And that was the worst symptom of all: I missed her. And I couldn’t understand why. I was a serial killer, for fuck’s sake. Days before I had chopped a woman to pieces and stuck her head on a singing Santa. Serial killers don’t have feelings. Rose West needed shovels, not cuddles. It takes a lot for me to cry. Even when Britain’s Got Talent wheels out the hydrocephalic magician who’s lost his mum to cancer and they play ‘Snow Patrol’ when Simon hits the Golden Buzzer – I’m dry as a bone. Craig is the one who always buries his head in What Car? so I can’t see his quivering lip.

But Ivy, apparently, was the difference.

I googled Seren while I was in the Business Centre. I knew I shouldn’t have but I wanted to see her face. To see some shred of home. In an ordinary world – in that damn parallel universe where I imagine the correct version of me lives – Seren would be on the end of the phone giving me advice and parcelling up second-hand onesies.

But we weren’t in that universe – we were in this one. And I’d given Ivy up so I could keep on killing. And my sister was the one who’d called the cops.

Seren had no online presence to speak of but her nine-year-old daughter Mabli’s got a vlog where she talks about her pets and does the odd children’s book review and sometimes she’ll appear in the background, folding washing or dancing along to a song. I must have watched twenty videos. Most of them were Mabli talking about various pets dying on her. Hamsters, guinea pigs, fish. She was fed up with creatures she loved dying. I felt that.

I googled Wherryman and Armfield too, the solicitors where Heather Wherryman worked – the only person who could tell me what I needed to know, that Ivy was OK. I still had her business card in my purse. My fingers itched to dial her number.

But deep down somewhere, a little thought owl was unravelling from its deep winter’s sleep and flapping its wings.

Don’t! it squawked. Don’t do it! Too soon! Too soon!

And, of course, the pesky owl was right.

Aside from a few barflies propping up the counters and the distant trill of jazz coming from the Chill-Out lounge, there didn’t seem to be anyone else about as I wandered, through the meandering corridors, up and down deck, as lonely as a twat.

Until I stood at the railings on the top deck, looking out onto the blackest sea, allowing the cold to seep through my clothes, my bones, and a woman in a grubby blue dressing gown appeared, carrying a crying baby.