Then Catherine’s face changes. His hands are round her neck again, and this time I know he won’t stop. Oh God, no. Please no.

I scramble to get up off the floor, but it’s no use. My brain is closing down, like a blind being pulled against the light. Hot tears stream down my face. I’m dissolving into nothingness.

The last thing I see is Catherine sliding down the wall and crumpling onto the floor like a rag doll.

55

I come round in the car, dizzy and bewildered. I’m strapped into the backseat, wrapped in a large bath towel. I don’t have any shoes on and there are bloodstains on my feet. My knickers are wet and there’s a dull ache in my pelvis. A heavy weight pressing me down into the seat.

I shut my eyes against the sun. Dreadful images swirl in the blackness. Catherine’s startled eyes. Thumbs gouging into a neck.

I jolt forward, then slump back.

Ross sees me in the rearview mirror. “Don’t panic, darling. We’re almost there,” he says. “You fainted.”

Our eyes meet in the glass. He’s just strangled someone to death before my eyes. Ross has just killed Catherine.

I’m numb with shock.

When we arrive at A & E, Ross carries me through the entrance. He speaks to the person on reception.

I keep opening my mouth to tell them what’s happened, but the words won’t form. I’m like a fish, drowning in air. I feel detached from reality, as if I’m floating above myself, watching the action unfold from afar. It’s all happening to someone else, not me. Everyone’s voices sound distant and muffled, as if my ears are blocked, as if the walls and floors of the hospital are made of cotton wool.

I’m taken straight through to the triage nurse and, from there, into a cubicle, where Ross lays me gently on a bed and covers me with a blanket. He hovers over me. The picture of love and concern. The doting fiancé who arrived in the nick of time. And I hover over the two of us: a watchful, disembodied presence, unable to break through.

The nurse asks me questions and, somehow, I manage to answer him: hoarse, monosyllabic responses confirming my name and age, my dates. My voice belongs to someone else. It’s the voice of a robot.

I think of Catherine, still crumpled, lifeless, on the living-room floor, the bruises from Ross’s fingertips a purple choker at her neck. I’d talked her round. It was going to be all right. She’d have got the help she needed. He didn’t have to do it.

He didn’t have to do it.