I thought of the women who had turned up at the Caine family home in Brighton. The whores at the door, his wife had called them. The women who did not realise that it was a well-trodden path and that taking it would impress no one and change nothing. The whores at the door. Women like me.

‘James Caine was a bastard,’ Sophie Sherman said. ‘And now you have to own your story. Because if you don’t, somebody else will. Those people at the end of the mews are going to eat you up if you let them. The dating expert whose secret lover wound up dead.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘I have been reading about your company for some time. This anonymous blogger – the Accidental Dater – seems to have it in for you.’

I felt my defences rise. The Accidental Dater was doing my business real harm. Subscriptions were down, advertising was down and so our revenue stream was drying up. If the money stopped coming in then soon I was going to have to ask the bank for an overdraft or my father for a loan, or both, to buy some time to try turning things around. At any other time, these money worries would have consumed my every waking hour, and quite a few of my sleeping hours too. But right now it felt like I had a bigger fire to fight.

‘Every business like ours has the same problem,’ I said. ‘How do we keep a distance from the liars, the bullies, the sadists, the sickos and the controlling creeps? It’s the same problem for every dating app in the world.’

Sophie Sherman smiled for the first time, and I realised I liked her.

‘And every woman,’ she said.

CHRISTIAN

I watched Tara online, standing in the bright spring sunshine outside the Angel Eyes office, reading a prepared statement, the thin young woman in black by her side.

‘I made a mistake,’ Tara said. ‘And I will regret it for the rest of my life. I have let down my family, myself and most of all my husband. I send my condolences to the family of James Caine, who have lost a husband and a father.’ She lifted her face to the media pack and the cameras clicked. ‘But,’ she said, and let it hang there for a while, ‘James Caine made my life a misery.’

Then the press were shouting their questions at Tara and Sophie Sherman, sensing another big scalp to put up there with King Leer and Uncle Norman, another juicy exposé that would run and run. Tara bent her head, and for the first time I saw the pain in my wife, and I saw the weight she carried, and my heart clenched with feeling for her.

‘For the victims of abuse,’ Sophie Sherman said, without the need of prepared notes, ‘it is never over. They live with the wounds inflicted by their abuser every day of their lives and they carry those wounds to their grave. Long after your headlines have faded, those wounds will impact on every corner of the lives of the victims and the lives of their loved ones. And this is true even when the abuser – like James Caine – is dead.’