‘The police want to talk to you,’ Skyla said. ‘Both of you.’

I led Wiggy out of the mews, dazzled by the lights of the fire engines and police cars. Crowds of people were waiting beyond the emergency tape, their phones pointing at the smoking ruins.

DCI Stoner was on the street. He gestured at Wiggy.

‘This the other owner? I need you both to come with me. We got the little bastards.’

He led us down an adjacent alley. Supervised by DI Ure and a few plain-clothes cops in trainers and jeans and T-shirts that showed off their body art, there were a line of youths on their knees, perhaps half the number of the mob who had been outside our office.

‘There were more than this,’ I said.

‘This is what we’ve got,’ DCI Stoner said. ‘Can you ID any of them?’

‘What have you done?’ Wiggy screamed at them. ‘What have you done? It’s madness!’

‘Do you know any of them, sir?’ DI Ure said.

Wiggy held out his hands helplessly. ‘They’re just stupid kids.’

‘Do you know them?’ DCI Stoner looked at me.

But Wiggy was right. They were just stupid kids who did not realise how easy it is to shatter someone’s life. Boys, all overgrown boys, on the spotty cusp of being beginner men. As racially mixed as you would expect in the heart of the city.

And then I saw her face. A long, gawky face that I remembered from my father’s trial, staring at me from the other side of the public gallery, and earlier, trailing her mother, the professional widow, and looking at me with undiluted hatred. It turned out they were not all boys.

‘The girl,’ I said. ‘Her.’ Pointing my finger, seeing my hand shake with rage. ‘I know this little bitch. That’s his daughter.’

‘James Caine’s daughter?’

DCI Stoner stared at her. She bared her teeth. Stoner’s heat-flushed features twisted into a grin.

‘Don’t buy it, do you, sweetheart?’ he asked conversationally.

Amy Caine spat on the ground and glared at me with an undying loathing.

DCI Stoner turned to me.

‘She doesn’t buy it,’ he said. ‘This idea that the guilty have been punished. And neither do I, Mrs Carver.’

He nodded at DI Ure and she said, ‘OK,’ and the plain-clothes cops in their T-shirts and tattoos started lifting the stupid kids to their feet and dragging them away, their arms locked behind their backs.

DCI Stoner was staring at me, waiting for a response.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I told him.

‘I think you do. What kind of cancer does your father have?’

‘The end-of-the-road kind.’

‘That’s what I thought. And the Caine family don’t believe a word of it. It’s too neat. Come on! The dying old man did it? That’s very convenient for you and your husband, isn’t it?’

I felt like clawing his face off.

‘If you don’t think my father would kill a man who wanted to hurt me, if you don’t think that my dad could kill a man like that, then – believe me – you don’t know my father.’