Cress will carry the exact memory of the news bulletin into the next few days, and a version embellished by anecdote and dream into the rest of her life. Always, though, she will be able to hear the bare bones of the words, see them as if they are laid out in hollowed earth.

Police are questioning residents in Archer Street after a new-born baby was found abandoned in a front yard early this morning.

Later, after the searches and the interviews, after the confessions and the stories in the paper, her memory will become visual. She will still hear the words but a moving picture will overlay them, she will see the events like a dream sequence, in odd conjunction – the mottled blues of baby skin, a girl shrinking – as she tries and fails to make sense of them, to give them a chronology, to make them narrative. This is the only way she can begin to comprehend.

Kieran will remember too. He will remember standing at the bench in the kitchen, the cereal box raised over his bowl, feeling suddenly exposed, as if the man reading the seven o’clock news has told the world the kind of underpants he wears. He feels that everyone who looks at him will know.

He will always have a clear picture of himself, pouring cereal, watching it fall, each flake a piece of evidence, a word, a sharp glance of accusation. As he eats he will feel certainty swell in his belly. He will know that somehow, what has happened to Abby is all his fault.

And for Laura, as well, there will be a picture. There will be answers, finally, rather than questions, in what she sees when she opens the door of the shed that morning: a girl sitting on a stool in a long, off-white dress that is streaked and blotched with blood, an avenging angel in a painter’s smeared smock, her face open as an infant’s.