The jury spokesman cleared his throat. I felt Alice’s fingernails digging into my palm once more, deeper now. The faces of the three defendants – immobile with a kind of surly stupidity through most of the trial – now registered the first stirrings of fear.

‘Yes, Your Honour, we have,’ said the jury spokesman.

Juries don’t give reasons. Juries don’t have to give reasons. Juries just give verdicts.

‘Guilty.’

‘Guilty.’

‘Guilty.’

And juries have no say in sentencing. We all looked at the judge, a papery-faced old man who peered at us from under his wig and over his reading glasses as if he knew the secrets of our souls.

‘Involuntary manslaughter is a serious offence,’ intoned the judge, glowering at the court, his voice like thunder. ‘It carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.’

A cry of, ‘No!’ from the public gallery. It was a woman with a barbed-wire tattoo on her bare arms. She must be one of the boy’s mothers, I thought, because none of their fathers had been spotted for nearly twenty years.

The judge rapped his gavel and demanded order or he would clear the court.

‘Public concern and the need for deterrence must be reflected in the sentence passed by the court,’ he continued. ‘But the Criminal Justice Act requires a court addressing seriousness to consider the offender’s culpability in committing the offence. And I accept the probability that the deceased was dead before he hit the ground due to a subarachnoid haemorrhage, making this a single punch manslaughter case.’

‘But what does that mean?’ the youngest child, the boy – called Steve, like his dad – murmured to his mother, and she shushed him, clinging on to good manners even in this place, even now.

It meant they would be home by Christmas, I thought, my stomach falling away.

It meant the bastards would get away with it.

It meant that it didn’t matter that they had kicked Steve Goddard’s head when he lay on the ground. It did not matter that they had urinated on his body and posted it on YouTube.

None of that mattered because the judge had swallowed the defence’s evidence that the man who attacked three unarmed boys was dead before he hit the ground due to a pre-existing medical condition.

Get the right brief and you can worm your way out of anything.

‘I am also obliged to accept the mitigating factor of self-defence, as the deceased was attempting to assault the defendants,’ said the judge. ‘I note you are all of good character. And I therefore sentence you to twelve months’ imprisonment.’

It was over.