If I survived, I vowed to make up with Pete. Fresh tears rose in my eyes at a brief mental flash of throwing myself into his embrace. The scent of urine was replaced, just for a second, by a memory of the smell of home: woodsmoke and Dad’s pipe – which, in my fevered, sentimental imagination still lingered all these years after he’d gone; Pete’s teenage aftershave; Mum’s gentle lavender. Oh God, please, I prayed. Please let me see Pete again. It seemed so trivial now, and me so stubborn. I’d treated him badly, him and Mum. No wonder they’d been angry with me for just walking out on my family, leaving Pete to pick up the pieces, too arrogant to think it mattered, too traumatised by Dad’s death to think about anyone else’s feelings.

Family was all that mattered. And now I’d never get the chance to tell him that.

Eventually the van came to an abrupt stop, somewhere so silent that my ears rang with it after the techno and engine noise. Door opening again. Heavy footsteps. Shutter up.

‘I have to do this, Merry,’ he said as he hauled himself in and put a hurricane lamp in the corner, his weird, high voice indistinct behind the hot, damp wool of the stripy balaclava. The emphasis on my stage name sounded mocking, full of intent.

He pulled the shutter back down again, sealing us in this windowless Tardis of torture. When he turned around I saw he was holding a knife so long and sharp-looking that I almost fainted.

‘Why?’ I tried to say through my tape gag and the encroaching blackness, but it just came out as a moan. I had backed myself into the corner, my knees hugged to my chest, the metal ring pressing into the small of my back, instinctively and pointlessly trying to make myself as small as possible. I didn’t want to die here, not in this cold metal box, with the lamp casting menacing shadows in the van’s interior and making the knife’s blade flash. He was actually waving it around, as if he’d seen too many martial arts movies, like the crazy person he must be. But he couldn’t be that crazy, surely; were full-on mad people capable of buying or hiring vans, working out how to get into my house, how to get me out without anybody seeing, all the logistics that must have been involved? He knew my name, so it must have been premeditated.