The police officer looked confused, as if she’d been reading from a script and lost her place. She’d prepped for procedural questions. She was unprepared for this line of questioning. She stared at Jia Khan, her groggy head wondering what had just happened.

‘How do you know the defendant’s wife, Officer Swan?’ Jia pressed.

The officer stammered over her words, before managing to cobble a sentence together. ‘We met at a mother and baby class,’ she said.

‘And how soon after you met did things become sexual between you?’

‘They didn’t.’

Jia took off her glasses and picked up a sheet of paper: ‘I miss you so much, and can’t wait for us to be together again,’ she read out. ‘David doesn’t understand me the way you do. I love you so much.’ She put the paper down and her glasses back on. ‘I’m afraid the evidence speaks to the contrary,’ she said.

The witness looked from Jia Khan to a woman sitting at the back of the gallery, her eyes lowered.

‘We’re just friends. That’s all,’ said the policewoman, her media training kicking in.

The freelance court reporter scribbled furiously in the press gallery. Salacious copy was lapped up by newsrooms. ‘Married mother-of-two police officer in lesbian love tryst with defendant’s wife,’ he wrote.

Text messages were a dangerous thing, especially between women. The absence of nuance, coupled with emotional vulnerability and the tendency to overshare could be twisted. Jia knew this.

The defendant’s wife had come to Jia with the allegations of impropriety on the part of the officer a few weeks ago. Jia didn’t know if they were true or not; she didn’t know if their meeting at the mother and baby class had been genuine or contrived. All she knew was that it was her job to defend her client to the best of her ability, and to this end she needed to plant a seed of doubt in the mind of the jury. All it took was sullying the reputation of an officer. She would get over it.

The jury listened intently. Nowak watched each one carefully, leaning in again as Jia Khan put forward her closing arguments. He knew each one of them from the photographs his men had taken after the first day of the trial. He was not troubled by defeat and he cared little for the defendant, despite him being family. Family, in his experience, was only ever a burden. He would ordinarily have left by now, but Jia Khan interested him. ‘Who is she?’ he’d asked his men after the first time they’d met.

‘She is the daughter of the man who runs our rival operations: Akbar Khan,’ he was told.

‘So that is what it is,’ he had said, more to himself than to his men. He had recognised something in her; he had seen himself.