His next words confirmed it: ‘It’s Iain McKinnon from Big World.’

Meredith couldn’t speak. ‘The Pointless I’, she and her fellow band-members used to call him, a play on the unnecessary vowel in his first name as well as his capabilities as a marketing manager.

‘Merry, are you there?’

‘Don’t call me that. It’s not my name,’ she managed.

‘Sorry, Meredith. Long time, no speak, hey?’

She had forgotten how affected his South African accent sounded. Why did he even still have an accent? He’d lived here since before apartheid was abolished.

‘How did you get my number?’

He laughed again. ‘It wasn’t easy, hey. I had to get a private detective on the case!’

He pronounced it ditictive.

‘You did what?’

‘Yah. It took him a good few weeks. Hiding in plain sight, you are. We thought you’d left the country! In a million years I’d never have thought you, of all people, would end up working in a shop. I mean, it’s not like you need the money!’

‘I’m the manager,’ Meredith said, immediately hating herself for it. She did not have to justify herself to Iain McKinnon, the lecherous creep. He represented everything that she had eventually come to loathe and detest about the music industry, with his fake, smarmy smiles and assumption that every woman wanted to rip off his clothes … And when he discovered that she didn’t, he’d threatened her.

‘You know where I work?’ She felt as if the walls of her living room were folding in on her, one at a time, bang, bang, bang, bang, squashing her beneath them.

‘I know where you work, I know your address and home phone number, I know where you buy your groceries, where your brother lives … the detective guy was top notch. Cost an arm and a leg,’ he said proudly, as if she should be congratulating him instead of feeling that it wasn’t just her room that had collapsed, but her whole world.

She had been found, by a man she wouldn’t trust further than she could throw.

He seemed to read her mind: ‘Merry, I’m not the guy I was back then, I swear. Obviously you know I never had anything to do with … what happened to you … I was just a pushy bastard who wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

‘You blackmailed me, Iain.’ Nausea bubbled in her gut.

He coughed. ‘Well, I think that’s too strong a word … I just suggested that it might not be a good thing for it to be made public knowledge…’

She noted that he knew exactly what she was referring to.