She was curled up on a row of plastic chairs that were fixed to the sticky carpet as if somebody might decide they were worth stealing. Without her glasses her face had an unguarded look that was so different to the woman I knew from work, she almost looked like someone else.

I went to get myself a cup of coffee from a vending machine that I had passed on the way in. It came out black and boiling hot. I stood in the corridor, sipping it as it cooled down, watching the cancer patients in their dressing gowns smoking their last cigarette of the day beyond the big glass doors of the main entrance. When I came back to the waiting room, she was awake and sitting up.

‘Max,’ she said, and I knew that there had been no real rest for her in this place. She slowly put her glasses on and I had never seen her face look more vulnerable.

‘How’s your son?’ I said. ‘How’s Just?’

She nodded, as if struggling to understand their new reality.

‘He – uh – lost his sight in one eye.’ She shook her head. ‘Somebody hit him in the face with a bottle, Max.’ She put on her child-sized trainers, ran her fingers through her messy blonde hair. ‘In a club. A fight. Over some girl. He was meant to be looking at some girl. And his right eye – his right eye took the full force of the blow and the left eye got a shower of glass fragments. He’s lost that right eye, Max. That’s gone. That’s mush. Forget about that right eye, Max. The left eye has a detached retina and all the bits of glass in it and – uh – they are trying to save that other eye. Dr Patel is doing his best, Max. But there’s glass . . . bits of glass . . . in his eye . . . his left eye.’

‘Pat,’ I said. ‘My God, Pat.’

She scratched her head. She sighed. She exhaled.

‘So that’s where we are,’ she said. ‘Waiting for news about his other eye.’ She shook her head and then she looked at me and her face stirred with the start of a smile. ‘What about you?’

‘Me?’

‘I left you in the lurch. Up at West End Central. The press conference. How did it go?’

‘You didn’t see it?’

‘No.’

‘Of course not. Of course you didn’t see it. It went well.’

‘That’s good, Max.’

I felt like putting my arm around her. But she looked me straight in the eye and I saw that she was still the woman I knew, she was still my boss, she was still the most experienced homicide detective in 27 Savile Row, and the moment passed, even though her eyes were wet with tears, even though I had never felt closer to her.

I sat down next to her.

‘What happened, Pat?’