I feel close to tears but I won’t cry. ‘He would look at me differently. He wants marriage, kids, the whole fairytale. And I want it too. After my upbringing …’ I swallow a lump in my throat ‘… I want a good man. A family man. I just …’ I lower my voice so that it’s barely audible ‘… I just don’t know if I deserve it.’

Jack leans forwards, still holding my hand. ‘Of course you do. You realize you made a mistake. Nobody’s perfect, Jess. Blimey. Certainly not me and I bet certainly not Rory, whatever you think. But you should tell him.’

‘I know.’ I take my hand from his and push the crisps packet away from me. I’ve completely lost my appetite. ‘There’s more,’ I say.

Jack stays silent, waiting, as he regards me over his pint glass.

‘The case I’m talking about. It was Marianne Walker-Smith.’

He snorts. ‘Shit.’

I don’t need to tell him what happened. The whole country knows. Marianne, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, went missing on Christmas Eve eighteen months ago from Reading. Everyone, including the press, suspected her stepfather, a rough-looking local hard nut made good. Wayne Walker was a builder, who made a lot of money but couldn’t shed his thuggish image despite his flash cars and fancy suits. He was arrested but released with no charge after lack of evidence. A few months later, and just before I was sacked, Marianne’s body was found on Clapham Common. A heroin overdose. She’d got in with the wrong crowd, the police said, and run away from home. There had been sightings of her with an older man, but nothing to suggest she’d been murdered.

But Wayne was angry and wanted someone to blame. One evening, when I still lived in London, I was on my way home from a night out with friends when he accosted me as I was walking alone to the tube station, slamming me into a wall and breathing into my ear that he would fuck me up, among other things.

‘You weren’t the only journalist who slagged him off in the press,’ says Jack, when I finish telling him. ‘Why did he come after you?’

I run my finger around the rim of my glass. ‘I don’t know. Someone saw, yelled out and he ran off. But I knew who he was. I recognized his bulldog face.’

‘It was just an empty threat. He wouldn’t do anything. He can’t know where you live now.’

I remember how scared I’d felt the other night when I’d thought I was being followed. ‘No. You’re right. It just freaked me out.’

‘Not surprising. He sounds like a nasty piece of work.’

‘I think he knew something about the phone hacking. Maybe someone in the police tipped him off. It was before my editor was charged –’