Reaching into the boot of her car, Alice’s eye fell for a second on an old picnic blanket there. In that moment, she returned to hell.
Ripped from the most ordinary of activities – loading up shopping in a car park – and transported back to the police interview room where she was shown a picture of a little girl on a different blanket in a different country who’d endured the most repellent sexual abuse.
Abuse, the officers calmly informed her, carried out and captured on the family camera by Alice’s husband.
The moment in the car park a fortnight ago is fairly typical for 45-year-old British GP Alice Wells*. At any moment her respectable, even mundane life can be overwhelmed by dark memories of marriage to a prolific paedophile whose secret perversion led him to help administer a child sex website.