‘I’ll never let you go, Rose,’ he said. And I realized I had to be clever. Trick him, like he’d tricked me. So I pretended that I’d think about it. When he trusted me enough to leave me in the house without locking the doors I planned my escape. First I would try to find some kind of ‘insurance policy’ in case he ever found me. A man like Victor, I thought, must have made mistakes in the past. I searched his study and when I thought I’d never find anything that was when I saw it. A file in his desk drawer. It looked innocuous enough, with the heading of his clinic blazoned along the front. But when I opened it I dropped it in shock. They were photos of women, legs akimbo in stirrups in one of his consulting rooms – the room I’d been in myself. The photos looked like they had been taken with a Polaroid camera and without the subjects’ consent: the women were all in hospital gowns, as though he’d been halfway through a procedure and decided to photograph their genitals for his own personal use. It wasn’t something a normal doctor would do. The women all looked drugged. I was sickened – he was every bit the monster I had come to expect. I wondered if I was one of them, but I didn’t want to look. My stomach churned and I had to concentrate on not throwing up.

I considered going to the police there and then. It was obvious from those photos that he’d be struck off the medical register, might even go to prison. But I was scared and intimidated by him. I couldn’t risk that he might try and wriggle out of it. He was a respected doctor, and he might have destroyed all the proof that I’d been artificially inseminated. He’d lie, manipulate, say we had been in a relationship and that the baby was his.

I had no choice but to run as far away as I could, taking the file with me.

The next half-hour was the most frightening of my life as I frantically packed my belongings into two suitcases, leaving a lot behind. And then I called a taxi and asked for it to pick me up two streets away. All the while my heart pounded as I expected Victor to turn up at any minute and stop me. As I ran down the streets, pulling my suitcases, I thought of him chasing me, my heart beating wildly. I only felt safe when I got into the taxi, and then when I boarded the train, knowing that each mile was taking me further and further away from him.

I didn’t come to Beggars Nook straight away. I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast in Chippenham while I trawled estate agents until I found a property cheap enough for me to afford: 9 Skelton Place.

Hidden away.