And on the fourth night I lay in bed and thought: you took two children off a man in a police lobby, and you locked a door on him, and you did it because a seven-year-old asked you to.

I got up at two and made coffee and sat in my kitchen, and my wife came down at about half past and asked what was wrong, and I said, “I might have got this catastrophically wrong.”

And Nadine — who has been married to a police officer for twenty-six years and has heard a great deal of this — asked me one question.

She said: “If it turns out he’s telling the truth, what did you actually do to him?”

I said I stopped him seeing his daughters for a night.

“And if he’s lying, what did you stop?”