I looked at him. He was a large man with the beginnings of a beard. There was a name card on his dark suit.

ANDREJ WOZNIAK, it said. BAILIFF.

And now I knew him.

He was the court bailiff who had stood in front of me and blocked my path when Steve Goddard’s killers had got away with murder.

He was the big man who had prevented me from doing something stupid.

I held out my hand and he shook it.

‘Before my time,’ he said. ‘But I understand the IRA made a bit of a mess. One dead and two hundred injured that day.’ He nodded at the broken glass embedded in the wall, almost smiling now. ‘We keep it as a souvenir.’

‘Let’s hope it doesn’t fall on some judge’s wig,’ I said.

Wozniak laughed.

‘It’s buried quite deep,’ he said. ‘I think we’re safe.’

Wozniak had a reassuring presence. Although the Central Criminal Court is the venue for some of the highest profile cases in the land, a large part of its daily life is devoted to cases concerning gangs. Far more than the average policeman, the bailiffs of the Old Bailey have to be physically capable men with skill sets somewhere between diplomats and bouncers.

Over Wozniak’s shoulder I could see Alice Goddard coming through the main doors. Her children, Stephen and Kitty, followed her. Now I saw the entire family looked much older than the night I met them. The children on the edge of maturity, and Mrs Goddard worn down by stress, growing old before her time. She waved to me. The big bailiff was still looking up at the chunk of broken glass buried deep into the wall of the Old Bailey.

‘All this time,’ he said. ‘Just think.’

The gang of three had been reduced to one.

Jed Blake, in his best suit. Looking nervous. Sitting in the dock and scanning the public gallery for familiar faces. They had been a gang the night that Steve Goddard died. When they had been arrested, and when they were questioned, and when they were charged, they had been a gang.

Different kinds of creeps, certainly. The coward. The weakling. And the bully. But undoubtedly a gang. They had felt like a gang when we brought them in and separated them in different interview rooms. They had felt like a gang when we charged them. And when they had gone down for involuntary manslaughter, they had felt like a gang. But now Jed Blake sat in the dock alone, anxious to abdicate from the gang, as his wigged and robed lawyer argued in an expensively educated accent that there had been a terrible miscarriage of justice.

Because they were never really a gang, he insisted.