‘It’s advertiser-funded. I have my own channel on YouTube, with 16,719 followers at last count. They’re mostly from South Korea, but there’s a smattering from all over the world. I get paid, by noodle manufacturers mainly, to display, eat and promote their products. I do three one-hour shows per week. I’m an influencer, and the bigger I get the more followers I attract.’

‘That’s incredible.’

‘Yes, it certainly is. I stumbled on it by accident when researching bariatric diets. But it’s been great for me. Fat faming, instead of fat shaming. I make even the biggest people feel slim. I’m a normaliser, if you like. It empowers them to know how wide, how broad, is the range of human sizes. I’m famous, successful and earning a good living. I show them there’s hope. A twenty-stone woman emailed me to say she was so happy to realise she’s in the slimmest quarter of humanity’s size scale.’

‘You’re paid to make people feel good about themselves?’

She giggled, an incongruous process that made her chins jiggle. ‘Not all of them. I’m sure for some casual viewers it is Elephant Man syndrome, a circus freak show. But the Internet means I don’t have to watch them stare at me. And it paid for all this.’ She lifted an arm, serried folds of blubber dangling, and pointed to a large blue wheeled frame on the far side of her bed. He saw that it was a medical hoist: stabilising legs that would slide under the bed and an arcing jib that suspended a sling. Further to the left was a bath-sized bariatric toilet, only partially screened by a curtain, and beyond it what appeared to be a wet room.

‘And it covers my care bill.’

‘If you had money, why kill Dr Chen?’

‘Just to help him out.’ Another giggle. ‘Actually, I needed more money, but I also needed to practise asphyxiation techniques before Rollason’s release date, before I tried it for real. Poor Dr Chen. I emailed a photo of someone else, a plus-size model, when Charon put him in contact. When he saw me in the flesh, he changed his mind. Boy, did he change his mind! He panicked and cried out and didn’t want to go through with it. But Gary had already fixed him to the bed. He wore this weird plastic mesh bodysuit that he’d had specially made so that he would feel helpless, and it was firmly cable-tied to the bed, so he couldn’t move an inch.’

‘That means it does not count as consent.’

‘Maybe he just got a treble helping.’ She smiled. ‘A lot more woman than he bargained for! Of course, he had wanted a lot of disgusting sex things that I wasn’t willing to do. But by then of course he was already tied up, so he could hardly contest the matter.’