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tried not to look him in the face.
    â€˜So . . .’ he said, after what seemed a long silence, ‘. . . have you always had this urge to hang round little girls?’
    He was getting the wrong end of the stick. I had to explain it to him. ‘It’s not just little girls,’ I said. ‘It’s little boys, too.’
    â€˜Is it?’ he said. ‘Really?’ And somehow he didn’t say it in a kind way. Then he went on, ‘Can you tell us what’s happened to Bethany Jones?’
    â€˜Happened to her? Why should I be able to tell you that?’
    â€˜I just thought you might be able to.’ Detective Inspector Bracken was looking at me in the way Papa used to, when I’d done something wrong and he was just waiting for me to own up to it. I always did own up; Papa knew he only had to wait. But with Detective Inspector Bracken it was different. There was nothing for me to own up to.
    â€˜Save us the trouble of doing it,’ he went on after a silence. ‘Save us the trouble of telling you what’s happened to Bethany Jones.’
    And then he did tell me what had happened to her. It was horrid. I don’t like things like that. It’s like kissing, and people’s secret bits . . . I don’t like it.
    Apparently she’d been attacked in the park. She’d been dragged off into the bushes near the children’s playground. Then she’d been ‘sexually assaulted’. And then she’d been beaten on the head with a stone until she was dead.
    â€˜Bethany – dead?’ I said in disbelief. ‘But I was talking to her only yesterday.’
    â€˜Yesterday,’ Detective Inspector Bracken repeated. ‘Were you? And what about today?’
    â€˜No, I didn’t see her today.’
    â€˜Where were you, Mr Bowman,’ asked Detective Inspector Bracken, ‘between three-thirty and four-thirty this afternoon?’
    I smiled at the question. Anyone who knew me at all – and granted there weren’t that many people who did know me – but anyone who knew anything about me would know the answer to that. I was where I am every weekday afternoon at that time.
    â€˜I was here,’ I replied. ‘Here watching Children’s BBC. I always am. Go on, I can prove it. You ask me any questions you like about this afternoon’s Children’s BBC. I bet I can give you the right answers.’
    Detective Inspector Bracken smiled wryly, and looked across at my video recorder. ‘Yes, I’m sure you can, Mr Bowman. Pretty unusual habit for a grown man, I’d have thought, videoing children’s television programmes . . .’
    â€˜Oh, but I like to have a full record,’ I told him. ‘I feel awful if I think I’ve missed a single minute of Children’s BBC.’
    â€˜I see,’ he said. But he didn’t look at me as if he did see. Soon after that, he said he wanted me to accompany him and the others to the police station, if I ‘didn’t mind’. No, I said, I didn’t mind. I knew it didn’t do to be difficult with forceful people like Detective Inspector Bracken. Best behaviour, Edmund, best behaviour.
    They kept explaining things to me. They kept stopping and checking that I understood what was going on. Then, after I was charged, they got a lawyer for me, and she kept explaining things too. And yes, I did understand. I understood the words and I understood what they meant. What I didn’t understand was how they could manage to get it all so wrong.
    I think a lot of the trouble was Detective Inspector Bracken. His manner, the way he put things, was so like Papa’s that . . . well, I still found it very difficult to argue with him. He’d say something which was complete nonsense and I’d . . . well, I’d try to point out, sort of, why what he was saying wasn’t true, but somehow my words didn’t come out right.
    I felt very trapped. I