I felt my body shift in anticipation of the move that would shove my head into the noose. Which is when I thought that if I couldn’t get rid of the compulsion, maybe I could change it enough to break it. I did it like anti-noise, where you cancel out a sound wave by broadcasting another sound wave with an inverted phase – it’s clever stuff and very counter-intuitive, but it works. I was hoping the weird, inside-my-head version would work because I’d only just started making the shape in my mind when my mouth said, ‘Very well, I will.’

My forma met the compulsion like the wrong two gearwheels brushing up against each other in a transmission. I thought I could actually feel bits of the forma spinning around in my brain and painfully ricocheting off the inside of my skull, but that could have been my imagination. It didn’t matter. I felt my body unlock and I yanked my head away from the noose and looked at Lesley in triumph.

‘Or maybe I won’t,’ I said.

A huge arm clamped itself across my chest from behind and a large hand gripped the back of my head and pushed it through the noose. I smelled camelhair and Chanel aftershave – Seawoll must have walked up behind me while I was feeling clever.

‘Or maybe you will,’ said Lesley.

I twisted, but while there are some big men who are surprisingly weak, Seawoll wasn’t one of them, so I jammed the syrette into the exposed bit of his hand and gave him the whole dose. Unfortunately the whole dose had been calibrated for Lesley, who was half Seawoll’s size. The pressure never wavered until Lesley yelled, ‘Hoist away, boys,’ and I was dragged into the air by my neck.

The only thing that saved my life was the fact that I was being hanged in a theatrical noose which had been designed, as a matter of health and safety, not to hang the attractive Croatian baritone whose neck was supposed to be in it. The slipknot was a fake and there was a wire reinforcement inside the rope to keep the loop in shape. Undoubtedly there was a eyelet for clipping a tether to the no doubt artfully concealed safety harness to be worn by the handsome baritone, once he’d made his farewell aria. Unfortunately I didn’t have a harness, so the damn thing half-killed me before I managed to get my head out of the loop, scraping the skin off my chin in the process. I got my elbow into the loop for more support, but even with that, there was a sudden line of agony down my back.

I had a quick look down and saw that I was a good five metres above the stage. I wasn’t going to be letting go any time soon.