I thought of the day I met Billy Greene, almost unable to stand after a look at his first body, and the raw shame he had felt when they had made him a canteen cowboy. I wondered if he knew how much good stuff there was inside him. And I wondered how he would make a living for the rest of his life.

Then I went to work.

They had Bob the Butcher in an interview room.

In the observation room you could watch through a one-way mirror or on a CCTV feed. There were lots of people I didn’t know crowding in front of the mirror. I looked up at the screen.

Whitestone and Gane were sitting across from Bob and his lawyer. She was pretty and prim, dressed in business black.

The lawyers are getting younger, I thought.

Bob had a broken nose and the two black eyes that came with it but none of it had wiped the smirk from his face.

He looked like a cocky little ape.

‘Ian Peck,’ Whitestone said, and her voice seemed changed as it came through the speaker. ‘We are charging you with murder.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

‘But it’s not him,’ I said.

Some of the crowd standing in front of the mirror turned to look at me. But then they looked away.

‘This is bullshit,’ I said.

There was a big duty sergeant on the door of the interview room.

‘You can’t go in there,’ he said as I came towards him.

I shoved him aside. He didn’t fight back.

They all looked up as I came in. Whitestone and Gane. Bob and his pretty lawyer. Somebody said my name.

I reached in my pocket and took out the FS commando dagger I had borrowed from Carol at the Imperial War Museum. It clattered across the table.

‘Show me how you did it,’ I said.

The duty sergeant was in the room now and, after getting the nod from Whitestone, he put his hands on me. I pushed him away. He was a stronger man than me but he held back.

The lawyer was on her feet, whining about some legal point that I didn’t quite catch. The pain was in my spine, and my skull, and directly behind my eyes.

The knife was right in front of Bob.

‘Come on, tough guy,’ I said. ‘Show me how you cut all those throats. You lying bastard, you fucking fantasist, you pathetic little man.’

Gane was shouting at me. They were all shouting at me. Apart from Bob. He looked at me, and at the knife, and back at me, as if weighing something in his mind.

He licked his lips. He stood up.

The room suddenly fell silent.

‘Come on,’ I said, quietly now, and I smiled to give him encouragement. ‘Show me how you did it.’

Bob – Peck, whatever his name was – picked up the knife.