1987. I was sitting in my St Peters Lane office, reading about the $100 000 compensation being paid to the members of the Ananda Marga sect for wrongful imprisonment over the Hilton hotel bombing. They’d served seven years and a quick calculation told me that amounted to a bit over fourteen thousand a year. Not princely. They’d been fed and housed, but I doubted they were grateful. The pardon didn’t surprise me: the little I’d had to do with security service types suggested that most of them would have had trouble passing a true or false test where the odds were even.

I put the paper aside when I heard the knock on the door and took my feet off the desk. I was expecting him, but he was late. I didn’t like Paul Hampshire from the jump, and I never warmed to him. He came in trying to hide the fact that the two flights of stairs had put him out of breath. He wore a blue suit with a handkerchief in the jacket pocket and a bow tie. I’ve never trusted men who sport bow ties and handkerchiefs. I suppose they think it looks natty.

Anyway, nattiness was out of place in my office, which would be described as drab although I preferred to think of it as functional. There were places to sit, places to put things. What else do you need? I could make coffee and I had a cask of red in a drawer and paper cups. A sixth-hand bar fridge kept the water, the white wine and the beer cold. The dirty windows made it a bit dim on a dull day, but that’s kind of appropriate. The sunshine could struggle through at other times.