A bag of nerves over the long weekend, which seemed longer than ever, she’d wandered around the house like a zombie, spending the entire three days alone, despite invitations from friends. She didn’t want to see anyone, that way she could avoid difficult conversations. She’d tried to watch Twelve Angry Men again, but her mind kept drifting. Thinking about Laura – and dear Cassie. What had happened to them? Were they safe? How could she trust her caller? What if they were already – God forbid . . .

She pushed that thought away, just as she had done repeatedly since the nightmare began. They weren’t dead. Her captor knew full well that if she succeeded in delivering the right verdict and then she found out something had happened to Laura, she would go straight to the police and tell them everything. There would then be a retrial, and from the research she had done, in cases where there was a real danger of tampering with a jury, the case could be heard by a judge alone, without a jury. In that scenario, from what evidence she had heard against Gready, he wouldn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of going free.

She’d excused herself from meeting Alison on Saturday, mindful they would be watched and their every word recorded, and she hadn’t felt up to attending the barbecue at their house on Sunday. A couple of other friends had phoned to see how she was, and she hadn’t picked up, letting their calls go to voicemail.

Throughout the weekend she had repeatedly tried to contact Laura and Cassie. With no response. A late glass of wine on Saturday night had helped her fall asleep, but only to wake at 2 a.m. with a dull stomach ache, pins and needles in her fingers, and her scalp feeling like a rat was clawing its way over it.

Meg had felt briefly better after a long run along the seafront on Monday morning, but the endorphin high had long worn off by the afternoon. She had planned to do a very early run this morning, too, but she’d felt too tired when the alarm went off. Now she was having to go into battle to save her daughter’s life after another totally sleepless night. And it seemed, from the talk in the jury room just now, that most of the jurors had already made up their minds to convict.

Addressing the jury, the judge went straight into his summing-up, walking them through detail by detail of the evidence they had heard from both sides. He took particular care to refer back to his earlier caveat about Michael Starr’s motives when recounting all the points that Starr had made against Gready, and reminded the jury again that he had already pleaded guilty to all of the counts that Gready faced.