There were things I was good at, it turned out. Finding information. Watching. Searching for people, tracking them down. I had not known I had these skills before, and so had never thought to turn them on my own husband. Why would I? He loved me, we were happy, or so I thought. Until I learned that he was lying and controlling and keeping me prisoner with my own fears. But now I wondered, what about his past? What had he done before me? Men like my husband – liars to the bone, stamped through with deception like a stick of rock – did not change. There would be something to find. And perhaps that something would lead me to him now, wherever he was in the world.

When we first met, after that concert in the Royal Albert Hall, Patrick Sullivan had told me the facts of his life. He was a doctor, an obstetrician (not true, he was a finance clerk, hence why he lived in a house-share with three other men. I had not found that out for some time, since he never took me there, insisting he was a gentleman, and by the time it occurred to me to wonder, I just assumed he owed money on student loans). His family were dead, he said, and he had been an only child with much older parents (I didn’t know if this was true or not). At university, there had been one serious girlfriend, but they split after a pregnancy scare ended in a termination. He’d told me this with a catch in his throat. ‘I know it was her choice, but I didn’t agree with it. It was still my baby.’ How my heart had swelled at that, thinking we’d have our own soon, that I would give him a child to make up for the lost one.

It turned out the girlfriend was real, at least as far as I could see. The ex, Kathy Gilsenan, had attended Essex University at the same time as Patrick, before he failed his first year and dropped out. He had been studying medicine, hence the photos I’d seen. It was sad. If I’d known him back then, perhaps I could have helped him pass, become a real doctor, and maybe there would have been no need to lie, to cheat, to take money that wasn’t his. Such a waste.

My research had led me to the fact that Kathy, still Gilsenan, now lived on the Isle of Dogs in London. So, my car eating up the miles between us, I was headed there to see her. It was a long shot that she’d know where he was, but I could think of no one else he’d ever been close to. And that was tragic in itself.