I want to be careful about that, because I have been offered vindication a number of times since and have never quite been able to take it.

What I felt was that a seven-year-old had been right, and that this was not a good thing.

It would have been a much better world in which Charlotte Sinclair was a confused child in a custody fight and I was an officer who had overreacted on a wet Thursday.

The internal complaint arrived four days after that.

I was interviewed twice by a lieutenant from the professional standards unit who was perfectly decent about it and who had to ask me, on the record, whether I had denied a father access to his children on the basis of an uncorroborated statement by a minor.

I said yes.