Jess

It makes her feel something more like anger.

She's thinking perhaps whoever left her there didn't necessarily want her to be found.

And for the first time in all these years, she says it strikes her that if she hadn't been picked up that morning, she might not have survived.

As Jess leaves the Verge and says goodbye to Jean, Jean repeats her theory that only someone local could have known about that lane.

And then she drops one more vital clue.

For the police, this is an old case, long forgotten and largely mothballed after Jess was adopted back in 1988.

But I reckon there must still be a case file somewhere.

I begin making some inquiries of my own, and I send off a request to Suffolk Constabulary, asking to see any paperwork they have about the investigation.

And while I wait, I try to track down the police officers who were involved.

Their names aren't on social media, so I trawl the electoral register looking for addresses.

It seems they all still live in Suffolk, and I end up driving round the county, parking in unfamiliar streets and posting letters through front doors.

I assume it's going to be straightforward, that they'll be amused, flattered even, to dust off an old and puzzling case.

But I'm wrong about that.

The detective who's in charge of the case doesn't want to talk about it, and neither do the two other retired officers who also worked on it.

I'm struck by this wariness I've touched on for something that happened so long ago.

It's only when I start to dig into the laws around child abandonment that I begin to see things more clearly.

Now, I know this might sound simplistic, but I simply hadn't thought of this story as a crime.

For us as kids, any police involvement was just about helping to reconnect mother and baby, almost like a missing person case.

And the police were keen to find the missing mother, but Jess's abandonment was still investigated as a crime.

The roadside verge was treated like a crime scene.