He and Liz both knew the risks, and while both were dimly aware that haemophiliacs infected during the 1980s were dropping dead, neither was fully aware of the scale of the problem. “He was scared, but his way of dealing with it was just to be flippant about it,” says Liz. “He always said: ‘Well, you know, I don’t want to make old bones.’”

So he resolved to struggle on and his and Liz’s relationship returned to normal. He was still feeling tired, but he never knew to what extent this was simply down to the pressures of a stressful job. Over time he began feeling stomach pains, but an endoscopy didn’t reveal anything untoward.

After the six-month course of treatment was finished, Jeremy was tested for the virus, and the drugs hadn’t shifted it. “It was six months of total hell for no reason,” says Liz. Jeremy couldn’t face going back on the medication again. He preferred to live with the risk of liver failure rather than put his family through that a second time.

On 7 December 2008, the family sat down to breakfast as normal. Lewis, now 15, caught his bus to school. Liz went to the insurance company office where she worked part-time handling claims.

Not long before lunchtime, she was in a meeting when a colleague knocked on the door. The mobile phone she had left on her desk was going off. It was Jeremy. “Please can you come home?” he asked. “I’m really not very well.”

Liz raced back to the house and called out Jeremy's name as she stepped through the front door. No-one answered. She went upstairs and opened the bathroom door. “It was absolutely horrific,” she says. There was bright red blood everywhere.

Then she went to the bedroom. Jeremy was lying on the bed, ashen-faced. The colour had drained from his lips. Barely conscious, he told Liz he’d been vomiting blood.

She rang an ambulance. Paramedics arrived to take him to hospital. He was booked in for an endoscopy to see what was wrong. The next morning, before he went in for the examination, Jeremy told Liz: “Right, I’m going to get this done and then I’m going home and I want to have a hot bath and a big cup of tea with sugar.” He didn’t normally take sugar, only on special occasions, as a treat.

Those were the last words he ever said to Liz.

The endoscope was put down his throat, but it didn’t get very far before an internal bleed erupted. He then had a cardiac arrest. The medical staff resuscitated him and rushed him into surgery.

A doctor summoned Liz to tell her what had happened. “I knew from his expression what he was going to say,” she recalls. There was nothing they could do. “I still feel ashamed of myself,” Liz says. “I remember getting on the floor in front of the doctor. I held my arms out and I said to him: ‘Take my blood because if you take my blood, he’ll have it.’” The doctor told her it was too late for that.

The doctor asked if she wanted to see Jeremy. She did, but she would later deeply regret setting foot inside the operating theatre. There was blood everywhere. “It was coming out of his mouth and out of his nose and even the corners of his eyes. His body was just rejecting everything.” She couldn’t stay with him. “It’s a memory that I’ve got etched in my mind and it was just like something from a horror film.”