She looks down at her hands and states baldly, ‘Rick killed my dad. That’s why I killed him. He deserved it.’

‘Lola, he killed himself,’ I say gently. ‘You know there was never any doubt about that.’

She lights a cigarette. Rick must have been bringing her those too. I see tears coming to her eyes. ‘Yes, technically he did,’ she agrees. ‘But Rick was the reason he did it.’

I’ve no idea what she means, but know I have to tread gently. Is this a delusion? It wouldn’t be the first time, though to my knowledge, that hasn’t happened for a while now.

‘What did Rick have to do with any of it?’ I ask. The man who abducted Lola, who she calls her dad, has been dead for years – long before she even set foot on the ships. ‘They’d never have even met, surely?’

‘They never actually met, no. At least, I’m pretty sure they didn’t. For a good while, when my memory started coming back, I thought Dad had killed Rick. Or killed Fred, as he called himself back then.’

‘Fred?’ I ask. I am seriously worried about her now. This makes no sense.

‘Yes!’ she snaps. ‘Even very shortly after my accident I had flashback memories of being with a boy, but I didn’t know who he was or where we’d met. Over time, during all that fucking therapy and hypnosis, more and more came back to me until I remembered his name, what he looked like and what he did to me. And as I gradually managed to put together what happened that evening in my mind, I realized that the night I left, Fred would have been far away well before Dad could have got to him. Dad couldn’t have killed him, as I had at first assumed. So I started to look for him myself.’

‘OK,’ I say, trying not to sound patronizing or doubtful. ‘But I still don’t see what that has to do with Rick.’

‘Fred is Rick,’ she says. ‘Was. Real name Frederick. Fred. Rick. Guess he decided to reinvent himself at some point. Back then he delivered something to our house. We chatted. I wanted a friend. I thought he was my friend. But I realize now that what he was doing was coming to the house and raping me. I didn’t put up a fight as I didn’t know any different. He was literally the only boy I’d ever met, and Dad had seen to it that I had no idea about sex, what was OK, and what wasn’t. Dad was very selective about what I read and what films we watched – I knew nothing about sex at all. Had absolutely no idea. He chose to leave anything about that entirely out of my education.’