Hanson let out a sigh. ‘In every possible way. As soon as he’d moved in with me, he stopped paying rent. He claimed he was having a temporary money problem thanks to a previous girlfriend who’d run up bills in his name. Then he borrowed off me on top of that. Thousands in total. I had to borrow off my mum to cover it and he kept claiming he had a bonus coming up at work that would sort it out, only it never came.’

Jason said nothing, but he nodded when she glanced at him.

‘He tried to tell me what to wear. He told me my clothes made me look like a whore. He also accused me of being a whore because I’d once told him, when he asked me, that I’d tried an open relationship.’ She took a breath. ‘He resented every good thing that happened in my life and tried to undermine it. Roughly every two days he would say something so unbelievably nasty to me that I cried. As it progressed, I increasingly ended up screaming at him in rage, too. But in the end, he always broke me down. Anger turning into misery.’

They came to a stop at the pedestrian lights, and Jason pressed the button. Hanson looked away from him before she went on.

‘And then he would apologise. He would tell me he was trying to get help. That he had trauma, and it got the better of him sometimes. It should have been clearer earlier on that he apologised because he’d got exactly what he wanted, which was to know how much he could hurt me. He got his kick out of breaking me down, and then he needed to reel me back in to stop me actually leaving. So it was all “my trauma, my trauma, poor me”.’ Hanson gave a small snort of laughter. The lights changed, and they started to cross. ‘The irony being that he dealt out trauma like nobody else. Oh, and he cheated on me with multiple women, which I damn well knew but couldn’t prove because he deleted every message between them. One of them was a good friend of mine and I lost her because of it.’

‘When you say he deleted his messages …’ Jason said, carefully.

‘I saw him delete them in front of me,’ Hanson snapped, knowing what he meant. Asking her if she’d been checking up on him all the time, as he’d probably told Jason that she had. ‘If I asked to see any messages he got angry and told me I should trust him, whereas my own messages were continually hacked. He sometimes got my phone and said terrible things to my friends, while they thought it was me. I caught him a few times and I can only imagine what he said that I didn’t see. That he deleted.’

‘How long were you with him?’ Jason asked.