‘Not as far as I am aware. You should talk to the nurses’ station. I know there were some members of the press sneaked in when the attack first happened.’ I suddenly remembered a horrific photograph of Bert Page in an Intensive Care Unit shortly after he was robbed by Darren Donovan, the old man’s face so swollen and discoloured that it barely looked human. ‘There’s a daughter in Australia who can’t quite manage to get over to see her father before he dies. But, no – Mr Page does not get visitors.’

I inhaled the sweetness of Bert Page’s hospital room.

‘Then who sends him flowers?’ I said.

Saturday night was slipping into Sunday morning when I finally arrived home. Stan roused himself and padded across the loft to meet me, his strawberry blonde tail wagging with welcome.

Jackson was sitting at my laptop, wearing some of my old clothes – a black T-shirt that said LONSDALE LONDON in white letters, faded Levi 501s – that I did not recognise at first because he had washed and ironed them so well.

‘You should have seen Scout when Mrs Murphy packed her off with little Mia and her mum,’ he said. ‘She was so excited.’

I felt the pang of the parent who is absent too often.

‘Is it OK to use the laptop?’ he said. ‘I was just checking the news.’

‘Anytime.’

He closed the laptop.

‘You should try to get away with her yourself,’ Jackson said. ‘They give you holidays in the Met, don’t they?’

I nodded. ‘We get twenty-five to thirty days, depending on length of service.’

I tended to use my days off walking Stan on the Heath. Were Scout and I really going to go on holidays like normal families? Two weeks in the sun? I couldn’t quite imagine it. And what would we do with Stan? He didn’t have a passport. And he was part of our little family, too.

‘Remember that holiday home my folks had when we were kids?’

The family that adopted Jackson had a cottage on the coast of Kent. I remembered a pebble beach, bunk beds and the salt tang of the English Channel. The sea was freezing even in the height of summer. When I was eleven years old, it had seemed like heaven.

‘Sand Pebbles,’ I said.

‘Sand Pebbles!’ Jackson laughed.

‘It’s still there?’ I said. ‘Sand Pebbles is still there?’

‘They never sold it,’ he said. ‘They rented it out before they died, but now it doesn’t even get rented out. I spent a couple nights there before I came up to London. It’s not in great nick, but you and Scout can use it anytime.’

He pulled on one of my old red Realm and Empire hoodies and started for the door. For a moment I thought he was going to the little holiday home on the coast.

‘Work,’ he said.

‘OK.’