‘Preposterous!’ was, reportedly, her reaction, and the police believed her. The letter had a UK postmark on it, and Samantha had been teaching in Kansas at the time it was sent. ‘After all,’ she pointed out, ‘if I wanted to make money in a sordid way, I’d have sold my story to the British tabloids instead, wouldn’t I? I have a good job and, more importantly, a good reputation. I would never risk that.’

Part of me hoped that this might prompt her to try and get in contact with me, perhaps apologise for her desertion – but only a small part. I was in too much of a state to care about that anymore.

The detectives went over and over every detail of the attack, but in the end all they could conclude was that my assailant was a mentally ill person with an imaginary grudge – a spurned fan, perhaps. Possibly Green-Paint Guy, but there was nothing to link them, apart from a similar build. None of us had a clue who might have written that letter, if it wasn’t Samantha. I half suspected Iain himself. Perhaps he had somehow managed to uncover Samantha’s name and the details of our love affair – perhaps one of the band had let it slip in conversation, but I very much doubted it. They weren’t the sort for idle gossip, and they didn’t like ‘The Pointless I’ much either.

I had trauma counselling, and we managed to keep it out of the papers. It wasn’t that difficult in the end, because of the police’s failure to catch the perpetrator. They made appeals, of course, for witnesses to the ‘serious kidnap and torture of an unnamed female victim’, but nobody apart from my rescuer had seen anything; not the man’s van, not his arrival or departure from my house, nor his escape over Clapham Common. CCTV picked up the van in a couple of places en route, and detectives were able to confirm that it had been stolen from a scrapyard in Falmouth three days earlier, but that was about as far as they got. CID left the case open and, off the record, admitted to me that it had probably been a ‘random nutter’.

Finally, a few months after I moved to Minstead, I plucked up the courage to do something I wished I’d done years before: I got hold of Pete’s phone number. I rang our old next-door neighbour in Salisbury, who confirmed that Pete had moved to London and that she had a number for him.

Another week later, I dialled it, my heart pounding in my chest, the fresh scar on my hand throbbing.

‘Hello?’

I started crying at the sound of his voice. ‘Pete, it’s me … I’m so, so sorry, for everything. I’ve been a selfish bitch. Please forgive me?’