There were just five of us at the press conference, and even that modest handful included the dead girl, Nora, a lunch-box delivery driver who had met Caine at his office and later taken her own life. Above the three women sitting at a makeshift table at the far end of the office, nervously waiting to tell their stories, Nora’s shyly smiling face looked down from a big HDTV screen. Poor Nora. She had been so young that she was still having trouble with her skin. I wondered what exactly James Caine had done to her. I wondered if he had used the same cruel playbook on young Nora that he had used on me.

The rest of us were older. Two of them were women in business suits who had once worked at Caine’s firm, Samarkand Wealth Management. One of them was a shockingly beautiful Anglo-Indian woman of around forty – Rani, it said on the little laminated ID badge she wore on her jacket – and the other a woman in her middle-twenties, pretty but rather washed out. Marta, said her badge. I felt a flutter of apprehension. Sophie Sherman didn’t seriously expect me to wear a badge, did she?

‘Here’s your badge,’ she said as we hovered by the side of the little table. ‘Helps them get the names straight.’

Rani and Marta were a team, acting as if they had known each other for years, whispering urgently among themselves and totally ignoring the third woman – a pale young thing with pink streaks in her white-blonde hair and some kind of complicated ethnic wrap – Peruvian, was it? – wrapped around her bare shoulders. All I knew about her – Wendy, her badge revealed helpfully – was that she had started a pet care app and bumped into James Caine at a conference in Helsinki. Perhaps Caine gave Wendy a few tips about public speaking.

Be sincere, be brief and be seated.

And that was us – five victims of James Caine’s coercion, control and abuse, five women – one dead, four living – whose lives were made a misery by the man. But if he was truly a monster, rather than just a lying scumbag, then it felt like there should be many more. I glanced over at my staff. Mary looked close to tears. I knew how she felt today. When we started the business, we had honestly believed there was a huge market for bringing men and women together and it had never crossed our minds that there were men like James Caine out there. I fingered my badge, still delaying the moment when I put it on.

‘Sophie?’ I said again.

‘What can’t you do?’ she snapped, checking her watch. So she had heard me after all.

‘I’m not doing this,’ I said. ‘I’m really sorry. But I can’t be somebody’s anecdote.’

And finally she looked at me.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But you’re not letting me down. You’re letting them down.’ She gestured at the women waiting at the table. ‘And you’re letting down Nora, who killed herself because she thought that James Caine was in love with her and was going to leave his wife. And you’re letting down Rani, whose marriage broke up after she confessed everything to her husband after believing James Caine’s broken-condom lies. And you’re letting down Marta, who lost her job after she started self-harming. Don’t let the business suit fool you – Marta has been unemployed for two years. All of them went from a short stay in Caine’s bed to years and years under the heel of his Gucci loafers. And now you don’t want to do it, Tara? No problem! I understand. Sometimes husbands and boyfriends and partners are not as supportive as we would wish, especially when they find out some other man has dominated your life.’