‘So anyway, after he spikes her drink that night, he drives off after her, just to be certain,’ Conor continues, speaking in the mockney accent that used to so annoy Silas. He can live with it now. At least they’re talking. ‘And sure enough he comes around the bend and sees her car smashed into a tree. Not nice, quite peak actually, but job done. I didn’t know any of this shit until tonight. He’s a hard bastard and just sits there, lights out, having a toke as he watches her life ebb away. What he doesn’t realise is that she managed to call 999 before she passed out.’

Silas remembers listening to the recording of her anguished voice, barely able to breathe let alone speak.

‘Just as he’s about to head off, he sees this other car pull up silently next to the crashed one,’ Conor continues. ‘A man gets out and checks on the driver. But this geezer doesn’t wait around. He drives away when he hears the ambulance approaching.’

‘What sort of car was it?’ Silas asks. He sees this other car pull up silently.

‘The barman is shitting himself in case this other man was following him,’ Conor continues, ignoring his dad’s question. ‘He thinks he might have seen the same car at the pub earlier that evening – in the car park. So he drives off too, in the other direction. Stays low. Disappears. Six months later, it’s show-trial time and a lot of people are banged up for fat sentences. The remaining gang members are not happy and send the barman down to Cornwall, where your woman’s recovering, to finish the job. And then he’s shot dead.’

‘This could be very helpful,’ Silas says, way too formally.

He’s having a conversation with his own son, not taking down a witness statement. Just how dysfunctional a dad has he become? He glances around the Parade Room, over towards Strover. Mel will kill him if she ever hears about this. He reassures himself that the only way to get their son out of the trouble he’s in is by dismantling the entire gang. And to do that, he needs to understand the network, its rivalries.

‘Is there any chance you could ask a bit more about this other man? What he looked like?’ Silas asks. ‘And maybe the make of car he was driving?’

Silence.

‘You always did want more from me, Dad, that’s the problem,’ Conor says. ‘Never fucking happy. I’ve risked my life for you tonight. Stood outside the boss’s office with my ear to the door. I could have been killed.’

Silas rubs the stubble on his chin. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

Conor’s right. His default response is invariably disappointment, like the time Conor achieved Bs and Cs in his GCSEs. It was only afterwards that they discovered Conor was dyslexic.