When you are up there on the eighth floor you realise that the big modern office block located at 8–10 Broadway, Victoria, so self-consciously anonymous, sits at the heart of British power.

From the window of the room where I waited in my old Paul Smith wedding suit I checked my watch against two of Big Ben’s faces as they struck noon and then looked across at the spires of Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster and, stretching off to the north, the rooftops of Whitehall and Downing Street.

It took my breath away.

A portrait of the Queen smiled at me. Her Majesty was young in the picture, and the painting had those saturated Sixties colours where everything was slightly more vivid than real life. She looked like a nice lady who was happy that England had just won the World Cup. Apart from the portrait of the Queen, there was nothing on the walls of that waiting room but posters proclaiming the values of the Metropolitan Police. They all said the same thing.

THE MET VALUES:
PROFESSIONALISM – INTEGRITY – COURAGE – COMPASSION

But on each wall the poster had a definition of a different value. PROFESSIONALISM was highlighted on one wall, INTEGRITY on another, COURAGE on another and COMPASSION on the last, the one with the portrait of the Queen. I had no time to read about the different values because a civilian PA put her head around the door.

‘They’ll see you now,’ she said.

I followed her inside where DCS Swire and DCI Whitestone were waiting for me in a top-floor corner room, the Chief Super at the head of a long boardroom table and Pat Whitestone at her right-hand side. Far below, the Thames shimmered like molten gold in the last of the summer sunshine.

‘Max,’ the Chief Super said. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine, ma’am, thank you. Nothing broken.’

The truth is my neck felt as though someone had tried to remove my head and I was so bone-tired that only a constant stream of triple espressos from the Bar Italia was keeping my eyes open. It had been a long night.

When the armed officers had allowed me to remove my face from the pavement I had been taken to West End Central where Edie Wren, roused from her bed in the early hours, had conducted what we call a hot debriefing – an interview conducted at the earliest opportunity to obtain as much information as possible in the aftermath of a serious incident. The Senior Investigating Officer almost always conducts a hot debriefing, but DCI Whitestone had been staying with her son at the hospital, and was unavailable. After the hot debrief I had gone home, slept for a few hours, parked Scout at Mrs Murphy’s, then shaved, showered, got suited and booted and come straight to New Scotland Yard.