I remember a woman walking past as I hurled things out of the window – she must have been the one to call the police. And suddenly there’s something else in that image too. Thea wasn’t in the car all the time I was in the house; she was on the drive when I started to chuck Ian’s clothes out. At the time I had thought she was coming to my rescue, but she had scurried back to her car. Did she take the claw hammer from the garage then? The door was open, I remember that.

‘We found blood at the scene, and it matched yours,’ the inspector says.

‘I cut my hand,’ I say, holding up my damaged palm, which still has a plaster on it.

‘There was so much evidence pointing to Ian’s guilt,’ she says. I can see she is uncomfortable. ‘The blood wasn’t just in the house, it was on some of his clothes and in the boot of the car. We assumed he had taken your body somewhere.’

I remember seeing the red stains on his grubby T-shirts as I threw them out of the window. And I had rooted around in the car, trying to find my boots.

‘My hand bled so much, and I couldn’t stop it. My heart was really pumping that day. I have never been in such a rage in my life, so I guess my blood pressure was through the roof.’

The inspector gives me a sympathetic smile. ‘They probably laced your food or drink with something designed to fire you up, make you angry. Why did you think you had killed him, though?’

I explain about waking up in the bath and not being able to remember a single thing that had happened.

She shakes her head. ‘I suspect they used a drug called scopolamine on you as well. It makes you compliant, but you forget everything you’ve done.’

We’re both quiet for a moment as I take in the horror of what has been happening to me, and what could have happened had I stayed in that cellar.

The inspector continues: ‘The evidence against Ian stacked up further when we found the emails – all of them antagonistic, to say the least. Another neighbour – an older man – came forward to say that he had heard Ian shouting at you and witnessed a serious argument. So we had the blood, the aggression, the shouting, the abusive emails – and you were missing. Your phone hadn’t been used; you hadn’t withdrawn any money from your personal account or bought anything on a credit card; your car was in the drive, and your passport was in the house. We had to arrest him.’

‘What will happen to him now?’