I’m told that first thing in the morning and last thing at night are the very worst of times for nightmarish thoughts, but that during the day, if kept busy, it’s possible to put all terror aside so that the whole affair actually becomes unreal: it becomes something so ridiculously awful, the mind has surely just invented it overnight. And so it was with me. As the days went by, and with no sharp knocks on the door, or threatening missives on my phone from Amanda, it started to seem like a surreal dream which receded into the distance with every passing day. Thus one slips easily into a false sense of security. Only occasionally, when I took Mum for her flu jab, for example, and had to park outside the police station because the surgery car park was full, or when Dad, en route to pick up his new orthopaedic shoes, commented on the beauty of the Georgian courthouse in the market square, did I feel that sharp stab of reality: that loss of breath that takes one from feeling perfectly normal to sick with fear in seconds flat. The mind does have a remarkable coping mechanism, however, so that by the time I met Dan, I was, if not totally relaxed, at least relatively sanguine about the situation.

We’d both walked, and arrived at the pub door at precisely the same moment. We laughed at our staggeringly predictable middle-aged promptness, cheeks glowing, wrapped in our coats against the unseasonable nip in the evening air. Neither of us, having grown up in the country, were the least worried about walking down dark lanes on our own, or even cutting across a crisp ploughed field as I’d just done. Obviously one had to dress for the occasion, which involved reasonably sturdy boots, but my days of high fashion were long gone. Anyway, Imo told me they were frightfully edgy when she’d asked me to send her a photo of them, together with one of Dan – I’d directed her to Facebook – but only, she’d told me, if teamed with a floaty dress, which she’d picked out for me online last year, and which I dutifully wore. I’d wondered if the look wasn’t too young for me, but Dan seemed to give the whole ensemble an appreciative glance after we’d kissed each other’s cold cheeks and taken our coats off.

We were just being led by one of the waitresses to exactly the same corner table we’d had the last couple of times, which he assured me with a laugh he absolutely hadn’t organized, when his phone went. He frowned, irritated, but when he saw who it was, he took the call.

‘Right … OK … OK. Yes, stay there, if you can … I won’t be long … No, no worries, I’ll be back … Yes, quite sure.’