A man and a woman are passing at that moment. The man is small, Asian, shabbily dressed and quite elderly – and yet he marches up to Matthew and stands next to him and sticks his finger in his face. Matthew lets Shelley go and she looks around for Estella, who is crying while the woman tries to comfort her, and for Jason, who is sitting in his pushchair by the side of the car and has begun to wail.

Matty has both hands raised, placating the man, and eventually the couple leave, looking from Matty to Shelley, to each of the kids and back again. Everything calms down. Shelley unclips Jason from the pushchair and Matty folds it and puts it in the boot. As they get into the car, though, something in Shelley is giving way. There have been plenty of scenes like that at home but this is the first time he has done it in public and there is something about the humiliation of it. Even though she doesn’t know it yet, that is the point she starts making her plans.

The elderly couple have walked away but they are not prepared to let it rest. While the husband was remonstrating with Matty, the wife was quietly using her phone to take a picture of the number plate of his car.

They go to Thorpe Road Police Station two days later. The young PC who speaks to them takes notes a little wearily – it sounds a very minor incident to him. When the couple have gone, he goes back to his desk and looks up the car registration and sees that on the Police National Computer there are two reports about Dr Matthew Goodison: the callout to Helen Lovegrove, the no-crime domestic, and the witness statement from a Mrs Leyla Abaza following the death of Lisa Evans. The young PC has a word with his sergeant and she arranges for a couple of officers to visit Matthew Goodison’s home while he will be out, to have a word with his wife.

The visit from the police is what gives Shelley the courage to believe her own feelings, the ones she has always had. It takes a while but within a year, she asks Matty to leave. He keeps coming round, of course, banging on the door, and has to be arrested twice before he stops. Eventually, the restraining order does the trick but Shelley doesn’t really feel safe again until she gets a job in Norwich and moves there with the kids. They settle there, the three of them, and it’s hard, but she got out while they were still young, at least.

Matthew Goodison will never go to prison. There are other girlfriends, after Shelley – and to each he tells the same story, of how jealous and unreasonable his wife turned out to be, how she took his children away from him and he will never recover.