“I don’t care, and nor do you,” Kim said. “You didn’t kill for gain, or to cover up crimes. You did it because people were trying to kill you or me at the time. All the same, you killed, and if I’m playing God now, I’ve done it before, when I begged DS and pulled every string I had to make sure you didn’t face consequences for any of them.”

Uncomfortably, that was true. “I’d have faced my trial if I had to.”

“Trials, plural,” Kim said. “I dare say you would have, but I didn’t want you to, and most people would not agree that decision was mine to make. God damn it, Will, I don’t want Chingford to get away with it. Left to myself, I wouldn’t lift a finger for the stupid sod.”

“But you are.”

“Yes. He probably murdered a man, and I’m going to help him get away with it because—” He shut his eyes. “Because I can be of use for once.”

That phrase rang a bell Will didn’t like. “Your father doesn’t know a sodding thing about you, or what you’ve done.”

“He knows that he’s lost one son and is about to lose another. I could change that.”

“And you think he’ll thank you for it?”

Kim made a helpless gesture. Will shoved a hand through his hair and topped up his own glass. He needed a drink.

“It is undeniably a step further and worse than anything I have yet done,” Kim said after a moment. “I know that.”

“Can you live with doing it?”

“I’m not sure I can live with it if I don’t.”

“You’d become a bloody marquess eventually! It’s not the end of the world.”

“You say that. My father would disagree.” Kim sounded calm, but his knuckles were white on the stem of his glass, and if he rolled up his sleeves, the silver lines of boyhood scars would be visible on his forearms, where he’d used physical pain to replace other kinds. Will hadn’t pushed to know more about that because he was pretty sure it would be too helplessly enraging to stand.

“I don’t understand this,” he said, feeling his way. “I mean, I can’t. My ma would rather have died than let me bend the law on her behalf, because she knew right from wrong. I think this is wrong. Maybe I’m a hypocrite, but I do. What if he gets off and then kills someone else?”

Kim put the glass down, and his face in his hands. “You had to say that, of course.”

“Don’t tell me you hadn’t already thought it.”