It’s so cold inside the car, my scar feels like it’s on fire.

Most of the time it doesn’t bother me. The lightning strike destroyed so many of my nerve endings the skin on my back remains numb, even now. But for the nerve endings that survived, extremes of temperature can set them alight. The pain makes me twist in the driver’s seat.

It is minus four degrees outside and gone midnight. Lawrie is bundled up in his coat, and every now and then I turn on the engine to keep us warm, but the noise breaks open the silence of the street, so I don’t keep it running for long.

The Daily Mail reporter is parked behind us, our photographer behind him.

‘This is pointless,’ says Lawrie.

But he’s wrong. The air is humming with tension. Something will happen tonight.

If the family slips out under cover of darkness, we’ll never track them down. Fleet Street’s old guard might have got their stories by blagging credit card details or hacking mobile phones, but those dark arts belong to the past. These days it’s all GDPR and being the first to update Twitter feeds with the latest breaking news.

In any case, the armchair commentators, the armies of the self-righteous and professionally outraged have posted and commented and retweeted until the address is plastered all over social media. We couldn’t leave now even if we wanted to. The story is here.

The upstairs lights in the house went out while we were still bickering about the best time to knock, and the decision was made for us. No one wants a complaint to the press regulator on their record.

The Daily Mail reporter offered to keep an eye on things while we went back to the guest house for some sleep, but Lawrie refused. After Russell from the Sun’s stunt, he doesn’t trust the opposition.

So all three of us are here. Watching. Waiting.

The front pages of tomorrow’s newspapers are now online. My name up in lights. I tried calling Aunt Peg a couple of hours ago, to tell her what I’d done, but there was no reply, the phone ringing out until I hung up. Some nights, she pops into the flat next door for a sherry, but I’ve left Pearline’s number in my address book at work. I’ll try her again in the morning.

Snow collects on the windscreen. My feet are freezing. Lawrie is on his phone, texting. At one point, he sighs and puts it in his pocket.

‘Does your boyfriend mind you spending the night with another man?’ He laughs to show it’s a joke.