I don’t even attempt to go back to bed – how can I when I know someone has tainted the very place where I sleep?

Instead, I make myself a hot chocolate and sit at the dining table with my laptop, wondering who has violated my home by placing Jennifer’s stuffed toy on my pillow. It wasn’t there before; it wasn’t even in the same room, as I always keep it in a box in the wardrobe where my mom’s clothes are. But it’s the intention behind it that bothers me the most; that whoever did it knows its significance and specifically chose it to cause the greatest impact.

The thought of Jennifer herself being involved clamps itself around my throat as I question what she’d be trying to prove. I know her motive; I can feel her bitter resentment at being ‘abandoned’ as keenly now as I did all those years ago, but does she really think she’s going to scare me into confessing something I had no control over?

And what of Jacob? It’s not impossible to believe that my alleged involvement in his disappearance is connected with the break-in at my home.

In spite of all the conspiracy theories as to who might be doing this to me, I know the only way I’m going to get myself out of it is by finding the man called Michael Talbot. And right now, whichever way I look at it, his wife is my first port of call.

I type ‘Michael Talbot’ into Google and the page is immediately flooded with the same stock image of a man with piercing blue eyes, a soft smile and a trimmed beard. His disappearance has only been reported in local newspapers, it seems, the incident not deemed serious enough just yet to run in the nationals.

But the Kentish Gazette has mentioned him in a two-by-one column and I guess the others will follow just as soon as they get a whiff of the backstory that accompanies it.

POLICE NAME ALLEGED MISTRESS AS LOVER’S KILLER is the headline I visualize across the front pages, as Jacob’s body is found washed up on the pebbled beach of Whitstable.

The papers would have a field day with that golden nugget alone, though it will only be a matter of time before it becomes KILLER’S DAUGHTER TURNS KILLER HERSELF, once an unscrupulous journalist sniffs out the real story.

I imagine the various articles and essays written by people like me; psychologists who will look to boost their profile by stating that killers are born with the killer gene. And red-top hacks will be dispatched to New York to track down the father who I inherited it from.