‘You can’t be compelled to testify, no. But you could do it voluntarily. To put right a wrong. It would – send a message.’ It was so close to what Vix had said, what seemed like a lifetime ago, but wasn’t even weeks. I wondered what she would think of me now.

‘I can’t.’ And yet I kept butting up against these barriers, these lines I said I wouldn’t cross, only to be pushed over them. Life skewing wildly to the left.

He looked at me over the table for a long time. Then he stood up. ‘I’ll be in touch, Mrs Morris. If you change your mind, or you remember anything about Martha’s death, do let me know.’

I’d never been to a prison before.

I repeated that to myself with something like amazement. How lucky I’d been, to be able to say that. I was forty-three and I’d never been to a prison before. I looked around the waiting room at the other women – younger than me, I was sure, many of them, yet some were here with grandchildren. Waiting to see their sons, the children they’d birthed and raised who were now behind bars. I tried to imagine Benji here, in this room with flickering fluorescent lights, and vending machines that were sticky with fingerprints, and the sad box of toys in the corner. I couldn’t. Benji would never be anywhere like this – that was the point of all those piano lessons and bedtime stories and dentist visits. But then, I’d never have thought Jake would end up here either.

Karen’s text had come in shortly after I’d spoken to DC Devine. Payment for services rendered. He’ll see you, was all it said. She wasn’t going to make it easy for me, and why should she? I’d have to convince him myself.

At least it wasn’t an adult prison. I didn’t think it had sunk in what that meant, the difference in a few weeks’ accident of birth. Jake was in a glorified school, where they’d rap his knuckles and give him tough love. Not a grown-up jail with the rapists and thieves and killers. But maybe he would be, if convicted. He was over eighteen already, and I knew the boys in this place were at most twenty-one. He’d stabbed Mike in the liver. He almost killed him. It was planned, it was intended. The sentence for that would surely be long, unless I intervened.