The other men in the meetings tried to talk to Ian but he said they were ganging up on him and jealous. Men like Ian thought everyone was against them and that if there was a real victim in the situation it was them. Peggy and Greta could see it in Ian’s body and hear it when he talked – above everything, this was what made him the most dangerous.

At another meeting, Ian started talking to Heidi. Peggy and Greta yelled, ‘Heidi, we’ve got that thing.’ But it didn’t work – Heidi waved at them and smiled. Then Heidi didn’t come home for four days and the three of them, Dell, Greta and Peggy, sat round the table and tried to talk each other into calling the police. ‘He could have killed her,’ Dell said. And while they wanted to say ‘Don’t be ridiculous’, Peggy and Greta knew men like Ian. Women were killed like that all the time. Women they knew were killed like that. Stabbed, strangled, left in rivers. Sometimes Greta and Peggy thought they were overreacting, that they’d seen too many movies. They used to live in a big city further north, before there were two of them. One morning, they woke up and looked around the room. There was a gun by the door and a safe, and men had come the day before to ask where the money for the drugs was. They were lying next to the man who had offered them as payment, and it hit them hard and immediately that this was not a movie. It was their life. They crept out of bed, too scared to get their boots. Too scared to look for their cardigan, and they snuck out and walked the two kilometres back to their flat. There were too many guns in the city, they decided that morning, and they moved south and then before they knew it – maybe four weeks later – they were in a room with a gun and a safe and another terrible man. If they were going to make a change, it had to be more than geographical.