TOM

"Go home," I tell the night officer. "I've got her."

A grey Astra has sat across the street with its engine running, three mornings now. I have a word with the driver. He remembers an appointment in Kent.

Upstairs, she's singing along to the radio. The oboe part.

I write that in my pocketbook. Then I strike it out.

HATTIE

My bodyguard has rearranged my kitchen so that nobody can shoot me while I make toast, and I object.

The toaster has gone from the window. It's on the back counter now, against the wall I share with next door, with the kettle and the bread bin beside it. The blind is down. My chair has been turned to face the door.

It isn't light yet. I'm in a dressing gown and one sock, and I'm due in court at half past nine. I've never been late for anything in my life. I'm not starting over a toaster.

I pick it up to put it back. There's a note underneath, torn from a pocketbook, in small black capitals.

LEFT SLOT FIXED. PLEASE KEEP IT THIS SIDE. T.A.

Something low in my stomach turns over.

The left slot has been broken since the week I was sworn in. I'm a High Court judge. I can send a man down for a decade before lunch, and I couldn't find the time to buy a toaster.

I put two slices in. I push the lever. Both sides go orange, evenly, and I stand there and watch them as if they might change their evidence.

Somebody sat in my kitchen in the dark, while I slept upstairs with the radio on, and mended my toast.

Nobody has done anything that pointless for me in years.

On Friday a letter came to my chambers. A photograph of my own front door, and under it, in green ink: WHICH WAY DO YOU WALK TO WORK, MY LADY?

On Saturday the Met parked a man outside in a car. Last night, apparently, they sent one who mends things.

"Good morning, my lady."

The voice comes from the hall, low and unhurried. I grab my dressing gown shut at the neck.

"Who's that?"

"Ashdown. Tom. Your protection officer for the next six weeks." A pause. "I'll stay this side of the door until you're dressed."

"You've been in my kitchen."

"Since twenty to six. The night officer let me in."

"You moved my toaster."

"You make toast standing in a lit window with your back to the street."

"Making toast is not a security breach, Sergeant."

"It is from the first floor of the house opposite."

I look at the blind. I look at my toast. I refuse to be frightened by either of them before I've had tea.

"Anything else you've rearranged?"

"Your bins. The bolt on your back gate. Your chair." Another pause. "And one rule."

"Go on."

"Rule one, my lady. Nobody touches you without my permission." The floorboard outside the door creaks once, as if he's shifted his weight. "That includes me."

It goes into me somewhere it has no business going, and stays there.

"Then here are mine," I say. "Rule two, nobody calls me my lady before I've had my tea. Rule three, the toaster goes back by the window when this is over. Rule four, I walk to work."

"No."

"I wasn't asking, Sergeant. I was ruling."

Silence from the hall. Then a sound I don't expect: one short breath out through the nose, the kind a man makes when a laugh has got halfway out before he caught it.

"Which way," he says, "do you walk?"

"The long way. Along the canal."

"That's the way they'll expect."

"That's the way I like." I butter my toast, both even sides of it. "It's the only part of the day when nobody wants a decision from me. I'm not handing it to a man with green ink."

A longer silence. I've sat on the bench long enough to hear a man decide.

"Then I walk with you," he says. "If I say move, you move. If you want me gone, you say stand down, and I'm gone. Nothing else takes me out of your sight."

"Stand down," I say, to try it.

The floorboard creaks. Footsteps, unhurried, down the hall. The front door opens and shuts.

I stand in my kitchen with a mouthful of toast and the extraordinary feeling of having been obeyed by a very large man I haven't even seen.

It's the most fun I've had before seven in years.

When I open the front door in my red coat, there he is.

He's on the step below mine, which puts his eyes level with my mouth. That's the first thing. The second is the size of him: not tall so much as built, the way a door is built, to stand in the way of things.

Dark suit, no tie, navy overcoat. Hair cut short and going grey at the temples. A face that's spent years out in weather and doesn't hold it against anyone. A clear coil of wire runs from his left ear into his collar.

His hands are clasped low in front of him. He looks at my coat.

"That coat can be seen from space," he says.

"Good. Then you won't lose me."

"I don't lose people, my lady."

"I've had my tea," I tell him. "You may now call me Judge."

"Yes, my lady."

He doesn't walk beside me. He walks a pace behind and a pace to the left, so that when I glance round I get one shoulder, a slice of jaw, and the impression of a wall that has decided to be polite.

The canal is flat and brown and smells of October. A heron stands on the roof of a narrowboat and looks at us both with open contempt.

"You sleep with the radio on," he says, behind me.

"How do you know that?"

"It was on at three. Strings."

"I don't like quiet." I walk faster. He doesn't need to. "In quiet I can hear every man I've ever sent down."

I've never said that out loud to anyone. He doesn't answer it, and he doesn't make it smaller. He just walks a pace behind me while it hangs in the cold air between us, and I find I'm grateful.

At the top of the towpath steps there's the big junction. The green man comes on. I step off the kerb reading the day's list on my phone.

"Move," Tom says.

I don't, quite. He does.

He's in front of me before I've seen what for. A courier on a black bike comes through the red, brakes screaming, and swerves round the back of him close enough to lift the hem of my coat.

I've got two fistfuls of his overcoat. I don't remember taking them.

"He's run four reds since the canal," Tom says, to the road. "I was waiting for this one."

The courier puts a foot down on the far side and turns to swear at us. He looks at Tom. That's all; he looks. Then he gets back on his bike and waits, very correctly, for the next green.

I let go of the coat. The wool is warm where my hands were. Under it, his back didn't move at all.

"You let me walk straight into that," I say.

"I let you walk up to it. I'd timed the lights." He steps back to his place, a pace behind, hands clasped. "Nobody touches you without my permission. Bicycles included."

And I laugh. Out loud, on a crossing in the rush hour, with green ink in my handbag and a trial to run, I laugh. He looks away up the road, as if it's the road he's pleased with.

My clerk is waiting outside my room with a lever-arch file and an expression.

Moira has clerked judges since before I could read, and outlasted most of them. She looks at Tom, who has put his back to the corridor wall by the window, and then at me.

"That's him, then," she says, when the door's shut. "Forty-one. Ex-Royal Marines. Says about nine words a day, according to security."

"He's said a good few to me."

"Has he, now." Moira hangs my robe on the back of the door, scarlet and black. "Did he mention he asked for you?"

I stop with my wig in my hand.

"Four times," she says. "Every time there's been a threat with your name on it, Sergeant Ashdown has put his hand up. They said no three times and won't say why."

"And this time?"

"This time they were short, and he was the best they had." She straightens the robe on its hanger. "I'd want to know why, Hattie, if it were me."

"So would I."

She goes to fetch the exhibits. I put on the robe, and the wig, and then the bands: two white linen tabs at the throat that make every judge look half a vicar.

My hands aren't quite steady. The bands go on crooked. I do them again, and they go on crooked again.

I open the door.

"Sergeant. Can you tie a band?"

He looks at my throat for a long second before he answers. "Yes."

"Then would you?"

"Permission?" he says.

I almost laugh again. Then I see he means it. He's waiting, hands clasped, on the far side of the threshold, the way he waited on the far side of my kitchen door.

"Yes," I say. "You have it."

He steps in. He leaves the door open. He stands close enough that I have to tip my head back, and lifts his hands to my collar.

He doesn't touch my skin. That's what I notice first: the care it takes not to. His knuckles stay a breath from my neck while he unties the tapes, and I feel the warmth of them anyway, all down one side of my throat.

He squares the tabs with his thumbs. He ties the tapes again at the back of my neck, slowly, as if there's a right way and a wrong way and he learned the right one a long time ago.

I've cross-examined men who were lying. I know what it looks like when someone is holding a great deal very still. There's a muscle going in his jaw. He's breathing carefully, through his nose. When his hands finally leave my collar, they aren't quite steady either.

He wants this. He's wanted it for a long time. And he's stopping himself half an inch from my skin, because I only gave him permission for the bands.

"There," he says, very low, almost to himself. "They were crooked then, too."

Then he steps back over the threshold, clasps his hands, and looks at the corridor window. He doesn't say another word.

Then.

I file it. I don't say it. I've spent my whole career learning which questions to ask in open court and which to keep until the answer can't be taken back.

Through the wall, the usher calls the court to rise. I go in to try men I've never met, with the warmth of his knuckles still under my chin.

All afternoon a detective takes the jury through bank transfers, and I write down every figure and think about the word then.

Then when? In all my years at the Bar and on the bench, I've never met Tom Ashdown. I'd remember. You don't forget a man that size.

After court we walk home along the canal in the dark, him a pace behind. I don't look round. I feel him there the whole way, steady at my back, like a fire I'm not allowed to turn and face.

Halfway, under the bridge by the lock, I stop and turn and face it anyway.

He stops too. He doesn't step back. There's a foot of cold air between my coat and his, and the water slapping the lock gates, and nobody else on the towpath at all.

"You're not wearing a tie," I say.

"No."

"Pity. I was going to return the favour."

He looks at me for a long moment. Then, very quietly: "I'll buy one."

I turn round and walk on. I have to bite the inside of my cheek all the way to the next bridge, because the back of my neck has gone pink, and he's walking right behind it.

At my front door I get my key out, and then I don't use it.

"Sergeant."

"My lady."

"Four times," I say. "You asked for me four times."

The streetlight is behind him and I can't see his face. I can see his hands. They come unclasped, just for a second, before he puts them back together.

"Somebody's been talking," he says.

"Somebody always is. That's what courts are for." I turn the key. "Tomorrow you drive. Quarter to eight. I'm in the front seat."

"The principal sits in the back."

"The principal sits wherever she likes," I tell him, with the door half shut between us. "And all the way there, Sergeant, you're going to tell me why you asked for me."