But he ignores me, and instead just empties my bag onto the table. The clattering sounds of plastic and metal hitting wood: Sabine’s drive, my lipstick, a tampon, some wrinkled receipts, a couple of pens, the bobby pins, my article on that memory stick, Anne’s bottle of pills and my locksmith tools.

But every cell within me clenches, because all I really notice is: no phone. No way for Camilla to find me.

I bite back tears. I will not cry.

‘Please let me go,’ I say to him. Sweet. Kind.

He ignores me, picking up the hard drive, putting it in his pocket, then the locksmith tools.

‘Please?’ I try again. ‘This isn’t you.’ But he just ignores me. And so I change tack. ‘Thomas. The least you can do is tell me why I’m here.’

‘Shut,’ he starts slowly, ‘the fuck up.’ He’s yelling by the end of that sentence, his jaw set, like I just said something terrible. And his face is almost purple it’s so red. There’s a little vein popping out of his left temple, spittle flying from his mouth. Then he turns to face me. Rabid. Like he’s spitting out the truth and I need to hear it. ‘This is all your fucking fault. None of this is how it was meant to go.’ I’ve never seen him like this. Not even when he was on the street, yelling at that guy Agnès had sent to follow me.

I don’t know how to react, I don’t want to make it worse.

So I just sit there, watching him, digesting the phrase ‘how it was meant to go’.

None of this is random. He had a well-laid plan. A plan he’d used before.

An echo of Stan’s voice: You look just like the dead girl we aren’t allowed to write about anymore.

Matilde Beaumont and I are a ‘type’.

My stomach twists as I think, Is this how he does it? He approaches a woman in a safe space. With me it was a laundromat. Where was it for Matilde? A supermarket? Did he ask her about which brand of coffee he should get? Strike up a rapport? Take her for a walk on that bridge? Is that what he gets off on? Making us trust him and then watching the horror in our eyes when we realise what he really is?

And then what? Does he always sleep with us, or was that just me? Does he do it then and there, or does he offer to drive us home, sedate us with a drink, drive us out here… to this? Or does he do it a few days later? Grab us in the dark?

Whatever the plan, it worked with Matilde.

But what about me? If he’d picked me out, chosen me, why didn’t he kill me?