I squeezed her neck, making her squirm and gasp as my own face ignited. And the life force seeped away from her the tighter I held on. She was dying in my hands. Her breaths became weaker. Veins bulged in her skin, eyes bulged. And it felt exquisite. I loved it. I was home again. The thrill was too much. An orgasm heightened and rippled through my body.

She was almost there, almost dead beneath my fingers.

‘Let her go! Hilary – you’ve got to let her go! You’re killing her!’

But Hilary wasn’t my name. That’s why I didn’t hear him at first. Right then, I only knew Rhiannon.

He was too strong and pulled me back with his free arm until me and him and Ty lay on our backs and the woman was disorientated and gasping, scrambling to her feet, coughing and stumbling from alley wall to wall, bleeding all over her face, clutching her neck. She glanced back, briefly, before tripping over her feet and running off, vanishing round a corner.

And I lay on those cobbles, staring up at a narrow blue sky. Shaking.

‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ Ryan soothed.

He thought I was scared. He thought I needed placating as much as Ty did. But I wasn’t scared at all. I was shaking with ecstasy. I felt like I had been lost but now I knew where I was going. I finally felt like myself again.

Thursday evening, 10 January – at sea

1. That roving reporter on Up at the Crack when she does her reports from a mega loud factory so her foghorn voice grates even more than usual
2. Holidaymakers who hold their tablets above their heads to take pictures
3. People who go to Italy but don’t like the food aka Eddie Callahan. What the fuck is there not to like? Carbs and cheese. Fair enough if you’ve got an intolerance but for fuck’s sake.
4. The whole cast of Stranger Things
5. Davina McCall. You’re fit, we get it

The irritating thing about being a hero when you’re an on-the-run serial killer is you have to play it down. Despite the glorious pride and excitement that fizzed in my chest like shaken cherryade, I couldn’t dine out on my daring rescue of Ty. I couldn’t crow about it as much as I wanted to. As much as Rhiannon wanted to. I had to dial up the Hilary Act for this one.

Jayde hadn’t stopped crying since we got on the coach. ‘There were loads of witnesses,’ she sniffed. ‘They’d be able to give a good image of her.’

‘We should tell the cops,’ Ryan whispered into Ty’s sleeping head as the coach juddered back along the endless motorways out of Florence. ‘They should be told, in case she tries—’ He buried his face into his son’s hair.

I was sat behind them, alone again, naturally.