I know that he said something to her, or that she found out something, maybe about The Profilo. I can feel it; I can taste it. I can see it on his face and in his eyes.

‘I think you need help,’ I whisper.

He laughs again. He laughs like he has done many times before; just now, and in the bar, in the restaurant, at The Monastery and, just like that, his mask drops and the laugh turns into a snarl. He grabs me by the throat and shoves me against the side of Tin Can Alley, on to bright yellow studded metal where rows of rounded peaks dig into my back.

‘I don’t need any help,’ he spits. ‘I’m a barrister. I’m rich. I have women lined up. You’re the one who needs help. You’re the freak. Did you think what we had was real?’ He says this with utter scorn. ‘That we would stay together, trot off into the sunset holding hands. Life is uglier than that, darling, much uglier.’

He’s really hurting me. I’m struggling to breathe. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. ‘You are nothing,’ I wheeze. ‘You are no kind of man at all. You don’t have any power over me.’ But he does, doesn’t he? He has his hands round my throat. He has reeled me in; seduced me – thrown me up in the air like one of his street performer batons, and then left me to fall. He has hurt me, like the others. He has power.

He squeezes a little harder. ‘What are you going to do, dear Prudence? Kill yourself? Go and throw yourself under the Waltzer or something? Who would miss you? Your pathetic blind father? That sap, Kemp? He won’t stick around, will he, not for you. Who would, freak?’

There’s a girl, suddenly walking past us, down this untrodden space between stalls; too close. She stops dead in front of us, surprised and horrified; her face coming into hyper-vivid focus, like a cartoon: coppery frizzy hair, a round face pocked with acne scars, thick milk-bottle glasses. Salvi, brazen, raises his eyebrows at her, in both challenge and a kind of twisted seduction, then, piercing her with his gaze – her eyes caught in his look terrified, yet strangely captivated – he releases me.

I take a large gulping breath and clutch at my throat, rubbing it. Salvi seems breathless too, his own eyes bulging, his neck red.

‘All right, darlin’?’ he says to the girl with the glasses, frozen before us.