‘My old mum used to take in washing, you know. Me dad had had it on his toes years before, leaving me and my four sisters. My mother worked like a black to give us a decent life, but she was held back, like we all were then, by lack of education and decent jobs.

‘I found my old man a few years ago. He’d only gone as far as North London. He’d shacked up with some old bird who was on the game. She kept him in the style he had rapidly grown accustomed to. He’d been a good-looking bloke in his day. I went to see him and told him I was his son, like. He just smiled and asked me if I had any money. He never even asked after my mum or my sisters. Not even casually.

‘But I told him. I told him Mum died of a massive stroke, that she’d been riddled with rheumatism from years of washing other people’s dirty clothes, but he wasn’t even interested . . .’

Kate saw him drop his head on to his chest.

‘All those years my old mum had been waiting for him to come home, and he never even thought about her.’

‘What did you do?’ Kate’s voice was low.

‘I smacked him. Punched him all around his little bedsit. An old man, and I kicked him in . . . me own father. Then, as I left, I gave him fifty quid. Threw it on the bed. I told him that was all he would ever get from me. I can still see him crawling over the bed. His face was bleeding but he grabbed that money like a dog with a bone. I hated him then.

‘I came home and I looked at my Mandy and I patted myself on the back. Oh, yes, I thought, my child will never know pain like that. But she ended up knowing a worse pain than I could ever have given her. A much worse pain.’

He sniffed loudly. ‘Well, whoever this pervent is, I’m gonna catch him. I’ve already got blokes sniffing about, and when I do find him . . .’ He left the sentence unfinished.

‘You’re much better off letting us find him, Mr Kelly.’

Patrick laughed at her. A hard bitter sound.

‘You must be smoking, as the youngsters say. Do you honestly think I’ll let the social workers and the bleeding hearts get their poncey hands on him? Do you? Do you think I’ll allow him to go to some nice top security hospital, where he can roam the grounds freely and have a television and video in his room? Where he can con his way out in a couple of years and end up working in a children’s home or something?