‘Tomorrow we’re bringing in Paul Warboys and Barry Wilder for further interviews,’ I said.

‘On the weekend?’ she said.

‘The law doesn’t stop for the weekend,’ I said.

‘And you want to know if they’re lying,’ said Tara Jones.

17

The summer had a different rhythm to the rest of the year and I did not drive home after we said goodnight to Tara. I didn’t need to go home.

Now Scout was at school, our lives revolved totally around term dates, pick-up times and all the everyday details of school life. But it was different in the long summer holiday.

Many of Scout’s friends had gone off on holiday, but there were always plenty more still in town, and my daughter was a popular child –and not just with her classmates. Parents loved her too because she was polite, sweet-natured and – just shy of her sixth birthday – already a veteran of the sleepover. Scout wasn’t one of these children who had been pushed into the sleepover too soon and then wakes up in tears at 3 a.m., demanding an Addison Lee cab to take her home. Parents, kids – everyone loved her.

Tonight Scout was away at her number one sleepover destination – with her best friend Mia in Pimlico – and as I watched Edie walk off to join the revellers on Upper Street where she was meeting her married boyfriend in some funky new bar, I realised I had no reason to hurry home.

So instead of heading south to Smithfield, I turned the BMW X5 north and drove to the far end of the Holloway Road, to the Whittington Hospital, where Darren Donovan’s elderly victim slept in the darkness that is somewhere between life and death.

Bert Page lay in a room full of flowers.

There were flowers on every available surface of his small room at the Whittington, flowers in every state from brown decay to full bloom, many still wrapped in their cellophane. I checked a few of them for the cards of well-wishers, but there was nothing.

I sat down beside the old man, my eyes stinging with helpless fury at the state of him.

Bert Page was a tiny man, almost child-size, and his frame did not seem strong enough to cope with the vast array of machines attached to his frail body.

He had tubes snaking up his nose and mouth and down into his windpipe from the ventilator giving him his next breath. An intravenous drip pumped two soft bags of fluids into one of his stick-like arms. Monitors traced lines of green, yellow and red for his heart rate and blood pressure.