After that, my memories are blurred. I started to pass out and come round, so that I was never sure how long I’d been there, whether this night was the same night or a new one. I found out later that I spent seventy-two hours tied to the stone plinth. At one point she ripped the tape off my mouth and I vomited blood all over her. That made her angry, and she slapped me across the face.

After a while my chest and stomach filled with a burning pain that seemed to radiate through to my back. I felt unbearably thirsty. Sometimes when she took the tape off, I asked for a drink, and she laughed at me. I expected to die of thirst if I didn’t suffocate. I began to vomit clear liquid—it seeped out around the tape. She sneered, ‘You say you’re thirsty, but you’re puking water. Swallow it instead and you won’t be thirsty any more.’

I lost my grip on my mind, became incoherent, and when she let me speak, it didn’t make sense. I was aware of what she was saying, but couldn’t think straight. Everything seemed remote apart from the pain. Waves of it started to pour through me: powerful, uncontrollable spasms in my stomach, which were worse even than the thirst. Then I started to pass the stones I’d eaten. I couldn’t help it. That was the worst agony of all.

Later, the doctors told me the names of all the injuries I’d suffered. My throat and oesophagus were badly cut, which had caused something called mediastinitis. I needed surgery to sew up the cuts, an endoscopy to inject the lacerations that couldn’t be sewn with adrenalin. I had rectal fissures, a perforated bowel, peritonitis, a paralytic ileus. These are words most people will never hear, but I heard them endlessly in the hospital and in court. They went round and round in my head, what she’d done to me. I had to have a laparotomy, which was what caused the scar.

I was in hospital for three weeks. It’s easier to race ahead to that part, to after I was free and in the hands of people who were trying as hard to help me as she had to harm me. The strange thing was that she must have decided, at a certain point, to let me go. She could have killed me—all she needed to do was leave me where I was—but instead she called the police, in tears, and told them to come to the house. They played the recording in court. She said, ‘Come quickly, there’s a woman in trouble, I think she’s dying.’ The police had found her hysterical, drunk, claiming not to know how a half-dead person had ended up tied to a stone column in her back garden.