‘I couldn’t do it.’ His voice choking now. ‘I didn’t have it in me. I wanted him to die – and I wanted to be the one who did it – but I was not enough of a man to do it.’

‘Did you ever meet Paul Warboys, Mr Wilder?’

‘Paul Warboys – the gangster?’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.

I reached across and turned off the machine quietly, anxious not to intrude on a grief that would never end.

Outside the interview room, Jean Wilder had a cigarette in her mouth. She brandished it at Edie, to show that it wasn’t lit, but when she got to her feet and got in my face, I could still smell the scent of tobacco that she always carried with her, and I could still smell the Jimmy Choo perfume and Juicy Fruit chewing gum that she used to cover it.

‘Will you ever leave us alone?’ she said. ‘You useless flat-footed fools. He didn’t do it. We have been through hell in this family. Mahmud Irani destroyed this family and my husband didn’t do a thing. Why don’t you arrest the stinking Paki bastards that are out there raping our children right now? Right now. Right now. Why don’t you do something useful? Why do you let those Paki bastards get away with murder?’

‘Stop,’ Barry Wilder said, very quietly, and she stopped immediately, shaking her head.

‘I’ll walk you out,’ I said.

‘Don’t bother,’ said Jean Wilder. ‘We can find the door ourselves. Go and catch some villains. Make yourself useful.’

When Edie and I went up to MIR-1, Tara was already running the voice biometrics on Wilder’s interview.

‘He’s telling the truth,’ I said.

A slim figure was standing by the window, looking down on Savile Row. She turned to face us and it took a long moment for me to recognise her.

‘I want to show you something,’ DCI Pat Whitestone said.

19

Pat Whitestone sat at her workstation in MIR-1 and searched online until she found a ninety-second film of pure horror.

‘Look,’ she told us.

The footage was grainy, jerky, filmed by someone who was at the end of a long night. It opened on a club, the dance floor as crowded as a tube train at rush hour, the music a wall of booming noise. Boom, boom, boom. Girls in heels and miniskirts. Shirtless boys holding bottles. Dancing in a space where there was no room to dance. Boom, boom, boom. And then the first screams. High-pitched, disbelieving, the revellers all turning their heads, straining to see.

The crowd parted.

A boy with blood covering his face staggered across the dance floor.

Staggering on legs that were on the verge of giving out. His hands held out before him, groping for help.

Blinded.

The club began to glow with the white lights of phone cameras as more of them began to film the broken boy.