Having illustrated her point, Clio carried on. ‘I mean, this is what we’re really going to get him on. It was rape. He raped this woman when she was nineteen bloody years old – he raped me, Xanthe; also you I think, Fran? Did any of us consent to having sex with a man called Michael Carrington? With a police officer? No, we did not. He got Sammi pregnant, and he fucked off. Back to where? The Home Counties and the expensive-looking Tory wife I saw him with at that Burns Night party? Listen, he clocked me from the stage. I’d thought it was him when I came in, but we were seated at different ends of the hall. I got my pal to take a picture because I didn’t want him to see me just in case there was something dodgy going on – didn’t even realize at the time he was police, did I? I just thought, oh, that’ll be Mark, wonder what the hell happened to him. But then I was announced and got up on the stage and he jumped straight out his bloody seat, I’ll tell you. He avoided my eye during my set, kept his head right down, and then him and the blonde had slipped out while I was getting the guitar unplugged. That’s when I asked the organizer, oh, who was that. Detective Inspector Michael Carrington, says she. The Met. He buys a table every year. He was taken unwell, I think. Unwell my fucking arse. You weren’t there. It was him. If I wasn’t sure when I saw him, I reckon his behaviour confirms it. That’s not an innocent man there, is it? I was a last-minute cover for a friend who’d dropped out. If he’d known I was on the bill, he wouldn’t have bought that fucking table, I’ll tell you that.’

It was funny how separate from it all Sam felt. Inside her the boy kicked and spun, secure in his paternity, and his mother wondered whether Mark had been married at the time he was fucking her and fathering Debbie. How would that wife feel? Would she just write it off as work? Not really him? At what point did the policeman stop? When he put his cock in? Whose was the sperm that had fathered her child? Was that erection, that constant need to get her knickers off, all part of the performance?