If it was you standing at the end of the access road to the freight depot, you would have seen me step onto the tracks. You would have heard the blare of noise from the freight train, whisking through at sixty miles per hour. Perhaps you were even close enough for the backdraught to blow the hair from your face. If so, you did not stay to see what had happened – you ran back to your car. You fled to our flat, and waited for the knock on the door.

Was it later, perhaps, when you made the decision? The next morning? Or a few days after, when you thought about how many questions would be asked about my state of mind and how, as the man who lived with me, you would be expected to provide the answers? Or maybe it wasn’t until nearer the time of the inquest in Huntingdon, while I was drifting aimlessly around the station, with no memory of what had happened to me or who I had been.

I think about what a fine figure you would have cut on the witness stand at the inquest – tall and straight, a young registrar doing your best to be calm and lucid despite the grief etched on your face.

I wonder whether you would have been questioned by the Coroner or whether, as it was a rail death, the BTP or Network Rail would have engaged a solicitor and counsel just in case any fault would be apportioned – like I say, I’ve heard them talking about it in general in the office but I don’t know the detail of what happened in my case. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, there was a barrister. You are standing in the witness box and the barrister shows you a note – it is handed up to you in a see-through plastic bag. And the barrister asks, looking down at her desk in a show of tact, ‘Dr Goodison, do you recognise the note you are being shown now?’

You nod. ‘I gave it to the police myself.’

‘And can you confirm that that note is written in Lisa Evans’s handwriting?’

You nod, and she looks up and says gently, ‘If you could just say yes for the written record, please, Dr Goodison.’

‘Yes,’ you say, the monosyllable ringing loud, and at this I imagine my mother, who is sitting next to my father, might give a single sob of distress, an involuntary exhalation that she quells immediately. She has been warned about the evidence and of course the forensics of what happened to me are dreadful – all through that, she has stayed composed. What has undone her is the note, the thought of her daughter scrawling those few words, the confirmation of my state of mind. She will never forgive herself for not understanding how unhappy her daughter had been.