There was no chance that I could try to pick them up. Not after last time. I’d waited in the playground with the other mums on my allotted joint day and gone in to help with their coats when the bell rang. The teacher had shielded Laura protectively, even as she darted towards me. It turned out that your mother had rung ahead and told them that ‘Caroline is having one of her off days’, and that the children shouldn’t go with her. But one day I will be there to pick them up. I will.

What will you do now? Now that she is no longer the shining star on the horizon? No longer the strong matriarch who will endure anything? Who will be on your side now to do your dirty work?

I’m just congratulating myself on blasting a huge hole in your defences when I spot your cheating fucking lawyer striding through the double doors and going into the interview room. They’re going to claim that I planted the bag there and that Missy is innocent. Of course they are. But they can’t prove it. If the police have done their homework, all the evidence will put me at home, aided and abetted by Pam’s insistence that I was there to open the door for her, and that I had been trashing the bedroom before she got there, if necessary. And I have her number if I need to prove it.

My taxi arrives and on the way to work I mull over a niggling doubt I have. Where are you, Jack? If you’ve been following me, tracking my movements, why has that suddenly stopped? Granted, I have been very careful. Maybe I’m underestimating how clever I have been. But you knew I was at the hotel. You knew I was in Peter Daubney’s room. You must have had me followed to know what I was up to. And the photographs going back weeks and weeks. So what about the rest of the time?

Pam spoke to you on the phone but you could be anywhere. If you’re not following me, and I don’t see how you can be because you would know about the hole and the other car, you must be distracted. I’m overtired and stressed and I want my kids back, but I have my finger on the pulse. I check the news for anything about an incident at a tea shop again. Nothing at all. Not even local news. Nothing has been reported.