The rain is still coming down. It’s fine and drizzly. I like the rain. I always have, the heavier the better; the way it smells, the sound it makes as it clatters into drains, the whoosh of it as tyres part puddles. Even nicer if it’s accompanied by thunder and lightning. Most people think it odd, but Heather felt the same as me. I remember the sound of it drumming on the aluminium roof of the barn at her family’s caravan park. We loved that barn, with its mezzanine level where they kept the hay for the horses. They had so much land, acres of it. It had been her uncle Leo’s idea to set up one of the fields as a caravan park. We used to escape to that barn with our art pads, tartan blankets embedded with yellow hairs from the family’s ancient Labrador, Goldie, pulled over our knees as we tried to sketch the pond or the fountain in her garden, or the caravans in the field beyond, a ribbon of sea glistening enticingly in the distance. Her house was amazing: five bedrooms and a room they called the Den. So much grander than the cramped cottage with the low ceilings that Mum and I shared. Although Heather’s house wasn’t posh: it was lived-in, with old-fashioned furniture, sanded original floorboards and checked blankets thrown over the back of well-worn sofas, very different from the pristine yet sparsely furnished two-up-two-down we had.

Heather tried to teach me to ride. She had such patience, leading me endlessly around the paddock on Lucky, while I tried to get the hang of it. She would tell me funny stories of her mishaps, like the time she thought she’d lost the use of her legs after one of the horses bucked her off. ‘I was such a drama queen about it,’ she’d said, giggling, ‘lying in the middle of the field insisting I was paralysed. My instructor just told me to stop being silly and get back on the horse.’ Despite Heather’s best efforts I never took to riding. I preferred spending time grooming the pony and French-plaiting its tail.

Heather had a menagerie of animals in that barn – a goat she’d rescued, chickens, a pet rat. She spent time with each one, tending them with such love I could only watch with a mixture of awe and envy. My own mother never allowed me to have any pets, saying they were a tie, but Heather’s mum, Margot, was happy for her to have all sorts of animals parading about the place. They even had a peacock that strutted across the field, showing off its feathers. Sometimes, guiltily, I wished my mum was more like Heather’s.

I keep trying to imagine that same sensible girl as a grown woman walking into a house and shooting dead two people.