And then, late Thursday afternoon, I got a message to my personal email account. The sender was [email protected]:

Not such a Happy New Year? Maybe it’s time for Nora to RIP.

For once, I completely agreed. Outside of using it for things like Amazon purchases and my energy bills, about ten people knew that email address. In a flood of panic, I decided it was time for a break. I nearly bought a train ticket home, but then I imagined this person following me onto the train, finding out where my parents lived. What if they booked themselves into the Tufted Duck? Plus, how could I explain any of this to them? I needed to go somewhere far more difficult to trace, and I needed the flexibility and privacy of my own transport.

I needed to be with someone who knew who Nora was, and who’d listen to the whole story, hug me while I cried, have me laughing about the whole sorry mess and then come up with an outrageous plan to help me make it right.

I did a hasty search for used car dealers, diving into a taxi with my face encased in a scarf, hat pulled down low, and returning a couple of hours later with the only car I could afford to buy in cash.

I spent the rest of the evening pacing up and down, stuffing in Pringles and trying to form coherent thoughts that allowed me to rationalise what was going on. It was probably easy for someone with basic hacking skills to find out my email address, once they knew who I was. They still hadn’t threatened me, not really.

They just wanted to torment me, it would seem.

I tried to calm down, collect my wits. I went through all my social media accounts, but Lucy had kept on top of things and there was nothing new that seemed to link to the stalker, or any of the Alami family. I tried to search the family’s Facebook accounts again, but they were mostly set to private, and the few I could access were completely innocuous.

First thing in the morning I would pack up and head to Nottinghamshire, trusting and hoping that Charlie had meant it when she’d insisted that this time she’d be home for good. I put my doubts to one side and pretended to try to go to sleep.

When the first message pinged through to my WhatsApp, I nearly fell out of bed. Before I’d untangled myself from the duvet and fumbled for my phone on the bedside table, another one had arrived. Six more followed in quick succession. I read them perched on the edge of the bed, the only light the glow from the attachments as I opened each one with the apprehension and speed of a bomb-disposal expert snipping the red wire on a homemade device. The dread and dismay grew with each one. Most of the messages were a mix of news clippings, formal notifications and photographs clearly showing six different restaurants that had gone out of business in the past year. I recognised the name of each one because I’d reviewed them. Three of them were terrible and would have failed with or without me. Three more were okay, nothing special, and given how few new restaurants survived they wouldn’t have succeeded without taking my carefully worded criticism on the chin and making some serious changes. My review could potentially have been their saviour.