Horton placed the bottle in an evidence bag, then wrapped it up in a cloth and placed it in the boot of the car before returning to the rider to read him his rights.

Grace walked over to the two youths on the sidelines, aware that a considerable crowd was now forming. He could hear sirens approaching – an ambulance and back-up, he assumed. ‘Would you like to be witnesses as you seem so interested and saw everything? Care to give me your names and addresses?’

Both of them hesitated, glanced at each other, then sprinted off, shouting abuse as they did so.

10

Tuesday 27 November

On the second and third floors of a shabby terraced building above a Chinese takeaway on a main road close to Brighton’s Magistrates’ Court, a stone’s throw from the police station, was the law firm of TG Law, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths. For over twenty-five years its eponymous proprietor Terence Gready and his associates had practised criminal law, specializing mostly in legal aid cases.

Occasionally the firm took on a rape case, or a GBH, or murder, but its bread and butter was an endless procession of impaired drivers, small-time drug dealers, shoplifters, sex workers, muggers, burglars, domestic abusers, sex offenders, pub brawlers and the rest of the flotsam of low-life criminals that plagued the city and endlessly stretched police resources.

Terence Gready was a short, neatly presented and scrupulously polite fifty-five-year-old who had a sympathetic ear for every client. He always put them at ease, however hopeless he considered their case might be. With his conservative suits, club ties, immaculately polished shoes and beady eyes behind small, round tortoiseshell glasses – which had been in and out of fashion during his thirty years of practising law and were now back in again – a client had once described him as looking like the twin brother of the late comedian Ronnie Corbett – but with smaller glasses and flappier hands.

Gready presented to the world a family man of seemingly modest ambition, for whom the pinnacle of success was to avoid a custodial sentence for a drug addict accused of shoplifting thirty pounds’ worth of toiletries from an all-night chemist. A good husband and devoted father, a school governor and a generous charitable benefactor, Terence Gready was the kind of person you would never notice in a busy room – and not just because of his lack of height. He exuded all the presence of a man standing in his own shadow, perfectly fitting Winston Churchill’s description of ‘a modest man with much to be modest about’.

‘Gready by name but not by nature,’ the solicitor would never tire of telling his occasional private clients, when informing them of his fees. On the wall behind his desk was a framed motto: NO ONE EVER GOT RICH BY GOING TO JAIL.