Just how close to home death had appeared. The dark thought marbled her bones and, as she looked at her son, the words don’t come any closer dripped through her brain.

‘Didn’t you want to be a doctor like Dad?’ He slid off the sofa, his bottom hitting the floor. ‘He gets loads of free time, and helps people get better.’

‘Your dad was good at Sciences at school. I wasn’t. I was good at Geography, English Literature and History. Places, stories and people interested me. They still do.’

She watched him processing the information, the softness of his brow tightening.

‘Last night, when we were talking about you, Dad said, The world needs different people doing different things, and if it wasn’t for your mum and her team there’d be loads more bad people out there doing terrible things. The world needs me to be a doctor and your mum to be a police officer.’

‘You understand that?’

‘Of course I do. I’m on Turquoise seven on the Project X reading programme. I’ve gone up four levels in a year.’

‘I know and I’m proud of you and I’m impressed.’

He lay on his side and peered under the sofa.

‘There it is.’

Philip stuck his hand and half his arm under the sofa and pulled out a black and red toy truck, which he rolled up and down on the carpet.

‘Beep! Beep, Beep!’

‘What do you want to do when you grow up, Philip?’

‘I’d like to play for Everton.’

Thomas came in and placed two mugs of tea on the coffee table. Clay looked at Thomas, at Philip on the carpet moving his truck around the legs of the coffee table, and back at Thomas.

‘Suppose you couldn’t be a footie player,’ said Thomas. ‘What’s your next choice?’

‘I’d like to be a policeman.’ He half-pointed at Clay. ‘Just like you, only a man not a woman.’

‘Why?’ Despite her cast-iron ability not to be shocked by what she saw and heard, she was amazed. In her mind her career flashed before her and, as a mother, she lit a small flame in her heart that this was just a passing phase that he would soon grow out of, and that he would choose something entirely different to the path she had walked.

‘Why, Mum? You’re famous. All the big kids in the school, the ten- and eleven-year olds, come up to me in the playground and ask me questions about you. They’re dead impressed. One lad asked me about that night, years before I was in your tummy. He told me you escaped from a burning building from which you’d arrested a psycho, single-handed.’

The fire that she’d walked through as she arrested The Baptist flashed through her memory.