‘How old is the baby?’ I asked her.

‘Eight months on Friday,’ she said. I thought she was close to tears.

‘What’s his name?’ I asked her, smiling.

‘Rory,’ she said.

‘That’s nice,’ I said, smiling at her again. ‘And what’s your name?’

‘Bridget,’ she said.

We sat there in silence for a while, Josef and me on the bed, with Bridget holding Rory on the upright chair.

‘What do you want?’ Josef said eventually.

‘Tell me what happened,’ I said quietly.

Josef shivered next to me.

‘It was a man,’ said Bridget. ‘He came here, to our flat upstairs.’

‘No,’ said Josef suddenly and forcefully.

‘Yes,’ said Bridget back to him. ‘We need to tell someone.’

‘No, Bee,’ he said again firmly. ‘We mustn’t.’

‘We must,’ she pleaded. ‘We must. I can’t go on living like this.’ She started to cry.

‘I promise you,’ I said, ‘I’m here to try and help you.’ And to help myself.

‘He broke my arm,’ said Bridget quietly. ‘I was six months pregnant with Rory and he came into our flat, hit me in the face and punched me in my stomach. Then he broke my arm by slamming it in the door.’

‘Who did?’ I asked her. Surely, I thought, Julian Trent had been in prison.

‘Julian Trent’s father.’

In the end, between them, they told me everything. It was a horror show.

The man who had said he was Julian Trent’s father had arrived wearing a smart suit and tie one evening soon after Josef had arrived home from his work at the Crown Prosecution Service. Josef had qualified as a solicitor only the year before and the CPS was his first job and he had loved it. He and Bridget had married while he was at the College of Law and they had moved into their first family home together in preparation for the birth of their first child. Everything was fine and they had been blissfully happy together. That is, until the shadow of Julian Trent had been cast over their lives.

At first the man had been nice and had even offered Josef some money to get some information for him.

‘What information?’ I asked him.

‘Stuff that was already in the public domain,’ he said.

‘What sort of stuff?’ I asked again.

‘Names and addresses of jurors,’ he said.

‘In the Julian Trent trial?’ I asked, but I already knew what the answer would be.

He nodded. ‘It was the first trial I had worked on at the Old Bailey. And the jurors’ names are in the transcript,’ he said in his defence. ‘Their names had been read out in open court.’ He was trying to justify his actions. The jurors’ names may have been in the public domain, but their addresses wouldn’t have been.

‘And we really needed the money,’ said Bridget. ‘What with the baby coming, there were things we had to buy.’

‘And it wasn’t against the law,’ said Josef, almost in despair.

‘But you knew it was wrong,’ I said to him. It may or may not have been against the letter of the law, I wasn’t sure, but it was definitely against the Law Society rules, and would quite likely have been in contempt of court.

He nodded again.

‘So when did he come back?’ I asked them.

‘The following day,’ Josef said. ‘He was meant to be bringing the money for the information I had ready for him.’

‘But he hit Bridget instead?’ I said.

He nodded again, and now tears welled up in his eyes. ‘I couldn’t believe it. He just walked straight into the flat and hit her. He knocked her down, then he dragged her over to the door and broke her arm while she was lying on the floor. It was horrible.’ The tears began to flow and he swallowed hard. ‘I felt so helpless to stop it.’

Bridget placed a hand on his arm. His tears flowed faster. ‘It all happened so fast,’ he wailed. It was obviously his inability to protect his wife that hurt him most.

‘Then what happened?’ I said.

‘He demanded the information,’ Josef said.

‘Did you give it to him?’ I asked.

‘I asked him for the money,’ he said. ‘But he said to give him the stuff immediately or he’d break Bridget’s other arm.’ He sobbed again.

‘What happened next?’ I asked when his sobs had diminished a little.

‘I had to get an ambulance,’ he said. ‘We were so afraid we would lose the baby. Bridget was in hospital for nearly a week.’

I had really meant what happened next with the man.

‘Did you call the police?’ I asked him.

‘The hospital did. They seemed to think that I had done it,’ he said. ‘The police didn’t believe me when I said it was another man.’

‘Did you tell them who he was?’ I asked. ‘Or what he wanted?’

‘No.’ He cried again. ‘He said he would come back and make Bridget lose the baby if we told anyone.’ He looked at me and I wondered if he was now thinking that telling me had been a mistake. ‘The man said that if we told anyone, he would make sure we would never be able to have any children ever.’

I was certain that Josef had believed it. Next time I’ll smash your head, next time I’ll cut your balls right off. I believed it, too.

‘But the man came back?’ I asked him.

‘Not in person,’ he said. ‘He sent me a letter at work the month after the trial was over.’

‘Saying what?’I asked, but I suspected I already knew that, too.

‘He told me to go to Julian Trent’s lawyer and tell him that I had talked to some of the jury to try and ensure that Julian Trent was convicted,’ he said in a rush. ‘But I hadn’t, I swear it.’ But he had sworn at the appeal hearing that he had. I had read the transcript.

‘Did the letter say which jurors you had to say you had approached?’ I asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Three of them.’

I knew their names too. They were also in the transcript.

‘What was the name of the lawyer?’ I asked. I had been Julian Trent’s defence lawyer at the trial.

‘Some solicitor in Weybridge,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember the name of the firm. Funny, though, I felt sure he was somehow expecting me when I arrived. He knew exactly what I was going to say.’

‘Please try and remember who it was,’ I said to him. The solicitor who had engaged me to act for Trent at his first trial had been from a central London firm, not one in Weybridge.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I had it on the letter, but the lawyer took that. I know it was in Weybridge High Street, above some shops. I could probably find it again. I was all in a bit of a daze.’

‘Was there anything else with the letter?’ I asked.

‘There was a photograph.’ He gulped. ‘It showed Bridget and me coming out of her ante-natal class at the local hospital. Someone had drawn an arrow on it with a red marker pen. The arrow was sticking into her stomach.’

Altogether I spent more than an hour with Josef and Bridget Hughes. Their lives had been totally destroyed by the visit of the friendly, well-dressed man offering money for information. He must have known they were young and vulnerable. He had drawn them into his scheme and tossed their futures away without a second thought. Josef had been stripped of the professional qualifications that he had worked so hard to obtain and had avoided a criminal prosecution only by a whisker.

But it was what he had done to their confidence that was worse. Bridget was now almost too timid to step out of her door. They were prisoners in a bed-sit, a bed-sit they could now hardly afford to live in with Josef having to do casual work stacking supermarket shelves at night. He would come home in the mornings with out-of-date food as part of his wages.

‘Please help us,’ Josef had pleaded as he came downstairs to the main door of the property. ‘I only keep going for Bee and Rory.’

‘How can I contact you?’ I asked him.

‘There’s a pay phone here.’ He pointed at it just inside the front door and I took down the number. I also gave him one of my cards.

‘Call me if you need anything,’ I said.