I believed the Central Criminal Court – the proper name of the Old Bailey – was no place for children, especially children who had watched their father being murdered from the window of their home.

The FLO – a decent, caring, university-educated young woman who still believed that this world is essentially a benign place – said that they were here for closure. But closure was the wrong word for what they wanted in court number one.

They wanted justice.

And they needed it if their world would ever again make any kind of sense.

When I had first gone to their home with my colleagues DCI Pat Whitestone and DC Edie Wren on that March evening, the last chill of winter had still been clinging on. Now it was July and the city was wilting in the hottest summer since records began. Only a few months had gone by but the woman and her children were all visibly older, and it was more than just passing time. The three of them had been worn down by the brain-numbing shock of violent crime.

For our Murder Investigation Team at Homicide and Serious Crime Command, West End Central, 27 Savile Row, the case had been straightforward. You could not call it routine, because a man having his life brutally taken can never be considered routine. But there was incriminating evidence all over the smartphones of these three blank-faced morons in the dock, and the blood of the dead man was all over their hands and their clothes. It was an easy day at the office for our CSIs.

We were not hunting criminal masterminds. When we arrested them, they still had fresh blood on their trainers. They were just three thick yobs who took it all much too far.

But the case felt personal for me.

Because I knew him. The dead man. That lost husband, that stolen father. Steve Goddard. Forty years old.

I had never met him in life but I knew what made him leave his house when the three yobs were urinating on his wife’s car. I understood him. I got it. He could have let it go – ignored the noise, the laughter, the obscene insult to his family and the street where he lived, the mocking of all that he loved.

And I could even understand that it made no rational sense at all to go out there in his carpet slippers to confront them. I could see why it was not worth it, why he should have turned up the television and drawn the curtains, and watched his children grow up and get married and have their own children, and why he should have stayed indoors so that he could grow old with his wife. I got all that.

But above all I understood why this decent man did not have it in him to do nothing.

‘Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict?’ said the judge.