Like all good authors, I must disclaim liability here for any legal error or artistic license employed. The reality of a courtroom drama—which would be more than one week, and would have multiple adjournments, and many more witnesses!—is different from the fiction of it, and there are so many things I have manipulated for pace and plot.
No author is much of anything without their agent, and mine is my linchpin. Clare Wallace at Darley Anderson plucked me off the slush pile, held my hand through initial rejections, and remains there most days of my literary career—even (I am ashamed to say) when she is supposed to be on maternity leave, which neither she nor I am especially good at. I couldn’t be without her.
I am, too, nothing without my very incisive and kind editors at Michael Joseph, Penguin Books. I’m forever in debt to Maxine Hitchcock, who launched and made my first and second books bestsellers, but who does so very much more than that behind the scenes: author guidance, hand-holding, and so many updates I may as well be in the office with them all. Thanks to Eve Hall for her initial input into the script, and Matilda McDonald, who is so organized it’s unreal: Her edits are also forensic in their detail. Thanks, as always, to my brilliant marketer, Katie Bowden, and my publicist, Jenny Platt. You should really check out my Facebook page, because they’ve made it look beyond awesome. Thanks, too, to my copy editor, Shân Morley Jones, who went beyond this time, and actually made a timeline in order to line edit this beast of a script. I couldn’t have done it without her.
And thanks, too (I am delighted to write), to my US editor, Sally Kim, who just three days before the writing of these acknowledgments acquired this novel to publish Stateside. Thanks to Camilla Wray for brokering the deal during what was one of the strangest and loveliest weeks of my life. I didn’t sleep for three whole nights—from the moment I learned there was serious American interest—and basically existed on New York time the entire week, refreshing my inbox in the small hours and speaking to Camilla on my sofa at midnight while my boyfriend and cat slept upstairs. Once the deal was done, I ate my body weight in American-style burgers and s’mores and couldn’t believe my luck. Sally, you’ve changed my life. You get this novel so well, and I’m so grateful. Likewise, thanks to her inimitable assistant, Gabriella Mongelli, and all the Putnam people I have yet to meet.
Thanks, too, to the Darley Anderson rights team. I had a Chinese takeout when they sold my Chinese rights last week, so we are all winning here.
Never has a book been so research-heavy as this one. At the outset, I knew almost nothing about the medicine of smothered babies, nor how that would be explored in a court of law. And so it’s thanks to the following people that this book exists.
The first and largest thanks go to Patrick Davies and Cathy Cobley, who both responded to my many hundreds of emails during summer 2017 about, variously, retinal hemorrhages, MRI scans, initial police interviews, and more. The nomogram in this novel belongs entirely to Patrick: It was his idea and my entire plot turns on it.
Patrick also facilitated my attending a trial of this nature, which was instrumental in writing sensitively and credibly about it. It was the strangest two days up in Lincoln in a hotel, attending a court case with my father, and I will remember that forever. I owe Patrick and Cathy both so much. I’m constantly surprised by how many experts will do so much for so little in return.
Second thanks to my garden-variety medics who are always on hand to describe horrendous A&E scenes to me and to answer my sociopathic questions: Sami and my sister, Suzanne. Thanks, too, to the crew of lawyers—Alison Hardy, Ian Peddie, QC, Imran Mahmood (whose own novel is simply perfection), and Neil White. Thank you for making this a “real” courtroom drama with not a shouted “Objection!” in sight.
Thanks also to my police—Phil and Marie Evison and Alice Vinten. You’re always steering me away from hard-cop clichés and into reality, and I remain forever grateful.
And now—if you will bear with me—on to my personal thanks. Thanks to those people who are always on the end of a phone and who are riding this roller coaster with me. The people I tell about my foreign rights and press reviews know who they are, but Mum, Dad, Paul, and Sarah Wade, G. X. Todd, Holly Seddon (afternoon!), and Lucy Blackburn—you’re in the inner sanctum. Sorry I’m so annoying.
To Tom Davis, my old university professor, who taught me about free indirect speech, and then distinctive character voices, last summer: You saved my crazy multiple-narrator novel. I owe you my career.
Penultimate thanks, as ever, to my father. Last spring I turned up at his house and said, “I don’t think I can do justice to all of the witness vignettes in this novel.” He said to me, “Let’s choose one witness per week, and we’ll walk and talk about them, and sort it all out.” We talked about Bridget, the midwife, while walking around Sutton Park, and about Sophie Cole in a bluebell wood. Every time I left him, I knew my characters a little better. I mean, could you really ask for a better dad than that?
And finally, as ever, thanks go to David. I write about love, really, in all its forms, but for you it is the purest.