“You mean they were prostitutes? You bought my toys with money you got from whores? Do you think that’s any better?”

“It wasn’t like that! They earned good money, it was a working arrangement.”

“Look! Look at this!” She held out another photograph.

He didn’t want to look but he had to. Oh no please no no no, not the disposal job, the girl who suffocated in the truck.

“Did you kill her?”

His most explosive piece of evidence. The looks on the men’s faces. They hadn’t known the camera was watching. If they’d known that night he’d taken a photo, he’d have been next for the axe.

“Of course not! What kind of a monster do you think I am?”

“I tell you what,” she said. “I tell you what, Dad. At least I know now where I get it from. That’s why I loved doing what I did with… ” she just managed to swallow the name, “… with him. Lying. Cheating. Sneaking around. I’m like you. I’m just like you.”

He wanted to hold her but she wouldn’t have it. She was stronger than him and faster than him, he was an old done man now, and she was the new generation. She ran for the stairs, and as he tried to catch her he turned his ankle and fell painfully against the wall. He hobbled into the pub just in time to see Alicia streaking through the front door like a rabbit and out into the street, vanishing into the darkness. He forgot his ankle and ran after her, feeling his reputation as a solid businessman falling away from him as he went, but none of that mattered, he just had to catch her. But she was too quick. She’d disappeared.

As he stared hopelessly into the empty dusk he was assailed by a sweet and terrible memory. Alicia, eleven years old, wrapped in a towel and padding into the living room.

“Dad,” she asked, her face pretty and puzzled. “You know how I’m supposed to shave the hair on my legs?”

“Well, you don’t have to but most girls do… ”

She had waved his words impatiently away. “Yes I know, but am I supposed to shave the hair on my bits as well?”

His daughter, standing on one leg, wrapped in a pink fluffy towel, her eyes fixed on his face. Trying desperately to think of a good answer.

“Why don’t you ask your friends what they do, and then do that,” he said at last. And, seeing her lips beginning to form the words But can’t you ask for me? he added with wry honesty, “And pet, don’t even think about asking me to ask them. I’ll get locked up for life.”

She had stared at him for a minute and then laughed until tears streamed down her cheeks, and then she had put her pyjamas on and crawled onto his lap, long and slender and made entirely out of elbows, and they watched a cop show and he critiqued their procedure for her until she fell asleep in his arms. She’d believed in him then. Tears gathered in his eyes.