‘I was in touch with Polly, but obviously I couldn’t tell Dom that. I told her how he was, and she told me she could help me. We met in London a few evenings, just to get together the logistics of the plan. She would hire a car that looks vaguely similar to Dominic’s and she would wait in the lane on the night of the bonfire. I was to text Dominic from an unknown number and make out as though the message was from Pamela. I knew he’d go running, and when she didn’t turn up, well . . . I didn’t know he’d already arranged to meet her.’ Her face darkens. ‘There was every chance that things would go wrong, but then I would simply claim that Polly had come back, and I was delighted to see her, that we had decided to bury the hatchet. Instead, when Laurel followed me to the toilets, it was the perfect opportunity. I handed her over to Polly through a gap in the fence, and it was sheer luck that a witness saw Laurel getting into a car that could have been Dominic’s. In the dark, and from the back, a VW Touran looks a similar shape to a Porsche Cayenne. It almost went horribly wrong when she said it was dark-coloured instead of silver.’

I could testify to that – hadn’t I thought it was Dominic’s car on the drive when I first arrived? ‘But, Fran, all of this . . . hurt and upset. I honestly thought Laurel was dead. And Dominic . . . you’d really let him go to prison for something he hadn’t done? All because you thought he would leave you?’