She couldn’t read the rest, for the tears that poured from her eyes. She stumbled blindly from the shed, wailing as she hauled opened the kitchen door and threw herself sobbing onto a chair at the kitchen table.

How could he? How dare he? With my daughter!

And from that anguish began to build a towering anger, a fury that in her entire life she had never experienced. Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold.

Wrong.

She was cooking up a gigantic cauldron, which she intended to dish up before the day was out. In the next hour she showered, washed her hair, and dried it carefully. She applied a blood red lipstick and smoky eyeshadow, and dressed in a navy blue skirt short enough to make the best of her legs. She rolled on dark tights, chose a smart jacket to match the skirt and checked herself over in the mirror.

Going back downstairs, she put on her white Aquascutum raincoat and a pair of elegant high heels. There was one more thing to do. She went back into the kitchen, to the knife block, and drew out the longest knife that they possessed. It was a sushi blade, forged in one piece of steel. It was expensive, and so sharp it had originally come in its own black plastic sheath, covered in warning stickers. She dug through the kitchen drawers until she found the scabbard, and slid the knife in with a satisfying gritty sound. She spotted Vanessa’s college bag, tipped out the contents on the kitchen table, and carefully put the sheathed weapon inside the leather backpack.

She took a quick look round.

‘Goodbye, house,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever be back.’

Gillard held Sam close in his arms throughout the ambulance journey to hospital. She clung to him wordlessly, like a child recovering from a nightmare. The paramedics, after having checked her vital signs, stayed back. It was not until an hour later, when she had been given her first formal examination, that the registrar said she would like to keep Sam in overnight for observation. Only then did she begin to speak.

‘I want to go home, Craig,’ she whispered.

It was another ninety minutes before she was given official permission to go. Craig took her home in a taxi, her head resting on his shoulder almost the whole time. It was halfway through that journey home when she began to cry. Big, gulping sobs that shook her shoulders, tears that wet his face and neck. Her hands blindly delineated his face, feeling the wounds on his ear and along his cheek and the two-day-old stubble growing on his jaw.

Gillard looked out of the window at the bright morning, the meadows silvered in dew, and the trees in bud. He started to assess the physical and mental toll that the confinement, captivity and claustrophobia had weighed on his precious wife. He was pretty sure that she would never be the same again. And neither would he.