I remembered. I’d been really angry as well.

‘But you did return a guilty verdict in the end,’ I said.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘And it was me who had to say it in court as they had made me foreman right at the start. It was terrible.’

I remembered back a year, to the nervousness with which he had delivered the verdicts.

‘Who cracked?’ I said, trying to make light of the situation.

‘One of the other two,’ he said. ‘A woman. She did nothing for days and days but cry. It was enough to send anyone mad.’

I could imagine the emotions in that room. It had taken more than six days for one of the three to change their vote to guilty.

‘I was so relieved,’ he said. ‘I had often so nearly changed my vote, but every morning the man had called me and reminded me that my wife would have an accident if I didn’t stay firm. I just couldn’t believe that it went on for so long.’

Neither could I. I had fully expected the judge to declare a mistrial because the jury couldn’t make a decision. But he hadn’t. He had kept calling the jury back into court to ask them to try again to reach a verdict on which at least ten of them agreed. We would never know for how much longer he would have persevered.

‘So what happened afterwards?’ I asked him.

‘Nothing for ages, at least a month,’ he said. ‘Then the man turned up at my door and pushed me over when I tried to shut him out. He simply walked into the house and kicked me.’ It was clearly painful for him simply to describe it. ‘It was awful,’ he went on. ‘He kicked me twice in the stomach. I could hardly breathe. Then he went over to Molly, that’s my wife, and just tipped her out of her wheelchair onto the floor. I ask you, who could do such a thing.’ His eyes filled with tears but he choked them back. ‘Then he put his foot on her oxygen tube. It was absolutely horrid.’

I could see that it was.

‘And he told you,’ I said, ‘to go to the police and say that you had been approached by a solicitor who had asked you to make sure you found Trent guilty?’ It was a question but, as all barristers know, one should never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.

He nodded and looked down into his lap.

‘It was dreadful, lying like that in the court,’ he said. ‘The appeal judges kept asking me if I was telling the truth or was I saying it because I had been told to do so by someone else. I was sure they knew I was lying. I felt so ashamed.’ He said the last part in little more than a whisper. ‘That’s why I’m here,’ he said more strongly. ‘When you came to my house I was afraid of you. I’ve been afraid of nearly everyone for the past year. I’ve hardly been out of the house since the trial. I’ve been looking at your business card for weeks and been trying to pluck up the courage to come here.’

‘I’m so glad you did,’ I said. He smiled a little. ‘And how is your wife?’

‘They took her into a nursing home yesterday, poor thing. The Parkinson’s is beginning to affect her mind and it’s becoming too much for me to manage on my own. She’s so confused. That’s another reason I’m here today,’ he said. ‘She’s safe now. The security at the nursing home is pretty good, mostly to stop the patients wandering off. Now I only have to worry about myself.’

‘And what would you like me to do about what you have told me?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’ he said, looking nervous again.

‘Do you want to go to the police?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ he said quite firmly. He paused. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Are you still frightened of this man?’ I asked.

‘Damn right I am,’ he said. ‘But you can’t live your life being too frightened to step out of your own house.’

Bridget Hughes was, I thought.

‘So what do we do?’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry. I think I should go now.’ He stood up.

‘Mr Barnett,’ I said to him. ‘I won’t tell anyone what you have told me, I promise. But if I try to stop this man and put him behind bars where he belongs, will you help me?’

‘How?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know yet,’ I said. I didn’t even know who the enemy was. ‘Would you recognize the man again?’

‘I certainly would,’ he said. ‘I’ll never forget him.’

‘Tell me what he looked like,’ I said.

Mr Barnett did his best but he often contradicted himself. He said he was big but then he also said he was shorter than me. He described him as muscular but also as fat. He was a little confused himself, I thought. In the end I had very little idea about the man who said he was Julian Trent’s father other than he was white, middle aged and fairly average in every way. Much the same as Josef Hughes had said and not very helpful. Short of getting a police artist or a photofit expert, it was the best he could do.

He departed back to his home in north London, again looking nervously from side to side. I was left to ponder whether I was any further on in finding out how, and why, Julian Trent had his fingers into the Scot Barlow murder.

Steve Mitchell’s trial was now less than a week away and we still had almost nothing to use in his defence except to claim that he definitely didn’t murder Scot Barlow, that someone else did – someone who was making it appear that our client was responsible. A classic frame-up, in fact, that no one else could see, not least because Steve Mitchell was not the most likable of characters and people didn’t seem to care enough whether he was convicted or not. But I cared. I cared for the sake of justice, and I also cared for the sake of my personal survival. But were the two compatible?

I could foresee that the trial was unlikely to fill the two weeks that had been allocated for it on the Oxford Crown Court calendar unless we came up with something a bit more substantial, and quickly.

After a sandwich lunch at my desk, I took a taxi to University College Hospital to see an orthopaedic surgeon, with my left leg resting straight across the back seat. Seven whole weeks had now passed since I had woken up in Cheltenham General Hospital with a pile-driver of a headache that had made my skull feel as if it were bursting. With a return to consciousness had also come the discovery that I had to remain flat on my back, my left leg in traction, with a myriad of tubes running from an impressive collection of clear plastic bags above my left shoulder to an intravenous needle contraption in my forearm.

‘You are lucky to be alive,’ a smiling nurse had cheerfully informed me. ‘You’ve been in a coma for three days.’

My head had hurt so much that I had rather wished that I had remained so for another three.

‘What happened?’ I had croaked at her from inside a clear plastic mask that had sat over my nose and mouth and which, I’d assumed, was to deliver oxygen to the patient.

‘You fell off your horse.’

I had suddenly remembered everything – everything, that is, up to the point of the fall.

‘I didn’t fall off,’ I had croaked back at her. ‘The horse fell.’ An important distinction for every jockey, although the nurse hadn’t seemed to appreciate the difference.

‘How is my horse?’ I had asked her.

She had looked at me in amazement. ‘I have no idea,’ she had said. ‘I’m only concerned with you.’

Over the next few hours my headache had finally succumbed to increasing doses of intravenous morphine and the roaring fire in my throat had been extinguished by countless sips of iced water via a green sponge on a stick.

Sometime after it was dark, a doctor had arrived to check on my now-conscious form and he had informed me of the full catalogue of injuries that I had sustained, first by hitting the ground at thirty miles and hour and then having more than half a ton of horse land on top of me.

My back was broken, he had said, with three vertebrae cracked right through but, fortunately for me, my spinal cord was intact, thanks probably to the back protector that I had been wearing under my silks. Four of my ribs had been cracked and one of those had punctured a lung that had subsequently partially collapsed. My head had made hard contact with something or other and my brain had been badly bruised, so much so that a neurosurgeon had been called to operate to reduce the pressure inside my skull by fitting a valve above my right ear that would drain away the excess fluid. My left knee had been broken, the doctor had explained, and he himself had operated to fix it as best he could, but only time would tell how successful he had been.