I looked at Alice Goddard’s face. She didn’t understand any of it. She didn’t understand why her husband was dead thirty years before his time. She did not understand what the judge had said or why the defendants were laughing while her two children were quietly weeping. I wanted to say something to them but there was nothing to say. I had no words to offer and no comfort to give.

Alice Goddard let go of my hand. It was over for everybody apart from her and her two children. It would never be over for them.

Alice was smiling, and it tore at my heart. A tight, terrible smile.

‘It’s all right, Max,’ she said. ‘Really. Nothing was going to bring my Steve back, was it?’

She was anxious to make it clear that she did not blame me.

I looked at the defendants. They knew me. I knew them. I had seen one of them weeping for his mother in the interview room. I saw another one of them wet his pants at the prospect of imprisonment. And I saw the other one empty-eyed and indifferent through the entire process, beyond recall, beyond hope.

When they had been arrested, and when they were questioned, and when they were charged, the three young men had seemed very different.

A coward. A weakling. And a bully.

Now they were one again. Now they were a gang again. Yes, they were going down, but they would be home in six months. Taking a life would have no real impact on their own lives. It would no doubt give them a certain status in the cruel little world they lived in.

The anger unfurled inside me and suddenly I was out of my seat and walking towards them. But the court bailiff blocked my path, his hands slightly raised to show me his meaty palms, but saying nothing and offering no threat if I dropped it right here.

‘Leave it, sir,’ he said.

So I did the smart thing. I did nothing.

He was a typical Old Bailey bailiff with a demeanour somewhere between a diplomat and a bouncer, and he looked at me sympathetically with the faintest hint of a smile – sad, not mocking – and I let the moment pass, choking down the sickness that came with the rage.

And my face was hot with shame.

The three youths in the dock smirked at me before they were taken down.

I had seen that look before.

Too many times.

It was the look of someone who knows they just got away with murder.

2

Later that day we watched the man hang.

We saw the film of his death on the big HDTV screen that’s on the wall of Major Incident Room One in West End Central, at first not sure what we were seeing, not even convinced it was real, still stunned by the fact that you can watch a man being executed online.