I’d have killed for one picture of her but Claudia had managed to keep her out of the limelight. She was moving too – there was a FOR SALE sign up outside her house and she’d handed in her notice at the Gazette – some pap shot had emerged of her leaving the office holding a bouquet with a Sorry You’re Leaving! card on it. There was a rumour she was going to London.

Caro hadn’t gone to the press yet. Maybe she didn’t even know about me yet. Where did she think I’d gone that day in Rome? I hoped she didn’t know. I hoped she never would.

They hadn’t interviewed Seren either. She was always a flat hand and a carefully placed hood when the journalists came knocking at her door. As a surviving relative of a serial killer and the grass who’d set the police on my flaming arse, she was hot property and the media hounded her mercilessly, especially Guy Majors, that self-important hack with the Messiah complex.

So I had to stay, that’s all there was to it. If I wanted the sunshine – the stans, the adoration, the glory – I had to put up with the rain – hiding. Hiding from those who wanted me caught, raped, jailed, sectioned, dead or all of the above. Hiding from detectives like Nnedi Géricault whose constant proclamations that they were ‘closing in on an arrest’. Hiding from journalists like Guy Majors who was hounding my sister for interviews, trying to locate Claudia, striving to get the first glimpse of Ivy to see if she had three sixes on her head. All the more reason to have surgery as soon as possible and stay hidden forever.

Or to see if I could reach one of those machetes on the fireplace wall.

And eye up Tenoch’s jugular whenever he was close by.

The more I let the idea of killing him bud and blossom, the more it made sense. I would take down one of those machetes. I’d hide it under my pillow. I would wait until he was asleep, until the snoring started.

And then I would creep, creep, creep, into his room and slice off his head. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

There was one teeny tiny problem: a thirteen-stone bodybuilding cokehead called Paco.

Wednesday, 6 February – Hacienda Santuario

1. Mosquitoes
2. Cockroaches
3. Spiders
4. Rats
5. Paco

As far as I could gather, Paco had been Tenoch’s bodyguard from his cartel days and he had stuck around – dropping in to the Hacienda at any time of day, helping himself to whatever in the fridge, changing the channel on my radio or watching TV with his feet up on the furniture. He had the face and body of a Dream Boy but the personality of a rancid sanitary towel.