As for my part in it all, my involvement in baby Lana’s story, the general feeling is I’ll get off lightly. I too have suffered enough will be the view: my murdered husband, my murdered child. Yet I should be punished, I want to be. I have carried the guilt for decades for what I did to Nadia’s grieving family. Her parents died without ever knowing the truth and for that I think I should pay.

Still, by hook or by crook, the mess will be made sense of, people will be punished while others will go free, the feeding frenzy will eventually die away until someone else’s tragedy replaces it. Of course, what almost nobody knows, what they will never know, is what Rose confessed to me the night of Nadia’s death, the night they brought little Lana to our door. They don’t know that when Doug took Oliver to the kitchen to make up the bottle of formula, Rose turned to me, her eyes wide with panic.

‘Beth,’ she said, ‘Beth, I have to tell you something.’

I looked at her stricken face in surprise. ‘What’s the matter? What is it, Rose?’

And that’s when she told me. ‘I pushed her, Beth,’ she whispered. ‘I pushed her.’

I stared at her in shock.

‘I arranged to meet her, I wanted to explain to her that she needed to stop, that she’d never have Oliver, that he was my husband and she had to stop her harassment. But she was so arrogant, so awful, taunting me, goading me, telling me how Oliver had pursued her, that he … that he slept with lots of his students. It was lies, all lies! I lost my head, I don’t know what happened, I just wanted her to stop. To stop talking, stop ruining everything. I thought of my darling little daughter and our lovely life and this girl, this silly, awful girl, was laughing at me, laughing at all of us, telling me I had no idea, that I was deluded, that everyone at the university knew what my husband was really like.’

‘Rose,’ was all I could say. ‘Oh God no, Rose.’ I didn’t want to hear any more, I wanted her to stop, to block my ears from hearing it.

‘I pushed her. Oh, Beth. I pushed her. I wanted her to die, just for a moment, I wanted it. Even as she fell … for a second I was glad.’ She looked at me, her eyes full of horror. ‘Oh, Beth, what has happened … what has happened to me? What am I going to do?’