But Maple’s nailing hammer put paid to all that.

If we went for dim rep then the prosecution would maintain that the nailing hammer had been taken to the hotel with the intent to kill. Kevin said that the nailing hammer meant that diminished responsibility was never going to fly. Because the nailing hammer screamed – premeditation.

So it was murder. And despite the optimism that ebbed and flowed, the hope that rose and fell in my family’s conversations with Kevin and the barrister, the charge could only ever be murder.

My father smiled up at only me, although all eyes were on him.

What did they see?

A working-class man, the dark suit he was wearing usually only brought out of the wardrobe for weddings, funerals and landmark birthdays, a man who seemed fascinated by these proceedings, as if they were not about him and the rest of his life. An intelligent man who had never received much of a formal education, a man who was still powerful as a bull at sixty, a man who – I knew in my soul – would never need a horse nailing hammer or indeed any weapon to overpower someone like James Caine who had been made soft from a lifetime of desks and screens and profitably shuffling numbers around.

I saw all of this and I saw something else.

As we sat and waited for Leo to answer the usher’s question, I saw my father more clearly. I saw him, in truth, for the first time. I saw his love for me, in all its purity and strength and madness.

My father was undiminished in this courtroom. He was unafraid as he stood up straight in the dock, a proud man, with the kind of pride that can slide into vanity.

I did this for my family.

I did this for my daughter.

I had never loved him more.

And at the same time I understood why my mother’s love for him had faded, why it had turned into something else, something sour, degraded, degenerated, turned bitter and old. I understood the arguments between my parents that I had grown up hearing, and much later, the ferocity of my mother’s late-night denunciations of my father when I was coming home after being out all night, nothing on my self-obsessed mind apart from what was in the fridge and then sixteen hours kip.

There were many fine things about my father but he lacked the self-awareness to see what my mother saw, the thing about him that drove my mother nuts, the thing that had been wearing away at our family for years. My father was one of those family men who – ironically enough – rarely stay at home with their family. The dedicated breadwinner who didn’t see his child before bedtime. Possibly some of the time my father was busy because he loved us so much, and because he was providing for us, but then there were other times when he probably just wanted to escape us – my mother’s mood swings, my wildness, and all those times when I bought the ticket. Who wouldn’t want to escape us?