I glanced beyond my office window at my staff, collected around the front door, watching the journalists and photographers who were gathering at the end of our mews, and I still did not want to be a part of the next Sophie Sherman sex scandal, and I still did not want to be a part of her next worthy project. But I could talk to Sophie Sherman, and talking was a relief.

‘After he told me about the broken condom, he told me to not have sex with my husband because I might have a sexually transmitted infection,’ I said. I bit my lower lip. ‘HSV-2, he said. I had never even heard of HSV-2. It sounds like a fucking highspeed rail network.’

‘Caine told a number of women there was a problem with protection. You have to wonder where he was buying his condoms from. Once you believed in the condom malfunction, everything else was credible. He liked women to think that they were possibly infected, or pregnant, or both. He enjoyed their fear. I think he enjoyed it more than the sex.’ She did not pat my hand – she was not the type for patting hands – but it felt like it. ‘Your test results were clear, Tara?’

I nodded, my eyes filling with tears of relief and rage.

‘But once he tells you that, you just don’t know,’ I said angrily, remembering how petrified I had been sitting in the Harley Street waiting room, going to see an expensive private doctor because she would give me the results immediately, and also because I was far too ashamed to see our local GP, the gentle old man who cared for my family’s minor ailments. ‘And until you get the results from the doctor, you can never know.’

‘James Caine had a PhD in coercive control,’ Sophie said. ‘It wasn’t only women he met on business trips. A co-worker in his office brought a sexual harassment case and got paid off to keep quiet, and a young woman who delivered lunch boxes to his office took her own life.’

‘A woman committed suicide because of Caine?’

Sophie Sherman took a deep breath.

‘Some things are difficult to prove. But other women are coming forward. Other women are contacting me. Women who were abused by James Caine. Women he tortured. Women like you.’

‘Women like me?’

‘Women like you,’ she repeated. ‘Women he met on a business trip and then had a brief affair with.’

‘It wasn’t an affair.’

‘What would you call it?’ she said sharply. ‘A one-night stand?’

I didn’t want to call it anything. I wanted to forget all about it, but the vultures were gathering at the end of our mews and I could hear them even from my office, waiting for their pictures and their quote and to shine their spotlights in every corner of my life.

‘I’m not like the other women you’ve helped.’

‘You’re exactly like them, Tara. And you need to get ahead of this story. And more than that, you need to get justice.’