“It’s all right,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine. Another couple of minutes and it’ll be all over.” He turned to Detective Constable Brady. “Let’s have them, Jack.”

Brady nodded and pressed a red button on a small control panel on the wall. A hard white light illuminated a stage at the far end of the room and a moment later, a door opened and half a dozen men filed in followed by two constables who marshalled them in line.

Miller took the girl gently by the arm, but before he could speak, she started to tremble violently. She managed to raise her right hand, pointing at the prisoner who stood number one in line, a great ox of a man, his right cheek disfigured by a jagged scar. She tried to speak, something rattled in her throat and she collapsed against Miller in a dead faint.

He held her close against his chest and looked up at the stage. “Okay, Macek, let’s be having you.”

A thick-set, fourteen-stone Irishman with fists like rocks, Detective Constable Jack Brady had been a policeman for twenty-five years. A quarter of a century of dealing with human wickedness in all its forms, of walking daily in squalor and filth and a gradual erosion of the spirit had left him harsh and embittered, a hard, cruel man who believed in nothing. And then a curious thing had happened. Certain villains now serving collectively some twenty-five years in one of Her Majesty’s Prisons had thrown him down a flight of stairs, breaking his leg in two places and fracturing his skull, later leaving him for dead in a back street.

Most men would have died, but not Jack Brady. The priest was called, the last rites administered and then the surgeons took over and the nurses and physio-therapists, and in three months he was back on duty with a barely perceptible limp in his left leg.