‘A good shock,’ she says. ‘The very best you could hope for, in the beginning. And I wasn’t stupid enough to think things would ever be like they were. I never expected that. Even though I hate to think about it, he must have suffered. He must have suffered terribly.’ Her eyes are wet with tears. ‘I know the kind of thing that must have gone on, and that makes me so very, very angry, I want to find those men and kill them, kill them in the most horrible way possible, with knives and burning and anything else I can think of. I want them to suffer the way they made him suffer. That’s one reason for the wine. It makes me sleep, and takes the edge off all that anger.’

Matt’s appetite is suddenly gone. He recognises the rage she feels; as his car eats up the miles of his daily drive, he’s regularly planned murderous, bloody assaults on his son’s captors, slow deaths and vengeful tortures.

‘That’s understandable,’ he says. ‘No one would blame you for that. We can plot revenge together, pool our ideas.’

She manages a teary smile.