When I heard someone arriving at Nora’s house, bumbling round the back garden, testing the door, I managed to get out the front and across the road in the dark. I didn’t know who it was, and was too frightened to look. There was no car that I could see. I got inside my house and stood there in darkness for a while, shaking with adrenaline, fear, shock, all of it. Nora. Eleanor. Your wife was my next-door neighbour. It was insane. What did she want?

I didn’t know what to do. Nick would be back from work soon, and I couldn’t explain why I was pacing up and down in the dark. Perhaps about ten minutes had gone by when I saw Nora’s car draw up – so it wasn’t her who’d interrupted me. I wondered who – ridiculous if it really had been a burglar, given the excuse I’d planned to use if she caught me in her house. I saw her glance towards my windows and I ducked, absurdly, though she couldn’t have seen me without lights. Nora, who’d been in my house, whose house I had been in, who I’d walked with in the deserted countryside, was now a figure of terror. I found myself thinking of the dead rabbit. The words in the snow, the moment I’d fallen and seen her hesitate before helping me up. But then the strange music in my house – how could she be doing that?

I didn’t know who to turn to. Claudia had been clear she couldn’t or wouldn’t help, and I couldn’t face telling my mother. I could only think of one person to turn to, a virtual stranger, but one who had been kind. One who had also been a victim of yours, in a way. Maybe he would be able to help.

The phone kept ringing. Words ran through my head. This will sound mad . . . Sorry to bother you but . . . I think someone’s stalking me.

‘Hello?’ My voice was too high. ‘Dr Holt?’

‘Speaking.’ His tone was warm but harried. I was amazed he answered his own phone; my usual experience of trying to contact anyone in the NHS was a Kafkaesque labyrinth of ringing-out extensions.

‘I came to see you the other day. I – I said my name was Nora.’

He seemed to remember right away. ‘Oh yes, the friend of Patrick Sullivan’s, my alter ego.’

It was so strange, that. Why would you, a finance clerk, even have been at a medical conference? It made no sense. Had you been trolling for sex? Or something else? ‘I was thinking . . . it just seemed weird, that he said he was you.’