‘That doesn’t matter. We’ll run a nitrate test on your hands. That’ll show whether you’ve fired a gun recently. And the mud on that wharf – a lab analysis of the dirt on your boots should tie in pretty closely. Then there’s your car. If it was parked for long in the alley outside the wharf, we can prove that, too.’ He shook his head. ‘You never stood a chance.’

‘Didn’t I?’

‘You know what your biggest mistake was? You told me you hated Ben, that from the age of fourteen on, he wouldn’t leave you alone.’ Nick shook his head. ‘If there was one thing I learned during the past eight hours, it was this. Where women were concerned, Ben Garvald was the original gentleman. He’d have cut off his right hand before he’d have harmed a fourteen-year-old kid.’

‘I wanted him,’ Jean said simply. ‘Do you know that? I used to lie in bed nights and burn for him and he never laid a finger on me.’

He got to his feet, dropping his cigarette to the floor, and she moved in close, hands sliding around his neck, breasts pushing hard against him.

‘Nobody needs to know, Nick. You could handle it somehow, I know you could.’

‘If I wanted to,’ he said slowly. ‘And there’s the rub. To use the words of a man who was worth a dozen of you any day, I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot barge pole, angel.’

She cracked completely, fingers hooked, clawing at his eyes. As he grabbed her wrists, the language came bursting out like a dam overflowing. All the filth of Khyber Street, the gutter years, pushed down, hidden away in some dark corner of the mind, now rising to the surface.

Grant came through the door, moving with incredible speed for a man of his weight, a constable at his shoulder. He caught her wrists, pulling her away. ‘All right, lad, I’ll take her.’

The constable took her other arm and she went through the door between them, looking over her shoulder, face twisted with hate, the stream of filth never ending, fading across the yard into the rain.

He stood staring into space, feeling for a cigarette mechanically. He placed it in his mouth and a match flared. He turned, looked into the dark, tortured face of Chuck Lazer for a moment, then leaned to the light.

‘A long night, General.’

Nick didn’t reply. He walked out of the room, passed along the corridor and stood in the porch, staring out at the driving rain.

‘A long night,’ he repeated slowly.

‘Look, I know how you feel,’ Chuck Lazer said awkwardly. ‘But she’s a woman after all. They’ll go easy on her.’