought me closer to him and helped me block out the pain. As for my mother, she finally booked herself into therapy to deal with her overwhelming grief a few years later when I was about to start university. She seemed to respond well and for a few months it felt like I finally had my mother back, but then she met a new man, a property developer named Tony, and they embarked on a new life together in Portugal. I heard from her sporadically but it was clear she had new priorities and that her distant daughter wasn’t one of them. The gulf widened when I met Mark because I decided he was the only family I needed. After a while I stopped all communication with my mother and tried to put her and my old life behind me.