I’m driving back to North Melbury, fingers trembling on the steering wheel and barely able to concentrate. Cars flash past me as I stick to the slower lanes, only focusing on the strip of tarmac directly in front. I’m so angry, so scarred, that I shouldn’t be driving. I know that – but I want to be home.

I should call the police. I know that. Stephen is almost certainly not his real name but, whoever he is, he’s a danger to women. I figure I’ll call the agency and tell them Stephen’s working on the side. It’s not as much as I should do but it’s something. If I call the police, there’ll be too much to explain.

As for Tyler, my first thought is that there’s no way he’d have a spare thousand pounds lying around. Except, I don’t know much about him. Perhaps he deals drugs and has plenty of cash – it’s just that he likes using Olivia to pay for things anyway. He has shoplifting convictions but perhaps there are many more crimes of which he’s guilty, where he hasn’t been caught. He might burgle houses, or rob shops and sell what he steals. It’s possible he’d have the money to set me up.

It could be straightforward: Tyler arranged this, I found out in my hazy drug-addled state, somehow ran him over, left him dying in a ditch somewhere and then woke up in that field. I’m not sure why he hasn’t been found but everything else makes sense.

Sort of.

It takes me a good twenty minutes to realise that none of those assumptions have to be true. It would take me five minutes to go onto the internet and set up an email address in Tyler’s name. It might have been him – but this is no more proof than I had before.

All it does show is that whoever set me up knew Tyler’s name and which hotel I was staying in. And when.

Off the top of my head, that’s Dan, Olivia and Graham from work. Graham’s a stretch because I’ve only mentioned Tyler’s name to him once when he said he’d seen Olivia outside the Cosmic Café with ‘some kid who looks like he’s homeless’.

It’s not only those three, though. Other people at work could easily have found out in which hotel I was staying – and then discovered Tyler’s name by looking at Olivia’s Facebook page. As could anyone else.

Once the hotel had been booked, I pinned the details to the fridge in case of an emergency. Tyler could have seen it there before he disappeared. Ellie hasn’t visited the house in a while – but she has a key. Jason was released from prison a few days before all this happened – but he could have used her key and got into our house.

And then there’s the fact that any of those people could have passed the information onto anyone else.

To a degree, I’m no closer to knowing who set all this up – except for the thousand pounds that was paid from Dan’s credit card. I’ve seen first-hand that he has something between a crush and an infatuation with Alice, so perhaps his long game is a divorce from me; while still being able to keep the house, Olivia’s affections, and everything else. It feels long-winded and ridiculously drawn out but it’s not beyond comprehension – especially if part of that long game is to frame me for whatever has happened to Tyler. If the police had searched the garage, I would have been in serious trouble. Everything happened shortly after I argued with Tyler and we’ve been at odds for months. That’s motive. Blood on my car and his chain in my glovebox is some degree of proof. Perhaps that would have been enough to charge me? If I was charged, let alone convicted, that’s Dan’s out.

It still doesn’t feel quite right.

This is a man I’ve known and lived with for two decades, someone with whom I have a child. It’s hard to believe this could be him – but then he does have a stun gun in his gym locker. And it wasn’t that long ago Stephen was telling me he’d do more or less anything for money. People do strange things at the promise of cash.

I suppose the talk with Stephen has cleared up one thing. After Stephen left me, whoever paid him entered my hotel room and then got me out to my car while I was barely conscious. Perhaps that person stayed in the hotel as well, or maybe they simply walked in and headed up the stairs without pausing. Looking confident is half the battle in situations like that. Staff aren’t going to challenge someone who walks up to a hotel room like they belong. The person might have used the fire escape to get me out and avoid being seen. Or maybe they simply held me up, smiling at any members of staff who passed, making a joke of it by saying, ‘One too many’, or something like that. Once I was outside, they drove my car out to that field and then put me in the driver’s seat.

I still have no idea what went on with the blood on the bonnet, nor if this is what happened. It’s still a mess.

Somewhere in all this, Tyler is involved. I can’t know whether it was really him who emailed Stephen but his blood was on my car and his dog tag inside. He’s also missing, so did he do all this and then disappear; or has someone kidnapped him to get to me?

There is someone else who might be able to help. Someone else who has helped make my life miserable in the past week. Before I contact him, I’ll have to do a bit of non-literal digging.