‘I can’t help you with your investigation. The Champagne Room – smuggling migrants – it’s not my world. The criminal life is not my life. That was my father. And that was my son. But it’s not me.’

‘You run care homes, is that correct?’ I said.

A flicker of irritation. I saw the pride in him, the hard-earned pride that he felt in stepping out from the long shadow of his father and making a fortune without even having to break the law.

‘Golden Years is a chain of retirement communities,’ he said, stiffening with the thin-skinned vanity of the self-made man. ‘They are not care homes.’

‘How did you get into that line of work, Mr Warboys?’

He softened, comfortable with a question that he had answered many times before.

‘I was close to both of my maternal grandmothers during my childhood. I think it began with them. Being the recipient of such kindness from the elderly. And wanting to give some of that kindness back.’

I nodded. I knew what that felt like. My grandmother raised me.

‘And was your son close to your father?’

‘Stephen idolised my father,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘Didn’t it show? But the feeling was mutual – my father had that unconditional love that is probably only possible for a grandparent to feel. I always think that parents are too close to their offspring. As a parent, you can’t miss the fact that your child – whatever their age – is just one more flawed human being, same as everyone else on the planet. But I don’t think that grandparents ever feel that way.’

He looked at the wreck of the Champagne Room.

‘My father owned this place,’ he said. ‘Not my son. My father set Stephen up in business. Were you aware of that?’

‘We know the lease is held by a company that was in your late mother’s name.’

‘Then perhaps you should be talking to my father.’

‘I will,’ I said. ‘And what about you, Mr Warboys? Are you close to your father?’

Another look towards the car. I thought of the photograph I had seen in the Black Museum, of Paul Warboys and the laughing hardmen looking down at the timid little boy in his oversized boxing gloves. I thought I could see the ghost of that scared little boy in this sixty-year-old man with the forgotten cigar in his hand.

‘Close? I wouldn’t go that far,’ he said. ‘I don’t talk to my father, Detective. Not any more. We were not close when I was a child – he was away, of course, for many years and it was my mother and my grandmothers who really raised me. And we were not close after I grew up. We were civil when we had to be. Unavoidable family gatherings and so on. But after my mother died, we finally stopped pretending.’

‘Stopped pretending what?’