Holding Christian’s hand too tightly, I turned back to look at my father standing in the dock as his gaze drifted from the usher who had asked the question to the judge, who was peering at him over the top of her reading glasses.

She was a small, beaky, bird-like old woman – although of course godlike in the theatre of the court, wearing the robes of a superhero and perched, it seemed to me, so much higher than anyone else in that terrible place of Regina v Doherty.

My father drew a breath as he looked up at the public gallery.

The seat that my mother had relinquished had already been taken by a serious young woman scribbling notes. A law student? There were all types in the house today.

At the other end of the front row, Sandy Caine and her lanky, frown-faced daughter sat with their eyes boring into my dad. The two Daves were together immediately behind Christian and me. A few rows behind them, beyond the faces of strangers who I had never seen in my life – the law students, the curious, the ghouls, the great gawping unwashed who had queued early for a seat to the show – Ginger and Spike were huddled together. The tears were streaming down Ginger’s face, her eyes swollen with misery.

Ginger was crying far too much for the father of a friend, you couldn’t help noticing. She caught my eye and quickly looked away, back at my dad.

Down in the well of the court, Detectives Stoner and Ure were on one side with the prosecution team while Kevin Steel, our lovely Geordie solicitor, sat behind our barrister, who I had not seen in his full horsehair and black-robed kit until now.

There had been a time when I thought our barrister would save us, a time I had felt something resembling hope, when there had been some discussion about my father pleading manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Both the barrister and Kevin had seemed keen.

‘We’ll have a con about dim rep,’ Kevin had said, in that cool, arcane language that makes no sense to civilians who feel their lives are being shredded.

In criminal law, Kevin explained, diminished responsibility is a potential defence when a defendant argues that, although they broke the law, their mental functions were diminished or impaired at the time, and because of their unbalanced mental state when the crime was committed, they should not suffer the full weight of the law. Dim rep, Kevin called it, all dreamy as if it was a beach he remembered from a blissful holiday island in Thailand.

Dim rep would have been nice. Especially when bolted on to factors reflecting personal mitigation – such as my father’s age, his previous good character, his lack of a history of violence or prior convictions.

But pleading dim rep depended on a qualifying trigger, Kevin said. Something to light the touch paper, as it were, and when a father was confronting a man who was abusing his daughter, it was not difficult to imagine how a qualifying trigger could come up. Dim rep would have been so lovely! Dim rep would have meant a few years inside instead of what was left of a lifetime. Dim rep would have meant my father being released before Marlon started big school.