‘He’ll find a way to make himself feel important,’ Duffy replied, following close behind as Michael began to walk down the staircase. ‘He always does.’

‘I’ll be impressed if he manages that. He has literally no power at all today. And I’ll make sure I remind him of exactly that, if he really is that much of a tosser.’

‘Now that I’d pay to see.’

The lawyers chuckled as they descended the two short staircases that led to the entrance of the building’s custody area. They were early, Michael knew. Most prisoners did not arrive until after 9.30 a.m., when the prison vans usually reached the court. But Nizar Mansour had been held in Stoke Newington Police Station overnight, and Bruce Bull had already confirmed that he had been delivered to the building.

‘Tell me about your connection to Bull,’ Michael said, intrigued by Duffy’s role in all this. ‘He seems to be sticking his neck way out on this. No matter how well he hides it, he’s taking on the Secret Service and backing a man who seems to have killed hundreds of people. If he’s wrong, his career’s over.’

‘Without question, aye.’

‘Then why you? This couldn’t be more serious. Why does he trust you?’

‘We were in a case together fifteen years ago,’ Duffy explained. ‘Only terrorism trial I ever did. Bull was the officer in charge. I was defending a kid from South London who they said had been radicalised.

‘It was one of those where everyone went through the motions. Bull was Special Branch back then and he had done a great job. Everyone thought their clients were guilty, Bull thought he knew they were, and so none of the lawyers had any fight left in them. No one was pleading, so they treated the trial as a formality.

‘My boy, though. He was different. They’d tried to radicalise him, aye. And they’d done a decent enough job to convert him to Islam and all that. But they hadn’t made him a terrorist. No as far as I could see. So I made my silk fight every step. I had him fight them on publicity. On experts. On covert surveillance. And all the while, I spent months digging through the unused material.

‘By the time the trial was halfway through, I’d found stuff that the normal police had even kept from Special Branch. Emails and web searches that showed my boy wasnae what they said. Bull saw it, pulled rank and made the prosecution drop the case. Even had a couple of coppers kicked off the force for sitting on evidence. Everyone else was convicted. And I think Bull appreciated that, because what I’d done had kept the rest of the convictions safe.

‘Anyway, we came to kind of trust each other in that case. More so than either of us trusted our own sides, eh? I haven’t seen hide nor hair of the man in the meantime, but I guess he’s got a long memory.’