Albertina glared at him, but either long exposure had rendered him immune or, more likely I thought, it didn’t even register. Seawoll had told me not to be cheeky, but there’s cheeky and then there’s cheeky.

‘Did you see a lot of Christina Chorley, then, sir?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, very clever,’ he said. ‘Middle aged man, young girls, let’s have a little dig, see what we can find? Is that it?’

‘We’re merely looking to establish a timeline,’ I said.

‘Interesting that you refer to the collective “we” there,’ he said. ‘Is that why you joined the police? To find an identity? You’ve got an old fashioned working class London accent, so I’m betting your mum was a native, south of the river, maybe Deptford, maybe from an old Southwark family.’

God help me, but I couldn’t stop myself saying, ‘Pretty much.’

‘So there you were, growing up stuck somewhere between black and white,’ said Mr Pryce. ‘Never really one thing or the other. I mean . . . absent a father figure for you to build your black identity around and, being a proper working class bloke, not comfortable with your feminine side. I’ll bet you didn’t do well at school – right? Bit of a rebel, acting up.’

‘I had my moments,’ I said, thinking of the time me and Colin Sachlaw borrowed a lump of dry ice from the chemistry lab and slid it into the girl’s toilets. I didn’t mind the week of detention, but they called mum at work. And that didn’t end well.

‘So, hello police,’ said Mr Pryce. ‘A nice uniform identity, a little authority and, god knows, after Macpherson they’d be desperate enough to recruit you to overlook any educational deficiencies.’

That, as they say, is fighting talk. But, as Nightingale once told me during boxing practise, the best blow is the one your opponent doesn’t even notice until he keels over.

‘I don’t blame you,’ said Mr Pryce, not noticing his daughter’s look of disgust. ‘Scrabbling for some structure in the wreckage of the permissive society to make a meaningful connection with other people. But we don’t do that anymore, do we? Listen to other people. The mighty Self has obliterated our ability to communicate.’

‘Dad,’ said Albertina.

‘You’re lucky, though,’ he said. ‘It could have been Islam, couldn’t it? The siren song of the mad mullahs, or the rough fellowship of the gang. Did smiting the infidel not appeal? Did you have something against drugs?’

‘Dad!’ screamed Albertina. ‘For god’s sake shut the fuck-up.’

Her dad’s mouth closed with a click and he looked guiltily at his daughter in a way that suggested to me that things like parent-teacher conferences and the like might have followed a similar pattern.