Their front door closed and I went home and read about Newgate Prison until the sky began to lighten.

I read of how a gaol had been built on the fringe of a Roman fort, a place of punishment born at a moment in history so unremarkable that no man ever thought to record it or remember it.

And as the meat market buzzed with its nighttime life beyond the windows of our loft, I read of Newgate becoming a crucible of misery and disease and corruption across the centuries, constantly destroyed and rebuilt, destroyed and rebuilt, burned to the ground in the Great Fire of 1666 and rising yet again, like a disease that could never be killed.

I read of the virulent strain of typhus that fermented in Newgate’s filthy black depths. I read of Rob Roy and Casanova rotting there, and of Robin Hood and Captain Kidd dying there, and the London crowds who queued to peek at its horrors and flocked to see its public executions and the appalled visitors like Charles Dickens who saw Newgate as London’s mark of eternal shame.

And as the total blackness of the night began to bleed away into the milky dawn, I read how, at the start of the twentieth century, Newgate was torn down brick by brick by brick, as if the city was seeking to hack out the tumour that had grown in its heart for almost a thousand years.

And when real morning came, one of those cold bright mornings that make summer suddenly seem like the stuff of dreams, I shaved and showered and I walked Stan and I made Scout breakfast and saw her settled with Mrs Murphy.

Then I walked to the Old Bailey to wait for justice.

31

As I waited for Alice Goddard inside the Central Criminal Court I stared up at a large shard of broken glass embedded in the wall at the base of the main staircase.

The jagged chunk of glass was as big as a dinner plate. It glinted with the golden light of an early autumn morning as the traffic of the Old Bailey bustled beneath it. The QCs in their wigs and gowns, the lawyers in black carrying cardboard boxes of evidence, judges, jurors, witnesses and – mostly younger, poorer and blacker than everyone else – the defendants in their best suits or newly laundered sportswear.

At least, I thought it was a chunk of glass. It looked like a chunk of broken glass. But I couldn’t understand how it got up there. Perhaps I was seeing things. Security at the Central Criminal Court is tighter than any public building in the country. No mobile phones, no bags and no food and drinks are allowed. So how did a random hunk of broken glass get stuck in the wall?

‘It’s from the IRA car bomb in 1973,’ said a voice beside me.