I know. I’d seen him on the CCTV, looking terrified as he no doubt listened to his wife telling him what she was going to do when she tracked him down. The sickening realization that the real danger might have been there in the bar with him threatens to wind me.

‘Do you want to know where the call was made from?’ she asks.

I wish I could say no.

‘The burner phone we found hidden in your house,’ she goes on, without waiting for me to answer.

It feels as if the sky is closing in on me. I fall heavily onto the closed door of my car.

‘And do you want to know what else was on the phone?’ says Robson, her voice sounding as if she’s underwater – or maybe it’s me that’s drowning.

‘Message after message from you to Michael. And message after message from him telling you that it was over and to leave him alone.’

I gasp, desperate for air.

‘But here’s the interesting thing; the messages stop on the night Michael Talbot went missing.’

‘I told you,’ I rasp. ‘I’ve never seen that phone before.’

‘I’m going to need you to come down to the station first thing in the morning,’ she says. ‘We’re running some tests on items recovered from your house and I expect to have the results by then.’

‘Is it true that you’ve found some prints at the flat?’ I ask, seemingly unable to stop myself from putting my foot in it.

‘That’s not information I’m able to share with you at this juncture,’ she says.

I want to say, But you can share it with Vanessa Talbot? but thankfully stop myself. If she finds out I’ve been stalking and hounding Michael’s wife, it’ll not work in my favour.

I get into the car and bang my hands against the steering wheel. There’s no way out of this, someone has made sure of that. I’m being forced further and further into a corner, the damning evidence building against me with every passing hour.

My chest hurts and my brain is heavy with convoluted theories of who’s behind this. As much as it pains me, Leon most definitely has the means; in fact he’s the only person who could possibly have filmed us having sex in my office and put it on my computer, who could have hidden a phone in our house. And as insane as it sounds, I’d like to think that only he could have put my sister’s bunny rabbit on my pillow, because if it wasn’t him . . .