I buried my eight-year-old daughter. Eight years later a new student walked into my classroom with her face, and when I finally called that girl’s parents in for a meeting, the door opened and my own husband was standing in it.

I asked her, at the second meeting, whether Gethin had come to her house during those twelve days.

She said she would rather not answer that.

That is the answer. That is how people answer a thing that has a yes in it, and she knew I would know, and I think she was being as kind as it was possible for her to be.

PART 3

I asked the question that everybody asks.

I asked it of Dr Adisa, in a room, in the February, eight years after the fact, because I found out she was still at that hospital and I wrote to her and she agreed to see me.

She had the file. She had read it again before I came, which she did not have to do.

I asked her whether it would have made any difference.

She said no.

She said it plainly, without hedging, and then she took twenty minutes to explain why — what they had been looking for, what it was not, and why a sibling’s records from the first four years of life would not have moved anything.

She said: I would say the same thing under oath and I have said it under oath about other cases.