The fight had gone out of her then. She knew her husband too well. And so Sirikit became his. Until he left home to go to university. His father had made it clear to him that he was on his own now. He’d sold up and taken Sirikit to live in Thailand, where she couldn’t be further tainted by independent Western women. He never sent his son so much as a birthday card. Clearly, he was done with parenting.

Really, he should have learned from his father’s choices and found himself a younger version of Sirikit. But he’d grown beyond his father and his crappy job working for the council. He was a graduate, a man with possibilities his father had never known. He was better than his father. He’d find a perfect wife without having to buy one. He’d find one who wasn’t a whore.

For a while, he thought he’d done just that. She’d come for a job interview at the office where he used to work. On paper, she was well qualified as a market analyst but she was so shy she could barely answer the questions he and his boss put to her. She was demure and deferential and she couldn’t believe it when he asked her on a date as he showed her out after her failed interview. Even on that first date, her eagerness to please was obvious. He used every technique at his disposal to undermine her, and within weeks she was cowed and controlled. Her parents lived sixty miles away in York and the first measure of his success was to turn her from a devoted daughter to one who never called. In spite of her parents’ unease, they were married six months after that first meeting. By the end of the year, he had separated her from all her previous connections. He deliberately kept in touch with the only one of her cousins who lived in Bradfield because he didn’t want to be blindsided. Information was power.

As far as he was concerned, he’d achieved exactly what he set out to do. Digital technology provided so many more opportunities for power and control. She didn’t have to go out shopping; everything could be delivered from the internet, from groceries to sex toys. She didn’t even need a bank account. He okayed or vetoed all the online spending, paying with credit cards she had no access to. He gave her small sums of money to pay for things like bus fares when she had to take one of the kids to the clinic, but he made her account for every penny. And whenever she fell short of the perfection he demanded, he made sure she understood the magnitude of her failure. He instructed her in ways she would never forget; it encouraged her not to repeat her errors. And it was effective.