It made sense. She’d been present when Coopertown killed his wife and child, during the incident in the cinema and the attack on Dr Framline. She’d been there when we planned the operation outside the Opera House, and she’d arrived with the back-up in time to pick up the missing pistol.

Lesley May was my suspect. She was part of it, sequestrated by Henry Pyke as part of his mad play of riot and revenge. I wondered if she’d been part of it from the beginning, from the first night when William Skirmish had his head knocked off and I’d met Nicholas Wall-penny. Then I remembered Pretty Polly from the Piccini script – the silent girl romanced by Punch after he’d killed his wife and child. He kisses her most audibly while she appears ‘nothing loath’. Then he sings, If I had all the wives of old King Sol, I would kill them all for my Pretty Poll.

There was a mother who lost her son in Covent Garden once. She was very English in an old-fashioned way, good-quality print dress, nice bag, down for a shopping trip to the West End and a visit to the London Transport Museum. Got distracted by a window display for a moment and turned back to find her six-year-old boy had gone.

I remember very clearly how she looked by the time she found us. A surface veneer of calm, a traditional British stiff upper lip but her eyes gave her away – darting left and right, she was fighting the impulse to run in all directions at once. I tried to keep her calm while Lesley called it in and started organising a search. I don’t know what I was saying, just calming words, but even while I was speaking I saw that she was shaking almost imperceptibly, and I realised that I was watching a human being come apart in front of my eyes. The six-year-old turned up less than a minute later, led up from one of the Piazza’s sunken courtyards by a kindly mime. I was looking right at the mother when the son reappeared, saw the relief laid bare on her face and the way the fear was sucked backwards into her until only the brisk and practical woman in the sundress and the sensible sandals remained.