‘I remember it was the first night we had a party in the squat,’ she said. ‘I’d been up on the roof. It must have been about six in the morning. The party had died down – there was a lot of people sleeping in heaps, in the living room, in the bath. There was a party still raging in the free-shop space, but the power had run out so there was no more music. I could hear noises coming from the office, where we ran the magazine from, so I went along to investigate. There was Mark – sorry, there was Chief Inspector Carrington. He was naked, and he’d got this girl bent over the layout desk. He was fucking her in the arsehole – I’m sorry. He was – sodomizing – her? The look on his face, I’ve always remembered it. This expression of wild joy, like he couldn’t believe his life. Like something feral. He was utterly and totally happy. His hands were on the small of her back, pushing her down, and he was staring at his own coc— penis going in and out.’

Mark’s daughter, she’d imagined, would shudder, cry out, hide her face in her hands at this point.

‘In and out. In and out. Fast. I remember thinking it must have hurt her. Anyway, eventually he saw me, and he reached out an arm to me. He called me his Nubian princess and asked me to come and join them. I took a couple of steps into the room, and then I recognized the girl. She was part of this group of schoolgirls who had been hanging around the place. She wasn’t an activist, or anything, she wasn’t in with us. Fucking this girl wasn’t going to get him any more sort of credibility or bolster his position in any way.