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Ra-cist !’ The guards made half-hearted attempts to shush the gallery. She sat there with her head down and in the dock Dan did the same.
    They were coming to an end, the judges and lawyers talking in low voices. One of the reporters coughed loudly. Dan had a strange look on his face, as if he was about to cry.
    ‘ Fucking send him down! Bastard! ’
    Dan was trying to speak. Again the courtroom exploded with murmurs and she heard herself say out loud, ‘What? What?’
    ‘Order, please.’ The lead judge was irritable. ‘Mr Stockbridge? Do you have a statement to make? Please be aware that anything you say now may be admissible in your later trial.’
    Dan stood up slowly, his height filling the dock. The metal on the jacket he wore rattled against the glass walls. He stared right ahead, looking anywhere but at Charlotte, it seemed. His throat moved.
    ‘Mr Stockbridge? Please proceed. Could the guards please silence the gallery?’
    ‘ Ra-cist! Fuck him! ’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Dan said, over the din. ‘God, I’m so sorry. I just don’t remember. I don’t remember what happened.’ And then he burst into tears, sobs rasping like sandpaper. He tried to put his hands over his face but the guard held his arm, so he hung his head, tears running unchecked to the floor.
    Charlotte’s mouth fell open among the racket. What the fuck? Did he have some kind of plan?
    Mr Crusty was talking over the noise. ‘Mr Stockbridge has been provoked, your worships, and so anything he has said cannot be taken as an admissible confession of guilt . . .’
    A woman was screaming, ‘Racist! Fucking racist!’ Charlotte couldn’t see who it was. A volley of murmurs swelled and rose. ‘ Send him down! Send him down! ’
    The head judge called out over it: ‘Order, order, please! Bail is denied in the case of Regina versus Stockbridge. Case committed to the Crown Court for trial. Please remand the defendant into custody.’
    Charlotte was going to be sick.
    Over the chaos of the judge calling order, and the bailiffs trying to quieten the screaming woman, she ran out, hands over her mouth, searching for the ladies’ sign. She leaned over a basin, her stomach heaving, and choked up a small bit of bile. There was nothing else in her stomach to throw up. That was when she saw the faces in the mirror, blurred through a lens of tears.
    The first kick came as such a shock she couldn’t even cry out. She might have even said, oh sorry , assuming they’d bumped into her by accident. It took her a few seconds to understand that people were behind her, hitting. Girls, two girls, with the heels of their shoes and points of their nails, a smell of hairspray in the air. Black girls, she could see, through her tears. One had a purple scarf over her face. The blows were coming from all over. A kick to her legs. A scratch at her face. Fucking bitch , one said.
    She felt one tug at her bag as the other pulled her hair. Her things clattered onto the plastic floor; her head jerked back.
    Then the door opened, and someone was saying, For fuck’s sake, leave it . And then something hit her, heavy and swinging, her own bag maybe, and she stumbled and the sink was coming at her teeth, and then the endless blue of the lino and she just had time to think of Jamaica in the turquoise sea, that they would never get there now, and then she was going under. This was it. This was rock bottom, she knew it for sure.

Part Two
Hegarty
    Hegarty had been seated near the back of the courtroom when Daniel Stockbridge was remanded into custody, and saw the girl slip out past him, hands over her mouth like she was going to throw up. He was just checking his watch to see if he could make it back to the station for the weekly meeting, when he heard all the shouting and, like everyone else, spilled out to see what was happening. In the crowd he saw a face he thought he recognised. A white man, with a shaved head. But there was no time to stop, and in that second the face was