‘I’ve had no contact with the man,’ Barry Wilder said quietly. No doubt he had been a violent youth when he was running riot at the football, but I could see no violence in the man now, only a bottomless sadness, and a grief that was never-ending.

He looked at the floor and washed his hands with each other.

‘I said those things, yes, I did say them, I don’t deny it, but I didn’t see the man since the trial, not until they showed that film on the Internet.’ At last he looked me in the eyes. ‘The film of him being hung,’ he said.

We stared at each other in silence.

And then I thanked him and stood up.

Jean Wilder followed us to the door.

‘You useless bastards!’ she said. ‘You tiptoe around these gangs because you’re terrified of looking racist.’

I turned to look at her.

‘Mrs Wilder, I don’t tiptoe around anyone,’ I said quietly. ‘I was not a part of the investigation into Mahmud Irani and the Hackney grooming gang that abused your daughter and neither was DC Wren here. Those men were criminals and they got what they deserved.’

She pushed her face close to mine. Too many cigarettes, I thought. And too much Jimmy Choo.

‘She could have loved someone,’ she said. ‘My Sofi. And she could have gone to college and she could have had a normal life, but that’s all gone now.’

I opened the door. Jean Wilder reached across me and closed it. She had not finished with us yet.

‘Do you know what they did to her?’ she said ‘To all those girls? You think you know – because you skimmed some report or you caught it on the news. But you don’t know. They flattered these children, and gave them attention, then filled them with booze and drugs and took them to rooms where men were waiting. Dozens of the leering, stinking bastards. They gang-raped these children. They filmed them. They invited their friends round. All their stinking Paki cousins and Paki brothers. They branded them.’ A rage and grief swelled up inside her and it was no different from vomit. She choked it back down. ‘They put cigarettes out on their bodies and laughed about it. They fucking laughed. My daughter – my little girl – my baby – has cigarette burns on her breasts and buttocks—’

Barry Wilder roared.

‘ENOUGH!’

Jean Wilder’s eyes were shining as she watched her husband lumber towards us. She placed a hand on her husband’s arm, and patted it once.

‘He had nothing to do with it,’ she said, suddenly very tired. ‘But you know what? I wish he did!’

I gently opened the door.

And this time she let me.