I smile and sit back down. ‘So you’ll stay here tonight?’ I ask.

He nods miserably as he puts his empty glass onto the varnished mahogany of the bar top.

‘Another?’ asks the ever-attentive barman. I want to say no on Jacob’s behalf, knowing that drowning his sorrows in the bottom of a whisky bottle is probably the last thing he should be doing. But he’s a grown man who is in the pits of despair right now, not to mention in fear of his life, and the last thing he needs is another woman telling him what he can and can’t do.

Jacob pushes his cut-glass tumbler towards the man in answer and, with his elbows on the bar, runs his hands through his hair and groans.

‘It’s going to be all right,’ I say, careful to keep a physical distance. ‘You’ll get through this.’

He laughs sardonically. ‘Unless my wife kills me first.’

I shiver, as if someone has walked over my grave.

‘If you’d asked me as a twenty-one-year-old man whether I was ever going to be in this position – allow myself to be in this position – I would have laughed at you.’

‘None of us know what life has got planned for us,’ I say. ‘We’re all going in blind.’

He nods ruefully and his jaw clenches.

I don’t want to ask the question, but I need to know what we’re dealing with here.

‘What do you think your wife is really capable of?’ I chance.

‘If she finds me?’

I nod, steeling myself for the answer I fear is to come.

‘She’ll kill me,’ he says, without skipping a beat.

‘So, don’t you think it’s time you went to the police?’ I ask. ‘Now that she’s threatened you by saying she knows where you live.’

‘Do you honestly think they’ll take me seriously?’ he asks. It’s a rhetorical question. ‘I’m six foot and fourteen stone. I don’t look like someone who gets pushed around by their wife.’

‘What does that person look like then?’ I argue. ‘Do you honestly think they’ll not know that abused partners come in all shapes and sizes? That it’s men like you who have to exert even more control because you know the physical power you can wield?’

He shakes his head. ‘They’d laugh at me,’ he says. ‘It’s a run-of-the mill domestic as far as they’re concerned, and since when have they ever done anything to help victims of domestic abuse?’

‘Things have changed,’ I say. ‘They’re much more aware of all the various guises domestic abuse comes in now and they take it pretty seriously.’

‘If I was going to get them involved, I would have done it when the kids were younger and I was still there. There’s no point doing it now that I’ve left.’