He looked up as the speaker gestured towards a lone step. Michael knew the drill. He stepped up, placed his feet shoulder-width apart and raised his arms to shoulder height. The speaker then spent twenty seconds patting Michael down. She checked beneath his collar, then his cuffs, his waistband and the hem of his trouser legs. She even checked inside Michael’s mouth. Satisfied that he was smuggling nothing into the prison, she allowed him to retrieve his belongings from the X-ray machine.

Michael slipped his jacket back on and moved to the back of the visiting crowd. Ross joined him within a minute, having suffered the same indignity. They waited in silence while Michael let his mind drift back to that first visit.

Seventeen years ago.

Back then he had been surprised to endure the strict security he had faced. Almost two decades later and the only surprise was how little things really change.

SIX

Simon Kash made an uncomfortable chair look downright painful. He looked younger than his twenty-one years. Much younger. His grey prison-issue tracksuit did not help. It swamped Kash’s small frame as he fidgeted in his seat.

Michael’s eyes swept up and down as he surveyed the figure in front of him. What there was of it, anyway. Kash was accused of a crime of extreme violence – double murder. Already it seemed unlikely, and not just because of Kash’s size.

True, the skinny boy did not look strong enough to overpower a teenage girl, let alone two brothers with violent reputations. But that impression alone meant nothing. Michael had encountered men half his own size who somehow possessed twice his strength. No. It was everything else about Kash that gave Michael pause. His nervous manner. His haunted expression. Michael just could not reconcile this frightened child with the animal who had massacred the Galloway twins.

‘Tell me about Darren O’Driscoll, Simon.’

Kash seemed to shrink at the mention of the name. Michael had expected no less. Darren O’Driscoll was Kash’s co-defendant and yet in the thirty minutes they had been in the small, dirty room in HMP Wandsworth’s legal visits block, Kash had neither mentioned O’Driscoll’s name nor alluded to the man’s involvement in the case.

And Michael thought he knew why.

Together, Kash and O’Driscoll were accused of hunting down and killing two brothers in South East London. In their thirties and strong from a working life of manual labour, the Galloway twins were not among life’s obvious victims. Yet they were now dead. Murdered – according to the prosecution – for the grave crime of disrespecting Darren O’Driscoll’s uncle on a construction site in the City.

The motive behind their death was not surprising. Michael had seen many killed for much less. But how they had died? That was another story entirely.

London can be a violent city and Michael had been involved in his fair share of criminal trials arising from that violence. There was little he had not seen. Yet even he was shocked by the attack upon the Galloway twins.