A few days later a policeman who didn’t look much older than herself came to her home. Mr Janowski was laying a charge of assault against The Man. He claimed she had been a witness to the assault. He was mistaken, she assured the cop. She knew vaguely who Mr Janowski was, wasn’t sure she’d recognize him if she met him in the street, and certainly had never seen Mr Gidman assault him.

‘That’s OK then,’ said the constable, who had a local accent and a cheeky grin.

‘So I won’t have to go to court?’ she said.

‘Shouldn’t think so, darling. Though maybe Sergeant Mathias will want to talk to you himself. Just tell him what you told me, you’ll be all right.’

Mathias turned up later the same day.

Unlike the constable, the sergeant had a funny accent, like somebody taking the piss out of a Pakki. ‘So what you’re saying is you wouldn’t recognize Mr Janowski if you met him on the street, right? In that case, miss, how can you be sure you never saw Mr Gidman assault him?’

‘Because,’ she retorted, ‘I’ve never seen Mr Gidman assault anyone, that’s how.’

The sergeant looked as if he’d have liked to give her a good shaking, but she saw the young constable hide a grin behind his hand, and as he left he gave her a big wink.

She said nothing of this to Gidman but presumably someone did, for next pay-day her wage packet tripled and stayed tripled.

One night not long after, a fire broke out in Mr Janowski’s workshop, quickly spreading to the flat above where the tailor lived with his wife and infant daughter. The firemen fought their way through the blaze to the smoke-filled bathroom where they found the Janowskis crouched over the bath. The mother was already dead through smoke inhalation. Janowski, who had third-degree burns, died four days later. But under a dampened blanket stretched across the bathtub, they found the child unburnt and still breathing.