A sharp rap on the car window lifted me six inches off the seat. Gabby glared down at me, half-cross, half-amused. I unwound the window.

‘We don’t want him thinking he’s got competition,’ she deadpanned, ‘you might as well come in.’

‘Only if you’re sure …’ I started but she’d already marched off.

I caught up with her at the front door.

‘I’ve tidied and everything.’

‘You knew I’d come?’

‘Funnily enough, Donal, because I’m being stalked I tend to keep a bit of an eye out. I can’t believe you park in the same place every night.’

My face burned.

‘I’m not a weirdo, Gabby, I really want to stress that point. I just want to help you get rid of this … problem.’

‘I know that now,’ she said, treating me to a closed-mouth, business-like smile.

She took a quick scan of the street – almost instinctively – then gestured at me to go through first, before treble-locking the door.

I led the way down her hallway into an open-plan sitting room and kitchen. I noticed original numbered canvas artwork, a bank of photos of her world travels, an old Canon Super 8 camera, books galore – lots of Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin.

She showed me to her kitchen table, put the kettle on.

‘Tea, coffee?’

‘Tea would be great.’

She opened her cupboard to reveal a rainbow of exotic brews: Darjeeling, Earl Grey, Cinnamon, Peppermint.

‘What type?’

‘Just normal, thanks.’

‘I’m not sure I have normal.’

‘Surprise me,’ I demanded, pretending to be the spontaneous type.

She put a cup of what smelt like steaming rat piss in front of me and announced: ‘Right, let’s get this over with, shall we?’

My startled look clearly empowered her.

‘You must be dying to know how I ended up with a nutty stalker boyfriend.’

How did she know?

‘Well, he didn’t start out like that. I suppose they never do.’

I shuffled awkwardly. I was still learning how to listen without judgement. It didn’t come naturally.

‘I met him at Uni. He was shy, serious but very dry and funny when you got to know him. And clever. He’s probably the only actual genius I’ve ever met.’

I realised I’d yet to tick a single point on her ‘What I Like in a Man’ list.

‘Of course I was totally bowled over by this tortured and slightly depressive genius. I mean, who wouldn’t be?’

‘Who indeed? Do you have milk by any chance?’

She looked at me as if I’d just cracked a really lame gag, then carried on.

‘After a while, he never wanted to go out or have anyone round. Looking back I can see how he isolated me from my friends and my family. They really didn’t like him at all. We spent more and more time together. I didn’t realise it but I’d become totally dependent on him.

‘He started getting very snappy and impatient, criticising me all the time. He just chipped away at my self-esteem until I’d lost all sense of who I was and what I believed in, if that makes sense.’

The dainty china cup felt ridiculous in my meaty farmer’s hand. I took a sip, careful to suppress all reaction, and apologised silently to rats.

‘Then my gran got diagnosed with cancer. Dom refused to come with me to see her. She’d only met him a few times but she gave me a really stiff talking to. I was really upset by the things she said but I knew in my heart she was right. So I went home and told him.’

‘And now he can’t accept it’s over?’

She shook her head.

‘You mentioned he could be violent?’

She swallowed, inspected her hands and nodded slowly. It didn’t feel right to press. I tried another tack.

‘Maybe he just can’t stop loving you?’

She laughed bitterly. ‘He never loved me. I’m a possession to him. His ego can’t accept that I finished it. Little old meek me.’

‘Meek? You? Jesus.’

That got a smile.

‘Look, Gabby, you need to move out of here, get a house share so you’ve always got people around you. Stay off the electoral roll so he can’t find you …’

‘But Gran left me this place. I’ve spent the last six months doing it up. I can’t just … leave.’

‘Maybe just for a year … you’d have no trouble renting it out. It’s beautiful.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I promise, give it twelve months and he’ll tire of trying to find you.’

‘He knows where I work.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Hopscotch children’s nursery, on Crescent Lane. I’m the manager.’

‘Trust me, stalker or not, he won’t hang around a nursery. He’ll get lynched.’

She laughed, then groaned: ‘Oh God, why do I have to move when he’s the one …?’

‘Look, I don’t want to alarm you, Gabby, but he’s escalating. You need to get away from here right away. By that, I mean tomorrow. Have you family close by?’

She sighed.

‘Mum and Dad live in Maidstone. It’s only an hour on the train. I suppose I could stay there for a while.’

‘Otherwise you’ll have to put up with me every night.’

She looked at me, eyebrow arched, quizzically amused: ‘What’s your story then, Donal? How does an Irishman end up in the British police force? And why do you shout in your sleep?’

‘How long have you got?’ I laughed.

‘I’m not a great sleeper either,’ she smiled, ‘so you can take your time. Another tea?’

‘Er no, thanks. Do you have anything stronger?’

‘I’ve got wine.’

‘Red?’

‘Blimey, you get your feet under the table quick, don’t you?’

‘Bespoke personal protection don’t come cheap.’

I skipped the stuff about Eve and Meehan: none of it showed anyone in a good light. Instead, over too much Merlot, I took her through my three-year journey from North to South London; from Irish rebel to tax-paying member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary.

Put it down to gut instinct or a copper’s mind but, as I poured out my story, I felt sure we were being watched, possibly listened to. I knew too that what I’d started here could end horribly. What if Dom was a disciple of that stalker’s doctrine: ‘If I can’t have you, nobody else will’?

When I first got to Harlesden, I shared a house so crowded that only the door-less bathroom didn’t have a bed. We went home to wash and sleep. We ate, drank, got hired and cashed our paycheques at the Spotted Dog pub on Willesden High Road.

Standing at the bar every night were the men we’d become if we kept this up for another twenty or thirty years, the old boys who came over in the Fifties and Sixties. They had faces like elephant hide and accents even thicker; I’d never heard anyone in Ireland speak with such a strong brogue. I watched them night after night, sinking pint after pint of Guinness, failing to quench terrible thirsts while clutching white polythene bags in their non-drinking hands.

‘What’s in the bags?’ I asked the barman quietly one night.

‘That’s their dinner,’ he whispered. On closer inspection, beneath the polythene I could see the outline of a chop or a ball of mince, potatoes and carrots.

‘Why don’t they get it later? It’s not like the shops round here shut.’

‘Because they’ll have drunk all their money later.’

You’d learn that some of them didn’t go home for Christmas anymore – the lost causes. Two nights a week, a tin collecting for ‘IRA prisoners’ rattled under your nose. No one dared decline. You noticed that the local mini-cab firm only ever sent white drivers. No one ever asked why.

I’d landed regular work feeding cement to a trio of Connemara bricklayers. They worked like savages, as if expunging some inner volcanic rage or demon. ‘Feed me,’ they’d roar, but no matter how fast and hard I’d mix, I could never keep up. It sapped me of the energy I needed to change my pub-based existence. At least that was my excuse.

We spent almost the entire weekend in the Dog, drinking away our aches and gains, frittering money on horses, football and pool. We’d end up at the Gresham on Holloway Road, a vast hangar of drunken oblivion where Irish people of all ages drank, ate, danced and fought. And they always fought. The red-faced middle-aged men in ripped shirts knew they only had to land one good one to win. The police never came. You were too pissed to wonder why.