.
dc-ea96-5ee1-a359-d132e610b281">
Innocent or Guilty?
A. M. TAYLOR
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
One More Chapter
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Annie Taylor 2019
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Annie Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008312930
Version: 2019-08-23
For my parents
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Then
Chapter 2. Now
Chapter 3. Then
Chapter 4. Now
Chapter 5. Then
Chapter 6. Now
Chapter 7. Then
Chapter 8. Now
Chapter 9. Then
Chapter 10. Now
Chapter 11. Then
Chapter 12. Now
Chapter 13. Then
Chapter 14. Now
Chapter 15. Then
Chapter 16. Now
Chapter 17. Then
Chapter 18. Now
Chapter 19. Then
Chapter 20. Now
Chapter 21. Then
Chapter 22. Now
Chapter 23. Then
Chapter 24. Now
Chapter 25. Then
Chapter 26. Now
Chapter 27. Then
Chapter 28. Now
Chapter 29. Then
Chapter 30. Now
Chapter 31. Then
Chapter 32. Now
Chapter 33. Then
Chapter 34. Now
Chapter 35. Then
Chapter 36. Now
Chapter 37. Then
Chapter 38. Now
Chapter 39. Then
Chapter 40. Now
Chapter 41. Then
Chapter 42. Now
Chapter 43. Then
Chapter 44. Now
Chapter 45. Then
Chapter 46. Now
Chapter 47. Then
Chapter 48. Now
Chapter 49. Six Weeks Later
Chapter 50. That Night
Chapter 51. Now
Keep Reading …
Acknowledgements
Also by A. M. Taylor
About the Author
About the Publisher
They find the body on a Sunday.
He didn’t return home the night before, which isn’t unheard of, but when he doesn’t make it back in time for church and he still isn’t home by the time they return, the family begins to worry. His mother rings the police and they tell her to sit tight, while his father calls his brother and gathers up a few of the boy’s friends to set up a search party.
He’s lying in the woods.
He has been all night.
He’s face down in the mud. There’s blood on the side and the back of his head, matting down his hair, pressing it to his skull. It’s a friend who finds him, calling out for the boy’s dad when he does so, the father running wildly towards him, pushing him out of the way, slipping in the mud.
He makes the mistake of moving him. Grabbing him by the shoulders to shake him awake in desperation. When he pulls his hands away they’re covered in blood and as the stories soon will go, the father screams, grief curdling at his throat. The police are called again and this time they come, sirens wailing on the damp air, a parent’s desperate