“He insisted on Father. I wanted to change that at one point but Sarah was about six then, and got very upset at me not being her real brother. So I left it. And I didn’t change my name for the same reason when my grandmother suggested I should—not that I greatly wanted to be a Napier-Fox either, and Lord knows the rest of the family would have objected. Fowler is my name now, however I got it.”

“Do you know your, uh, original father?”

“Never met him. He knew my mother was pregnant when the family paid him off, but he never sought us out. And he was forty-eight when he married a nineteen-year-old, so I’ve no great desire to make his acquaintance. I really don’t know what I’d say to him.”

“Was there something you wanted to say to your father?”

That hit home. Aaron stared at the wreckage of the fish between them. “I would have liked to thank him. To tell him I really was, am, grateful. I think if I could have done that, it would be easier to remember him for what he did well instead of dwelling on what he failed at. But he didn’t want to see me. I had gone over to the enemy and that was that.”

“Not a man for compromise. I suppose saints aren’t. And now they, the Met, want you to work on unions,” Joel said. “Does your boss know who your father was?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Is the idea that you’ll be excessively keen to stamp out union activity because of him?”

“No. No, I don’t think they can think that.”

Joel put his fork down. “Aaron. For want of a better way to put it, what the bloody hell? Without knowing how the Met or CID normally conducts itself—”

“It’s not normal,” Aaron said, although his mind flickered to Helen Challice weeping in a dark room, sobbing, It’s again and again every day and I can’t bear it, into his shoulder. “Or at least, it’s extremely hostile.”

Joel was searching his face, light eyes flickering. “If I were to ask you if this is related to the other thing we talked about—”

“Best not.”

“Right.” Joel sat back. “Well, this sounds absolutely awful.”

“It is rather.” He smiled on the words, as one had to, and knew that it didn’t look right.

Joel puffed out his cheeks. “Look, I couldn’t eat another bite. I don’t suppose you’d care to walk this off?”

“Where to?”

“Home. That is, that’s where I’m going and you could come in that direction. You could come with me as far as you’d like to go.” His eyes locked on Aaron’s. “Why don’t we find out how far that is?”