Still, the odds continued to be stacked against me as the trial began. Connor’s mother had paid for an expensive barrister, an intimidating giant of a man with gold cufflinks and a permanent sneer, who spent the first two days ripping me to shreds. I spent each night curled up in the foetal position on Georgie’s sofa, my sister rubbing my head and bringing me cups of tea, telling me, just as she had done in the days and weeks following my mother’s death, that everything was going to be fine. ‘The good will out, my darling,’ she told me as we drove back to the court the following day.

I couldn’t see how it possibly would. But when we arrived at court that morning I was met by my barrister, Nicole Jones, a softly spoken but deadly sharp young woman. She told me that, following a tip-off from one of Connor’s ex-colleagues, they had managed to track down Cathy Cooper, a woman who had worked with Connor and accused him of date rape, before he’d intimidated her into leaving the firm. She’d relocated to Brussels, but when my legal team tracked her down and explained what I had gone through, she felt she had to speak out. ‘She’ll be appearing in court, as a witness for the prosecution,’ said Nicole as we stood in the corridor, huddled up against a wall. Neither of us dared say it but we knew that Cathy giving evidence could change everything.

I’ll never forget the look on Connor’s face when Cathy stepped into the witness box. Until then he had been ultra confident, laughing with his legal team, flashing that beaming smile up to his mother in the gallery, answering every question without a flinch. But when he saw Cathy – a tall young woman with blonde hair, pale-blue eyes and a light voice that never wavered, even as Connor’s barrister tried to rip her story to shreds – the colour had drained from his face. He knew, in those moments, that his trail of abuse had come to an end. It was all over.

Like me, Cathy had been a confident, well-balanced, happy woman when she met Connor but after the date rape she had suffered from depression, which was so bad her employers had wondered if she was having a nervous breakdown. When this was revealed in court I thought back to that conversation with Connor where he’d told me about a friend of his who’d had a breakdown. ‘We were all so worried about her,’ he’d said. In reality, he’d stood by and watched as the woman he’d attacked was ground down by the horror of what he’d inflicted on her. And yet, despite her own trauma, Cathy had been brave enough to come forward. I will never forget that and will always be grateful to her.