As he knelt on the third stair down, his elbows on the landing floor; he smiled. Penny and Maggie’s nestbuilding had accelerated over the past few weeks. They’d shown him material swatches, paint charts, online nurseries and asked his opinion, which they didn’t really want or need, and Jack didn’t want to give. Being asked his opinion put Jack in very dangerous territory: if he said it was up to them, he’d be scolded for being uninterested; but if he offered an opinion that differed from theirs, he’d be scolded for not understanding the needs of his unborn child. Jack much preferred the mind games of criminals to the mind games of his wife and mother: they mercilessly ganged up on him all the time. But the masochistic part of him adored being bullied by the women he loved – and it was tragic that Charlie wasn’t here to share the burden. He deserved to be here. He’d worked hard all his life to mould Jack into a man to be proud of and now, when Jack needed his dad to be on his side against ‘the women’, Charlie wasn’t around. The very thought of Charlie brought tears to Jack’s eyes – the pain stage of his grief was merging with the anger stage and resulted in short-lived, intense moments of heightened emotion. Jack deep-breathed through it and the tears subsided.

Then a strange memory popped into Jack’s head and he sat on the stair to relive it.

*

The sonogram burst into life and showed them an indistinct, grainy picture like something on a water-damaged VHS tape. In this uniquely beautiful moment, Jack’s mind leapt to one of his first cases for the Met, in which he was asked to watch illegally produced porn tapes found in a toilet cistern, to see if any of them starred James Daniels, a well-known, yet highly elusive local pervert. Jack closed his eyes – ‘For fuck’s sake!’ he thought as he desperately tried to get rid of the memory. Maggie squeezed his hand, and he was back in the room.

She repeated the question they’d been asked and which he hadn’t heard: ‘Do we want to know the sex?’ The romantic in Jack didn’t want to know, but the practical decorator in Maggie definitely did. So, for the sake of painting the nursery in the appropriate colour, they both said yes.

‘It’s a girl!’

The tears welled up in Jack’s eyes. He had no idea why and he could do nothing to stop them. He and Maggie looked at each other through the blur of tears, and they laughed with joy, hysteria, fear, anxiety, anticipation. ‘She’s amazing’ Maggie blubbed, as she looked at the grey snow on the screen with a black bubble, inside which was their baby. But all Jack could see was James Daniels’ bare arse bobbing up and down . . .