The affair went public three days later, when a woman calling herself Carnita Matthews arranged an interview with a TV news crew. The woman was wearing a veil and burqa, but only the hardiest of sceptics would have doubted, at the time, that she really was Carnita Matthews. After all, the interview took place in Ms Matthews's home, and concerned her treatment at the hands of Constable Fogarty. But we need to tread carefully, because the identity of this woman has since become a matter of legal  controversy.  

Whoever she was, the lady was about to up the ante. Having apparently forgotten the matter of the P-plate, she made a graver allegation. She claimed that Fogarty had lunged at her in an effort to remove her veil. "It felt like he actually punched my veil," she said. "I pulled back."

With the TV cameras still rolling, the woman got into her car, which looked an awful lot like the one in the breath-test video, and drove to the local police station to file a written complaint. A small entourage of supporters accompanied her.  Among them was a moustachioed, ponytailed, and instantly recognisable figure: a former inmate of Guantánamo Bay named Mamdouh Habib. 

Habib is an interesting character, and an odd choice of PR adviser. He spent a significant amount of time in Pakistan in the lead-up to September 11, 2001, exploring what his lawyer would later term a "lucrative business opportunity". Whether this opportunity also took him to certain rugged areas of Afghanistan remains slightly unclear: Habib has sometimes refused to comment on that charge, and at other times has hotly denied it. Arrested in Pakistan in October 2001, and subjected to alleged torture by interrogators in Cairo, he confessed to having given karate lessons to six of the 9/11 hijackers. He now maintains this was a false confession, extracted under duress; and his lawyer has put the matter to bed by pointing out that Habib only holds a yellow belt — several hues shy, clearly, of the type of belt required to run an al-Qaeda dojo. Habib was eventually released from Guantánamo Bay without charge. 

Accompanied by Habib, then, the woman in the burqa delivered a signed complaint to the police. This repeated the claim that Constable Fogarty had made a physical effort to lift her veil. "He moved closer to me in a threatening manner and moved his hand close to my veil where I felt he was going to rip it off my face," she wrote.