I turned the key over and over in the ignition, flooding the engine with an impatience to get away. I mustn’t be seen. I had been slunk low in the driver’s seat, which I now frantically rolled down into horizontal repose. The couple were walking back towards the car park. I peered up over the dashboard in horror at the man holding hands with Rebecca. He was one and the same person who had been at the cinema with Amber.

When Connor’s dad hit my mother and smashed her cheekbones, I had pushed my neatly ironed handkerchief into my mouth to stop myself from crying out. Hot wet urine had dripped through my shorts. If he killed my mother, there would be no one left. Fear had ripped through me but cowardice kept me rooted to the spot. Now the fear was back but this time a murderous rage threatened to break through the manufactured barricade.

I grabbed my binoculars and focused on the man climbing into the orange sports car. I couldn’t be one hundred per cent certain but he also looked uncannily like the late night visitor to Amber’s flat all those years ago. What was he doing with Rebecca? What cruel twist of fate was punishing me for my cowardice?

I was forced to wait for the car engine to cool down. Once it finally started up again, Rebecca had gone. A panic that she might have spotted my car passed once she’d driven off. If she had seen me, she would surely have come and spoken and introduced her friend; perhaps invited us both back for coffee. They didn’t leave together so I felt cautiously optimistic that she would be back in her flat by the time I got there.

The clock stared down from the wall of my self-designed incident room. It was three in the morning. Rebecca hadn’t come home. I’d waited in my car across from her flat for three hours, willing her to appear. I tortured myself with images of her having coffee with the stranger. Perhaps her car had broken down. Who was I kidding? She knew the man, I was certain.

The wallchart of images, notes and scribbles was growing exponentially. The front length of my living room was fully covered and the display had already spilled onto a kitchen wall. Some measure of solace was achieved in activity.

I cut out carefully constructed arrows, using cardboard strips and pasted them so they ran from one character in the collage to another and back again. While I maintained superiority over all the players from my position at the top of the board, it was with some horror that I realised most of the arrows (twenty in total) seemed to be pointing to the character in the middle: the mystery man.