I’m better now, about the children thing; I’ve got better since I’ve been on my own. I’ve had to. I’ve read books and articles, I’ve realized that I must come to terms with it. There are strategies, there is hope. If I straightened myself out and sobered up, there’s a possibility that I could adopt. And I’m not thirty-four yet—it isn’t over. I am better than I was a few years ago, when I used to abandon my trolley and leave the supermarket if the place was packed with mums and kids; I wouldn’t have been able to come to a park like this, to sit near the playground and watch chubby toddlers rolling down the slide. There were times, at my lowest, when the hunger was at its worst, when I thought I was going to lose my mind.

Maybe I did, for a while. The day they asked me about at the police station, I might have been mad then. Something Tom once said tipped me over, sent me sliding. Something he wrote, rather: I read it on Facebook that morning. It wasn’t a shock—I knew she was having a baby, he’d told me, and I’d seen her, seen that pink blind in the nursery window. So I knew what was coming. But I thought of the baby as her baby. Until the day I saw the picture of him, holding his newborn girl, looking down at her and smiling, and beneath he’d written: So this is what all the fuss is about! Never knew love like this! Happiest day of my life! I thought about him writing that—knowing that I would see it, that I would read those words and they would kill me, and writing it anyway. He didn’t care. Parents don’t care about anything but their children. They are the centre of the universe; they are all that really counts. Nobody else is important, no one else’s suffering or joy matters, none of it is real.

I was angry. I was distraught. Maybe I was vengeful. Maybe I thought I’d show them that my distress was real. I don’t know. I did a stupid thing.

I went back to the police station after a couple of hours. I asked if I could speak to Gaskill alone, but he said that he wanted Riley to be present. I liked him a little less after that.

“I didn’t break into their home,” I said. “I did go there, I wanted to speak to Tom. No one answered the doorbell . . .”

“So how did you get in?” Riley asked me.

“The door was open.”

“The front door was open?”

I sighed. “No, of course not. The sliding door at the back, the one leading into the garden.”

“And how did you get into the back garden?”

“I went over the fence, I knew the way in—”

“So you climbed over the fence to gain access to your ex-husband’s house?”

“Yes. We used to . . . There was always a spare key at the back. We had a place we hid it, in case one of us lost our keys or forgot them or something. But I wasn’t breaking in—I didn’t. I just wanted to talk to Tom. I thought maybe . . . the bell wasn’t working or something.”

“This was the middle of the day, during the week, wasn’t it? Why did you think your husband would be at home? Had you called to find out?” Riley asked.

“Jesus! Will you just let me speak?” I shouted, and she shook her head and gave me that smile again, as if she knew me, as if she could read me. “I went over the fence,” I said, trying to control the volume of my voice, “and knocked on the glass doors, which were partly open. There was no answer. I stuck my head inside and called Tom’s name. Again, no answer, but I could hear a baby crying. I went inside and saw that Anna—”

“Mrs. Watson?”

“Yes. Mrs. Watson was on the sofa, sleeping. The baby was in the carry-cot and was crying—screaming, actually, red in the face, she’d obviously been crying for a while.” As I said those words it struck me that I should have told them that I could hear the baby crying from the street and that’s why I went round to the back of the house. That would have made me sound less like a maniac.

“So the baby’s screaming and her mother’s right there, and she doesn’t wake?” Riley asks me.

“Yes.” Her elbows are on the table, her hands in front of her mouth so I can’t read her expression fully, but I know she thinks I’m lying. “I picked her up to comfort her. That’s all. I picked her up to quieten her.”

“That’s not all, though, is it, because when Anna woke up you weren’t there, were you? You were down by the fence, by the train tracks.”

“She didn’t stop crying right away,” I said. “I was bouncing her up and down and she was still grizzling, so I walked outside with her.”

“Down to the train tracks?”

“Into the garden.”

“Did you intend to harm the Watsons’ child?”

I leaped to my feet then. Melodramatic, I know, but I wanted to make them see—make Gaskill see—what an outrageous suggestion that was. “I don’t have to listen to this! I came here to tell you about the man! I came here to help you! And now . . . what exactly are you accusing me of? What are you accusing me of?”

Gaskill remained impassive, unimpressed. He motioned at me to sit down again. “Ms. Watson, the other . . . er, Mrs. Watson—Anna—mentioned you to us during the course of our enquiries about Megan Hipwell. She said that you had behaved erratically, in an unstable manner, in the past. She mentioned this incident with the child. She said that you have harassed both her and her husband, that you continue to call the house repeatedly.” He looked down at his notes for a moment. “Almost nightly, in fact. That you refuse to accept that your marriage is over—”

“That is simply not true!” I insisted, and it wasn’t—yes, I called Tom from time to time, but not every night, it was a total exaggeration. But I was getting the feeling that Gaskill wasn’t on my side after all, and I was starting to feel tearful again.

“Why haven’t you changed your name?” Riley asked me.

“Excuse me?”

“You still use your husband’s name. Why is that? If a man left me for another woman, I think I’d want to get rid of that name. I certainly wouldn’t want to share my name with my replacement . . .”

“Well, maybe I’m not that petty.” I am that petty. I hate that she’s Anna Watson.

“Right. And the ring—the one on a chain around your neck. Is that your wedding band?”

“No,” I lied. “It’s a . . . it was my grandmother’s.”

“Is that right? OK. Well, I have to say that to me, your behaviour suggests that—as Mrs. Watson has implied—you are unwilling to move on, that you refuse to accept that your ex has a new family.”

“I don’t see—”

“What this has to do with Megan Hipwell?” Riley finished my sentence. “Well. The night Megan went missing, we have reports that you—an unstable woman who had been drinking heavily—were seen on the street where she lives. Bearing in mind that there are some physical similarities between Megan and Mrs. Watson—”

“They don’t look anything like each other!” I was outraged at the suggestion. Jess is nothing like Anna. Megan is nothing like Anna.

“They’re both blond, slim, petite, pale-skinned . . .”

“So I attacked Megan Hipwell thinking she was Anna? That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. But that lump on my head was throbbing again, and everything from Saturday night was still deepest black.

“Did you know that Anna Watson knows Megan Hipwell?” Gaskill asked me, and I felt my jaw drop.

“I . . . what? No. No, they don’t know each other.”

Riley smiled for a moment, then straightened her face. “Yes they do. Megan did some childminding for the Watsons . . .” She glanced down at her notes. “Back in August and September last year.”

I don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine it: Megan in my home, with her, with her baby.

“The cut on your lip, is that from when you got knocked down the other day?” Gaskill asked me.

“Yes. I bit it when I fell, I think.”

“Where was it, this accident?”

“It was in London, Theobalds Road. Near Holborn.”

“And what were you doing there?”

“I’m sorry?”