‘I’d had driving lessons from an uncle in Iran when we went over there on a family holiday the summer before. It had been cool. We’d rolled round the countryside and I knew enough to get the thing going and keep it in a straight line. It wasn’t as if I was going to be driving the Focus very far, after all. It was a short, quick ride into a large plate-glass window. Finding the bodies in the car had distracted me from the fact that this was a very dangerous stunt.

‘Yeah, well, I tried not to think about all that and kept moving.

‘“Mirror, signal, manoeuvre,” that was the drill.

‘I looked in the rear-view mirror and got a glimpse of the two corpses in the back. They were blackened, their lips shrunk back, showing their teeth, as if the two of them were grinning at a private joke.

‘I looked away pretty quickly. I really didn’t need to check my mirror or make any signals, did I? I was about to break all the rules. So I set off across the car park towards the front of the shop. It felt unreal, like I was a dad on some kind of warped family outing, with his two kids in the back.

‘A family of crash-test dummies.

‘As soon as I had a clear run at the window, I accelerated. Not too fast – I didn’t want to kill myself – just fast enough to break the glass. It felt insane. I was about to ram a car at full speed into Tesco. I had no idea what might happen. If it had been a film the car would’ve probably exploded …

‘At the last moment I put on a final burst of speed, screamed like a kid on a roller-coaster and slammed the car into the window. It all went down so quickly I didn’t really have any idea what happened next. I thought I might be dead, to tell you the truth. I couldn’t see anything, hear anything or feel anything. I think I probably blacked out for a moment.

‘All I had was a memory of the impact, rather than the actual feeling of it. The memory of a big bang followed by the sound of glass falling. The memory of something big and white punching me in the face. The memory of being kicked back into my seat and my head bouncing off the headrest. The memory of the two bodies in the back being thrown forward through the windscreen and splattering messily across the bonnet.