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aged six years, daughter of Frances and Alfred Wells (deceased), was found dead in the River Thames close to Teddington on Saturday, September 26. A citizen reportedly discovered the child’s body in the water around 8:15 Saturday evening and immediately called the emergency services. Catherine Wells was pronounced dead at the riverside at 8:52 p.m.
    Catherine was playing on the common land known locally as the Green in front of her home on The Avenue earlier that evening with another child, who is believed to be a family friend. The child, who cannot be named for legal reasons, will continue to be questioned by police today. Her family, who was attending a party in the street at the time, was not available for comment.
    Police are asking anyone who may have seen the two girls playing out on the Green or by the Thames on Saturday evening between the hours of 5:30 and 8:15 to come forward with information.
    Detective Inspector Dyer of the Metropolitan Police, who is leading the investigation, said, “Catherine Wells was not reported missing on the day of her death, and it is therefore crucial to our investigation to ascertain exactly what happened to her between the hours of 5:30 and 8:15 p.m. when her body was discovered.”
    I must have read it five times, maybe ten. It was front-page news, staring back at me in black and white. It wasn’t some image or memory from inside my head. It was confirmation — in print. It was what had happened in my first life. And yet still, it gave me nothing of what I needed to know. It didn’t tell me what I had done. I’d been playing on the Green. I remembered Frances telling us to go out and play. But a party? Being questioned by police? You’d have thought I would have remembered some or all of that. But I didn’t.
    I closed my eyes to try to think.
    All I could feel was guilt. I was covered in it, immersed; like I was standing in a pool of wet and sloppy algae, it clung on to me, and I could do nothing but cling on to it. And I saw the bows, the tartan bows, as they kept slipping in Catherine’s hair, sliding down from the top of her head until they were swinging around, nipping the back of her ears as she ran.
    â€œWe’re going to the river, Catherine. We’ll play hide-and-seek by the river.”
    That’s what I’d said to her. Because I wanted her to go and hide so I didn’t have to play with her anymore. I wanted my dad. I wanted to play with my dad. I wanted him to come and play like he’d said he would. I didn’t want Catherine. I wanted Catherine gone.
    I went back into the main part of the library and found a free computer with Internet access and started typing.
    The Avenue, Teddington.
    There it was. I could see it on the map. A stripe of black for the road, blue for the river, and a strip of green for the Green in between. It was so close. I reckoned I could walk to it easily from the library in under an hour.
    I memorized the route.
    â€œFind what you needed?” asked the librarian as I walked past the desk, like she was interested all of a sudden.
    â€œYes,” I said as I walked through the heavy wooden doors out into the street. “Yes, I did.”
    I was going to The Avenue. I was going back to the place where it happened. I was going to see it. The Avenue. And I hoped that when I saw it, I might remember what I had done.

 
    8
    I FOUND T HE A VENUE within forty minutes of leaving the library. It was about an hour’s walk from where I lived now with Rachel. It was absolutely mind-breaking to think that I lived so close to it. To think that out of the infinite number of places in this vast world, I had been born a second time, here again — so close to where I’d lived before.
    I stood in the road looking at a row of twenty or so large redbrick houses that stood opposite a piece of common land. This was the place I had remembered. The Avenue. I turned to look at the Green. There