The hooded figure rises from its haunches and creeps towards the unsuspecting young woman. She is looking up at the stars, trying to pick out Venus. So lost is she in her stargazing, she doesn’t sense the shadow that has just crossed her path. Somewhere in the distance an oboe strikes up, playing a single note. It’s an ominous sound, funereal. It gets louder and louder as the hooded figure bears down on the woman and clasps its bony hands around her throat. She tries to break free, but the figure is stronger than she is and soon she’s overwhelmed. Her body loosens and flops backwards like a limp rag doll. In her final moments she turns her head to look at her killer, but her eyes are full of starlight.

‘Bloody hell,’ whispers Lottie, in the seat beside me, as the curtains close and the audience strikes up a reticent applause. ‘The things you make me do, Nessa.’

She starts to giggle.

‘Puppet theatre for adults?’ she says, shaking her head. ‘I mean, really?’

‘Oh God, I’m sorry, Lottie,’ I say as the lights come up in the auditorium. ‘It got such a good write-up in the Observer too. Still, at least we didn’t have to pay for the tickets.’

‘Murderous gothic puppets,’ says Lottie, her eyes widening.

She looks at me and her face is so astounded that we both burst into fits of giggles. A woman with cropped grey hair and a batik-print jumper, sitting in the row in front, turns to us with an expression of dismay.

‘Come on,’ I say, sliding out of the seat. ‘Let’s get out of here before they do an encore.’

‘Christ, yes,’ says Lottie, stumbling behind me.

When we reach the exit I turn and take Lottie’s hand and, released from the deathly quiet auditorium, we explode into loud laughter.

‘Remind me to thank Georgie for the tickets,’ says Lottie as we make our way down the corridor to the bar. ‘I wonder why she passed them on to us.’

As senior curator of a successful independent art gallery in Mayfair, my sister is always being given free tickets for exhibitions and theatre shows of the more experimental kind. Tonight’s murderous puppets were part of a six-part show produced by a Danish theatre company who specialize in something called ‘Puppetry of the Macabre’. I smile as I imagine Georgie trying to convince Jack, my rugby-loving, no-nonsense brother-in-law, to go and watch a puppet show. ‘Give the tickets to Vanessa,’ he would have said. ‘She likes fairy stories.’ He would have been right about that. I do. Though, if I’m honest, there was something about the puppet show that got under my skin.