A lot of the work I take on doesn’t end with the completion of what was in the job description. Some of my clients, particularly the elderly ones, need a lot of aftercare, and I have to watch it that I don’t spend too much unpaid time looking after them.

Mary Griffin was a good example of what I mean. Not elderly in her case, early thirties with a three-year-old daughter called Amy. I’m often employed through social services and charities. I was put on to Mary by a Worthing-based organization that helps in cases of domestic violence.

As a young woman, she had been well placed, owning a two-bedroom house in Ferring, which she had inherited from her parents. She had a job she enjoyed, working as a waitress in Shoreham-on-Sea, and her life appeared to be set fair. Until she met and married the wrong man. Craig Griffin.

The pattern was achingly familiar. Though charming and considerate during the wooing, once married, Craig turned out to be the standard-issue coercive husband, whose manic jealousy had cut Mary off from friends, family, and any form of independent social life. He started to get paranoid about her relationships with the other staff at work and the customers. He took to spending his evenings parked opposite the restaurant where she worked, watching his wife through the glass frontage. If he thought her to have been over-friendly with any of the diners, she would pay for it when she got home. Eventually, Craig’s presence became so irksome to her employers that she had to give up the job.

Like many women in such circumstances, sheer terror had prevented Mary from doing anything about his behaviour. She had endured bullying and beatings, even through her pregnancy, and had kept quiet about the situation because she saw no one she dared tell about it. And also, as is so often the case in such situations, she genuinely loved her husband.

Only when he started turning his anger against their daughter did Mary find the courage to speak up and contact the charity. They had acted with commendable speed, informing the police about her husband’s violence, and removing Mary and Amy to the safety of a women’s refuge. They then embarked on the difficult process of starting legal proceedings against Craig Griffin.

As it turned out, he made things easy for them. In a fury of frustration at his inability to trace his wife, he had refocused his violence on the house. Literally taken a sledgehammer to it. The furniture had been reduced to matchwood and the electrical equipment smashed to pieces. Anything featuring glass – the television, the doors of cupboards, the microwave and the washing machine – had been shattered. When questioned by the police, Craig Griffin did not deny that he was responsible for the destruction. So, he had been arrested for that and was on remand, while the charity’s lawyers tried to assemble a case against him for the more serious crime of domestic abuse. As usual, the problem was lack of witnesses. Mary had not been hospitalized after any of her husband’s attacks, so there was no paper trail in the medical records. It came down to her word against his. But the lawyers had been in that situation many times before and were hopeful of charging him.