‘The suite, yeah. There were two bedrooms and he made a big deal of showing me mine, my own bathroom. And he said I could pick what I wanted off the room service menu and he told me to go and have a bath, there was a jacuzzi bath, and a rainwater shower, and when I came back out, dinner had arrived. Of course now I see that he didn’t want the staff to know who he had in the room.

‘So we had dinner and I ate, and he ate, and he got me a drink. Coke, at first. And then, he was having a rum and Coke, a Cuba Libre, he said, and where was the harm in me having one, and he wouldn’t tell if I didn’t, and why would I? So I had one, and then a second one, a third. He had a bottle of rum with him, and a big bottle of Coke. He wasn’t paying for drinks from the minibar. He was too cheap. I didn’t think of that till later, and it shouldn’t bother me, considering what happened, but it does … So, yeah, we were sitting there drinking and laughing and picking things to watch on the movie menu and that’s the last I remember until I woke up.

‘To this day, I don’t know if he drugged me, or if it was the alcohol or a combination of the two. But I knew something had happened. I knew straight away that he … he’d had sex with me. He didn’t deny it. Told me I loved it, that I was the one who wanted it, that I’d forced myself on him, and that he was a man, and what could he do? And that I was a bitch for doing it, and that I was the same as all the rest of the bitches, and that he should have seen I would be, and that we were finished, and that I had myself to thank, and that I needn’t think about telling anybody because if I did he’d kill me and, just to make sure I understood that, he hit me. Not on the face, on the belly, all around there, the back, and then he threw me on to the floor and raped me again and kept telling me that I was a bitch and fit for nothing. He dropped me home then, to the end of the street. The last thing he said to me as I got out of the car was that he’d kill me if I told. I believed him. I still do.’

She paused, picked up her glass with both hands, took a sip, and slowly replaced it on the table.