Jess

A woman has been arrested after a newborn baby was found dead in a plastic bag in London last week.

Each time it happens I think of that Suffolk baby.

Whose was she?

What happened to her?

And occasionally, when I search online for child abandonment, I find there's very little to explain what happens to the babies who are left.

And there's even less about their mothers.

I've spent decades as a radio producer researching true stories, and yet after all this time, I know no more about the Suffolk baby than I did as a child.

So I make a decision to go back, back to the Suffolk of 1987, to try and answer the questions that have gnawed at me for years.

What happened to that baby?

What does it do to you to know that you were left abandoned?

And perhaps even more intriguing for me are the questions about her mother.

Who would carry a beautiful, healthy baby girl to a lonely country lane and just dump her there in a plastic bag?

When I was eight, it had felt like a beguiling whodunit.

Later, I'd imagined a more nuanced story of trauma and loss.

But what I've uncovered over the last year is a story which is much more troubling than anything we dreamt up as children.

It's about family.

I don't think I've still fully accepted it, to be honest.

There's still a part of me that thinks this can't be happening, it's not real.

And about how secrets can, in the end, bubble up and destroy things.

Lies always come out, don't they?