It was the anxiety that triggered it. Fear like I have never known before. It reached an unbearable crescendo, and then something snapped. I vanished, and another me came into being. She was – well, she was unstoppable.

That new Louise knew more than I did. She knew she had to get the body of this man out of the house. She could see herself being jailed for something she had no way of defending herself against. She had to stop it happening.

And, as a side point, isn’t this refreshing? An alter ego that is actually looking out for Sober Louise. One who clears up the mess instead of making it. I can’t help liking her.

It felt very much like watching someone else as she set to work. She knew she had to do it while it was still dark, and that it would be better to do it naked, so she stripped off, and put my going-out clothes into the wash. She noted, as she did it, that I was missing a diamanté earring but dismissed it. It didn’t matter if it turned up somewhere on the streets if the crime scene was going to be in my front garden.

She put on a pair of disposable cleaning gloves, and heaved him out of bed. He was unbelievably fucking heavy but she did it anyway.

Did you wince again just there? Did you feel more revolted by the swearing than you did by this vision of your wife dragging a well-muscled dead man out of our marital bed? I almost want to know.

Anyway, she was a determined person, this newly born Louise. After a good twenty minutes, she’d made it outside with the body. And having Dettol-ed the knife in case she’d touched it at some point, she put it down next to him and stood back to take a look.

There wasn’t enough blood, she realised. Nobody would believe he’d been attacked there. She needed to make it look like he’d come from somewhere else.

So she took his shoes off him, soaked them in blood off the mattress, slipped them on to her own feet (over some socks) and left a fake trail from the pavement to where he lay, making sure to step only on the marks she’d already left on her way back.

Doing it, she thought about dead men’s shoes, and it made her laugh. She actually laughed, out there in the bitter cold, with the threat of discovery hanging over her. And that isn’t the black mark against her character you might think. There is a great, terrible absurdity in having to handle a dead body, and I defy most people not to be hit by it at some point.