‘There is no Mary!’ Ian was shouting now. ‘Leave Mary out of it.’ He stood. ‘I’d like you to leave. Neither my wife nor I have had anything to do with O’Brian’s death and we haven’t written any letters to that woman. Maybe you should ask her about all this, seeing as she’s so good at writing false reports. She would probably find writing a couple of letters to herself a breeze.’

‘Why would she write the letters herself?’

‘Why would she write a false report accusing Joanne of killing our child?’

‘I’m sure Ms Graham wrote up what she believed to be true from the evidence she saw.’

Ian leaned across the desk and placed his hands close to Nell. She didn’t move.

‘The reason we won the appeal was because that report magically went missing. So they had to examine the evidence again and lo and behold, everything she’d written in the report was a lie.

‘Now I have nothing more to say on the matter and in future, should you wish to speak to me or my wife, we will require a lawyer.’

Thirty-two

Then

We sit holding hands, Aoife and I, while the first police officer speaks and the second looks on with bored indifference. Turns out the police did care about us after all and I don’t know if we are more scared of them or of Alf when he finds out.

‘Do you know Alf Waites?’ the officer asks. The interview room feels hot, claustrophobic. The smell of smoke seems ingrained in the wooden edges of the worn tables, and the stale stench of previous occupants permeates every pore.

We nod.

‘How did you meet him?’

Aoife squeezes my hand. ‘He owns a café we go to, by the front.’

‘Do you spend a lot of time there?’ He smiles, trying to disguise the importance of the question.

‘Yes, after school mostly. Why do you want to know?’

‘Your social workers have raised a few concerns over the …’ he pauses, ‘… relationship you have with Mr Waites.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with it. He’s a friend. We are allowed friends, you know.’

‘Were you ever there alone with him after closing? Or say, at his flat?’

I freeze. How could the social workers know we go there? I try to think of anything we could have done to give the game away, but we always look clean, we don’t have bruises and we don’t skip much school. And anyway, why do they care – being at Alf’s means that we’re out most of the time, so surely that’s two less problem kids to deal with?

Our hands feel hot, sweat sticking them together. The policeman repeats his question. ‘Do you ever go to Mr Waites’s house?’