Dan felt sad about Patrick Ryan. It was a darn shame for him to have gone through such suffering and hardship, to have been so determined to get his life back on track and to end up dead just when it was all beginning to take shape again. He made a note in his phone to get the office to find out which youth clubs Ryan had been volunteering with. ‘Does Patrick have any family alive other than your daughter? Parents, siblings?’

‘Both his parents are still alive. They’re in Kilburn.’

‘What are their names?’

‘Sinead and Gabriel.’ She jotted his parents’ address on a pad and handed it to him.

Dan nodded. ‘Do you know if he was involved with any social action or community events?’

She frowned.

‘For example, protests or flash mobs?’

Her face fell, and she looked scared. ‘Is this about the arson in Brick Lane?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll be honest: protests don’t sound like him but he was certainly against gentrification, just as he was opposed to people pretending to be something they weren’t. When Patrick worked at the bank, he earned a lot of money and suffered terrible imposter syndrome. He felt he’d betrayed his working-class roots and it made him feel guilty. He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a hypocrite – although he did change when he was working at the bank.’ She paused. ‘But – we obviously weren’t as close in the last few years as we once were. It may be that stuff happened on the streets that I don’t know about. You can’t go through all that, the drugs, psychiatric hospital, and sleeping rough, without it changing you somehow.’ She stopped again, as though there was something she wanted to add but wasn’t sure about. ‘I know he was angry about getting kicked out of hospital so quickly so maybe that changed his attitudes.’

‘Can you explain how he changed?’

‘He got hard when he was working in the city. He began not to give a shit about anyone. He worshipped at the altar of money and his mind was on the current deal and the markets. But it wasn’t really who he was.’ Her eyes ached with regret. ‘That’s probably partly why he started boozing and taking cocaine. The pressure, the weirdness of the environment, the hours, the imposter syndrome. Somewhere along the way he lost touch with who he was, and it was as though he despised himself for what he was doing. That led to more booze and drugs, and more self-loathing. Really, he was a classic example of a working-class boy who got a lucky break, found something that he was good at, made hundreds of thousands, and all the while felt unworthy of the success and guilty.’