Mr Martindale shoved the shutter higher and shone his torch inside the van. I remembered his gasp at the slick crimson puddle illuminated in the beam, and the gentlemanly but heartfelt imprecation that he uttered when he saw me, gagged and chained by the ankle to a metal ring bolted into the side of the van, the knife still sticking through my hand. The bastard had plunged it in with such force that the tip was showing through my palm. I had neither strength nor stomach to try to pull it out, or to think about the reality that if my hand hadn’t been in the way, the knife would instead be residing in my jugular, or my eye, or my heart…

I was too far gone to think about anything by then. Fading fast, I watched two Mr Martindales heave themselves stiffly up over the lip of the van, valiantly ignore the crimson puddle, and rush towards me in duplicate, before slipping in my blood and ricocheting off the van’s other side like a grim sort of comedy double-act. Double-vision act…

‘Oh my dear girl,’ they were both saying, tears of shock and panic in their voices. ‘What is your name? Don’t go to sleep! There’s a phone-box on the corner, I’ll call for help then come straight back, I promise…’

I didn’t want him to leave, even though he was going for help. I was so terrified that the man was going to come back and kill us both. But I must have passed out then, because I didn’t know anything else until I woke up in St Thomas’ Hospital.

Several days later, Mr Martindale asked permission to visit me, and I agreed. He was the only visitor I’d had the whole five days I was an inpatient. I missed Pete more than I had at any point over the decade we’d been estranged. But I just couldn’t bring myself to ring him; not yet. I was too afraid he’d reject me.

Mr Martindale turned up with an African violet in a little pot and a box of chocolates, those horrible sickly seashell ones I couldn’t stand. His kind eyes and compassionate tones were the things that made me lose it and break down, and I sobbed in his arms for the whole duration of his visit. He didn’t even seem to mind that I left snail-trails of mucus all over his Fair Isle tank top. It smelled of potpourri and tobacco – exactly as my dad would have smelled if he’d still been alive. When I had that thought, I howled so much that the policewoman who sat outside my door came in, thinking that Mr Martindale had done something awful. She saw him patting me tentatively on my hospital gown-clad back with his veined and shaky hand, and withdrew again tactfully.