They didn’t want her letters arriving through the letter box of their suburban semi, stained by the sins of what she had done, and I suppose I wasn’t confident enough to challenge them. A small part of me almost didn’t mind. Every letter was an elegy to the past, a painful reminder of all that had happened. Every page rang with her distress, it made me feel guilty for being free when she was locked into her bedroom each night.

I skipped a week here and there – blaming homework and trips to the cinema with my friends – until I stopped writing altogether and, eventually, she did too. It was easier not to think about it. Easier to forget about everyone from that time and look to the future instead of behind me. Weeks turned into months and years until writing a letter became harder than not writing one.

By the time I’d grown up and realized what I had lost, she had been released from the unit and I had no idea where she was.

54

Coggsbridge’s only pub may be a cut-price version of the Hope and Anchor but the beer’s still cold. The handful of journalists left on the job have gathered here, their news desks clinging to a story not related to Brexit, refusing to let it die.

Lawrie and I make our way to a table where Garth, the photographer, is already nursing a pint. He salutes when he sees us.

‘Fucking waste of a day,’ he says.

We murmur in sympathy. Sara Carter has gone to ground and although we’re ever hopeful, none of us expects to see her back at the cottage.

When Sara was first charged with her parents’ murders, she received hundreds of death threats in the post. In an early letter to me, she’d explained, matter-of-factly, how one of her father’s patients had written to her at the unit, suggesting she should be put down like a dog. He had enclosed a choke chain to do the job.

The staff at Mayfields had intercepted the parcel, but one of the other residents – they call them that, not inmates – overheard them talking about it and word had spread.

These threats – which continued throughout her incarceration – were one of the reasons Sara was given a new identity. The prosecution had done an excellent job of undermining the sisters’ account of the suffering they had endured at the hands of their parents. That, and the relentless press coverage, had vilified her until she became a caricature of evil, as far as the national consciousness was concerned.

Plunging a pair of scissors fourteen times into the bodies of her sleeping parents was an act of terrible savagery. But it went beyond that. This ten-year-old girl, who looked like an angel, had been demonized by a public hungry – no, ravenous – for all the blood-soaked thrills of her parricide.