With No One As Witness

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“IT ISN’T WHAT YOU THINK,” WERE BARRY MINSHALL’S first words when Lynley had the tape recorder going. “Your sort have an idea fixed in the head, and then you mould the facts to make sure your idea plays out. But how you think it was…? You’re wrong. And how Davey Benton was…? You’re wrong about that as well. But I’ll tell you straightaway, you won’t be able to face what I have to say, because if you do, it topples the way you’ve probably always seen the world. I want some water. I’m parched and this will take a while.”

Lynley hated to give the man anything, but he nodded to Havers and she disappeared to fetch Minshall his drink. She was back in less than a minute with a single plastic cup of water that looked as if she’d taken it directly from the ladies’ toilet, which she probably had. She placed it in front of Minshall and he gazed from her to it as if checking to see if she’d spat in it. Finding it passable, he took a sip.

“I can help you,” he said. “But I want a deal.”

Lynley reached towards the recorder another time, preparatory to switching it off and ending the interview once again.

Minshall said, “I wouldn’t do that. You need me just as much as I need you. I knew Davey Benton. I taught him some elementary magic tricks. I dressed him up as my assistant. He rode in my van, and he visited me in my flat. But that’s the end of it. I never put a hand on him in the way you’re thinking, no matter what he wanted.”

Lynley felt his mouth going dry. “What the hell are you implying?”

“Not implying, saying. Telling. Informing. Whatever you want to call it, it comes out the same. That boy was bent. At least, he thought he was bent, and he was looking for proof. A first time to show him what it was like. Male to male.”

“You can’t intend us to believe-”

“I don’t care what you believe. I’m telling you the truth. I doubt I was the first bloke he tried because he was damned direct in his approach. Hands on my crotch the instant we were out of public view. He saw me as a loner-which I am, let’s face it-and to his way of thinking, it was safe to try things out with me. That’s what he wanted to do, and I set him straight. I do not have underage kids, I told him. Come back on your sixteenth birthday.”

“You’re a liar, Barry,” Barbara Havers said. “Your computer’s filled with child pornography. You were carrying it in your van, for God’s sake. You’re shagging your fist in front of your computer screen every night, and you want us to believe Davey Benton was after you and not the reverse?”

“You can think what you want. You obviously do. Why not, when I’m such a flipping freak? And that’s running through your head as well, isn’t it? He looks like a ghoul, so he must be one.”

“Use that move often?” Havers asked. “I expect it works wonders out there in the world. Turn people’s aversion in on themselves. That must work specially well on kids. You’re a sodding genius, you are, boy-o. High marks for sorting out a way to play your appearance to your advantage, mate.”

Lynley said, “You don’t appear to understand your position, Mr. Minshall. Has Mr. Barty”-with a nod at the solicitor-“explained what happens when you’re charged with murder? Magistrates’ court, remand, coming to trial at the Old Bailey-”

“All those lags and screws just waiting to welcome you into Wormwood Scrubs with open arms,” Havers added. “They have a special greeting for child molesters. Did you know that, Bar? It requires you to bend over, of course.”

“I am not-”

Lynley switched off the recorder. “Apparently,” he said to James Barty, “your client needs more time to think. Meanwhile, the evidence mounts up against you, Mr. Minshall. And the moment we confirm that you were the last person to see Davey Benton alive, you can feel free to consider your fate well sealed.”

“I did not-”

“You might try to convince the CPS about that. We collect the evidence. We turn it over to them. At that point, things are out of our hands.”

“I can help you.”

“Think about helping yourself.”

“I can give you information. But the only way you’re going to get that from me is through a deal because if I give you anything, I’m not going to be a particularly popular man.”

“If you don’t give us something, you’re being sent down as Davey Benton’s,” Barbara Havers pointed out. “And that’s not going to do much for your popularity, Barry.”

“What I suggest,” Lynley said, “is that you tell us what you know and pray to God we’re more interested in that than in anything else. But make no mistake about it, Barry, you’re facing at least one murder charge currently. Any other charge you might come to face in the future as a result of what you tell us now about Davey Benton isn’t going to carry the same stretch in prison. Unless it’s another count of murder, of course.”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” Minshall said, but his voice was altered now, and for the first time it seemed to Lynley that they might be getting through to the man.

“Convince us,” Barbara Havers said.

Minshall thought for a moment and finally said, “Turn the recorder on. I saw him the night he died.”

“Where?”

“I took him to a…” He hesitated, then went for more water. “It’s called the Canterbury Hotel. I had a client there and we went to perform.”

“What d’you mean, ‘perform’?” Havers asked. “What kind of client?” In addition to the tape that Lynley was making, she was taking notes, and she looked up from her writing.

“Magic. We were doing a private show for a single client. At the end of it, I left Davey there. With him.”

“With whom?” Lynley asked.

“With the client. That was the last I saw of him.”

“And what was this client’s name?”

Minshall’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t know.” And as if he expected them to walk out of the interview room, he went on hastily. “I knew him only by numbers. Two-one-six-oh. He never told me his name. And he didn’t know mine. He knew me only as Snow.” He gestured at his hair. “It seemed appropriate.”

“How did you meet this individual?” Lynley asked.

Minshall took another sip of water. His solicitor asked him if he wanted a conference. The magician shook his head. “Through MABIL,” he said.

“Mabel who?” Havers asked.

“M-A-B-I-L,” he corrected. “It’s not a person. It’s an organisation.”

“An acronym standing for…?” Lynley waited for the answer.

Minshall gave it in a tired voice. “Men and Boys in Love.”

“Bloody hell,” Havers muttered as she wrote in her notebook. She gave the acronym a vicious underscoring that sounded like the scrape of rough sandpaper on wood. “Let us guess what that’s all about.”

“Where does this organisation meet?” Lynley asked.

“In a church basement. Twice a month. It’s a deconsecrated place called St. Lucy’s, off the Cromwell Road. Down the street from Gloucester Road station. I don’t know the exact address, but it’s not hard to find.”

“The scent of sulphur’s no doubt a big hint when you get in the area,” Havers pointed out.

Lynley shot her a look. He felt the same aversion to the man and his story, but now that Minshall was finally talking, he wanted him to continue talking. He said, “Tell us about MABIL.”

Minshall said, “It’s a support group. It offers a safe haven for…” He seemed to search for a word that would elucidate the purpose of the organisation at the same time as it depicted its members in a positive light. An impossible task, Lynley thought, although he let the man attempt it anyway. “It offers a place where like-minded individuals can meet, talk, and learn they’re not alone. It’s for men who believe there is no sin and should be no social condemnation in loving young boys and wanting to introduce them to male-male sexuality in a safe environment.”

“In a church?” Havers sounded as if she couldn’t restrain herself. “Like some sort of human sacrifice? On the altar, I expect?”

Minshall took off his glasses and shot her a withering look as he polished them on the leg of his trousers. He said, “Why don’t you put a cork in it, Constable? It’s people like you who head witch-hunts.”

“You listen to me, you piece of-”

“That’ll do, Havers,” Lynley said. And to Minshall, “Go on.”

The magician gave Havers another look, then shifted his body as if to dismiss her. He said, “There are no young boys who are members of the association. MABIL does nothing but provide support.”

“For…?” Lynley prompted.

He returned his dark glasses to his nose. “For men who’re…conflicted about their desires. Those who’ve already made the leap help along those who want to make it. This help is offered in a loving environment, with tolerance for all and judgement of none.”

Lynley could see Havers getting ready to make another remark. He cut her off with, “And two-one-six-oh?”

“I saw him straightaway, the first time he showed up. He was new to it all. He could barely look anyone in the eye. I felt sorry for the bloke and offered to help him. It’s what I do.”

“Meaning?”

And here Minshall stalled. He was silent for a moment and then asked for time with his solicitor. For his part, James Barty had been sitting there sucking on his lower teeth so hard that it looked as if he’d swallowed his lip. He burst out with, “Yes. Yes. Yes,” and Lynley switched the recorder off. He nodded Havers towards the door, and they stepped out into the corridor of the Holmes Street station.

Havers said, “He’s had all bloody night to cook this up, sir.”

“MABIL?”

“That and the two-one-six-oh rubbish. D’you think for a moment there’s going to be a MABIL at this St. Lucy’s when we send Vice over there to sit in on their next ‘meeting’? Not bloody likely, sir. And Bar will have the perfect comeback for that, won’t he? Let me give it to you in advance: ‘MABIL has members who’re cops, you know. The Met’s grapevine must’ve put those blokes in the picture, and they passed the word along. You know how it works: telephone, telegraph, tell-a-cop. They’ve gone to ground now. Too bad you can’t find them…’ And arrest their arses from here to Sunday,” she added. “Sodding paedophiles.”

Lynley observed her, righteous indignation personified. He felt it as well, but he also knew they had to keep the information flowing from the magician. The only way to sort out the truth from his lies was through encouraging him to talk for a length of time and listening for the snares he would ultimately set himself, which was the fate of all liars.

He said, “You know the drill, Havers. We need to give him the rope.”

“I know, I know.” She looked towards the door and the man behind it. “But he makes my skin crawl. He’s in there with Barty coming up with a way to justify the seduction of thirteen-year-old boys, and you and I know it. What are we supposed to do about that? Sit there and seethe?”

“Yes,” Lynley said. “Because Mr. Minshall’s about to discover he can’t have it both ways. He can’t claim he rejected Davey Benton as too young to experience the love that dare not et cetera, while at the same time he provided the boy to a killer. I expect he’s sorting out that little difficulty with Mr. Barty as we speak.”

“So you believe there’s a MABIL? That Minshall himself didn’t murder that kid and all the others?”

Like Havers, Lynley looked towards the door of the interview room. “I think it’s very likely,” he said. “And there’s part of it all that makes sense, Barbara.”

“Which part is that?”

“The part that explains why we’ve now got a dead boy with no connection to Colossus.”

She was with him, as usual, making the leap with, “Because the killer had to find new ground once we showed up in Elephant and Castle?”

“From everything we know, he’s not stupid,” Lynley said. “Once we got on to Colossus, he had to find a new source of victims, didn’t he. And MABIL exactly fills the bill, Havers, because no one would even suspect him there, especially not Minshall, who’s just waiting to take him under his wing, eager and ready to hand over the victims, apparently believing-or at least telling himself that he believes-in the sanctity of the whole damned project.”

“We need a description of two-one-six-oh,” Havers said, with a nod at the interview room.

“And more,” Lynley told her as the door opened and James Barty bade them enter once again.

Minshall had finished his water and was setting to the destruction of the plastic cup that had held it. He said he wanted to clarify things. Lynley told him that they were ready to listen to whatever the magician wished to tell them, and he activated the tape recorder as Havers sat and scraped her chair noisily against the lino.

“My first time was at the hands of my paediatrician,” Minshall said quietly, his head lowered to direct his gaze-ostensibly, since he was wearing his dark glasses-on his hands as they tore apart his plastic cup. “He called it ‘seeing to’ my condition. I was a kid, so what did I know? Groping round between the legs to make sure my ‘condition’ didn’t cause sexual problems in the future, like impotence or premature ejaculation. He eventually raped me right there in his surgery, but I kept quiet. I was that scared.” Minshall looked up. “I never wanted other boys’ first time to be like that. Do you understand? I wanted it to come out of a loving and trusting relationship so that when it happened to them, they’d be ready for it. They’d want it as well. They’d understand what was happening and what it meant. I wanted it to be a positive experience, so I empowered them.”

“How?” Lynley kept his voice calm and reasonable, although what he wanted to do was howl. How they excelled when they had to justify, he thought. Paedophiles lived in a parallel universe to the rest of mankind, and one could do virtually nothing to blast them out of it, so immovably had they placed themselves there through years of rationalisation.

“Through openness,” Barry Minshall said. “Through honesty.”

Lynley heard Havers restrain herself. He saw how tight her grip was on her pencil as she took notes.

“I talk to them about their sexual urges. I allow them to see what they feel is natural and nothing to be hidden or ashamed of. I show them what all children need to be shown: that sexuality in all of its manifestations is something God given, to be celebrated rather than hidden away. There are actual tribes, you know, where children are initiated into sex as a rite of passage, guided there by a trusted adult. This is part of their culture, and if we ever manage to loose the chains of our Victorian past, it will be part of ours as well.”

“That’s what MABIL aims at, eh?” Havers asked.

Minshall didn’t directly answer her. “When they come to see me in my flat,” he said, “I prepare them for magic. To assist me. This takes some weeks. When they’re ready, we perform for an audience of one: my client. From MABIL. What you need to know is that no boy has ever refused to go with the man to whom he was given at the end of our performance. They’ve been eager for it, in fact. They’ve been ready. They’ve been, as I’ve said, empowered.”

“Davey Benton-” Havers began, and from the heat in her voice, Lynley knew he had to stop her.

He said, “Where did these ‘performances’ occur, Mr. Minshall? At St. Lucy’s?”

Minshall shook his head. “They were private, as I said.”

“At the Canterbury Hotel, then. Where you last saw Davey. Where is this place?”

“Lexham Gardens. Off the Cromwell Road. One of our members runs it. Not for this. Not for men and boys together. It’s a legitimate hotel.”

“I’ll bet,” Havers murmured.

“Take us through what happened,” Lynley said. “At this performance. It was in a room?”

“A regular room. The client is always asked to book himself into the Canterbury in advance. He meets us in the lobby and we go upstairs. We do the show-the boy and I-and I get paid.”

“For supplying the boy?”

Minshall wasn’t about to admit to pandering. He said, “For the magic show at which the boy assisted.”

“Then what?”

“Then I leave the boy. The client will take him home…afterwards.”

“All those boys whose pictures we found in your flat…?” Havers asked the question.

“Former assistants,” Minshall said.

“You mean you handed every one of them over to be done by some bloke in a hotel room?”

“No boy went unwillingly. No boy stayed against his will at the end of the performance. No boy later came to me with a complaint about how he’d been handled.”

“Handled,” Havers said. “Handled, Barry?”

Lynley said, “Mr. Minshall, Davey Benton was murdered by the man you handed him over to. You understand that, don’t you?”

He shook his head. “I know only that Davey was murdered, Superintendent. There’s nothing that tells me my client did it. Until I hear from him otherwise, I remain convinced that Davey Benton went off on his own later that night, once he was driven home.”

“What d’you mean, ‘until you hear otherwise’?” Havers asked. “Are you expecting a serial killer to phone you up and say ‘Thanks, mate. Let’s have a second go of the same so I can kill another’?”

“You’re saying my client killed Davey. I’m not. And yes, I’m expecting a second request from him,” Minshall said. “There usually is one. And a third and a fourth if the boy and the man haven’t reached a separate agreement on the side.”

“What sort of agreement?” Lynley asked.

Minshall took his time about coming up with an answer. He glanced at James Barty, perhaps trying to recall how much the solicitor had advised him to say. He went on carefully. “MABIL,” he said “is about love, Men and Boys in Love. Most children are eager for that, for love. Most people are eager for that, in fact. This isn’t about-this has never been about-molestation.”

“Just pandering,” Havers said, obviously able to restrain herself no longer.

“No boy,” Minshall plunged doggedly on, “has ever felt used or abused from an interaction I bring about through MABIL. We want to love them. And we do love them.”

“And what do you tell yourself when they turn up dead?” Havers asked. “That you loved the life right out of them?”

Minshall gave his answer to Lynley, as if believing Lynley’s silence implied tacit approval of his enterprise. “You have no proof that my client…” He decided to make a different point. “Davey Benton wasn’t meant to die. He was ready to have-”

“Davey Benton fought his killer,” Lynley cut in. “In spite of what you thought about him, Mr. Minshall, he wasn’t bent, he wasn’t ready, he wasn’t willing, and he wasn’t eager. So if he went with his killer at the end of your ‘performance,’ I doubt he did it willingly.”

Minshall said hollowly, “He was alive when I left them together. I swear it. I’ve never harmed a hair on a single boy’s head. No client of mine has done that either.”

Lynley had heard enough of Barry Minshall, his clients, MABIL, and the great project of love in which the magician apparently saw himself involved. He said, “What did this man look like? How did you contact each other?”

“He isn’t-”

“Mr. Minshall, just now I don’t care if he is or isn’t a killer. I mean to find him and I mean to question him. Now how did you contact each other?”

“He phoned me.”

“Land line? Mobile?”

“Mobile. When he was ready, he phoned. I never had his number.”

“How did he know when you had all the arrangements in place, then?”

“I knew how long it would take. I told him when to phone again. He kept in touch that way. When I had things set up, I just waited for him to phone and I told him when and where to meet us. He went first, paid for the room in cash, and we met him there. Everything else happened as I said. We performed, and I left Davey with him.”

“Davey didn’t question this? Being left alone in a hotel room with a stranger?” That didn’t sound like the Davey Benton that his father had described, Lynley thought. There had to be a missing ingredient to the mixture Minshall was describing. “Was the boy drugged?” he asked.

“I have never drugged one of the boys,” Minshall said.

Lynley was used to the man’s way of dancing round by this time. He said, “And your clients?”

“I do not drug-”

“Plug it, Barry,” Barbara cut in. “You know exactly what the superintendent is asking.”

Minshall looked at what he’d done to his plastic cup: rendered it into shreds and confetti. He said, “We’re generally offered refreshments in the hotel room. The boys are free to take them or not.”

“What sort of refreshments?”

“Spirits.”

“Not drugs? Cannabis, cocaine, Ecstasy, the like.”

Minshall actually reared up in offence at this question, saying, “Of course not. We’re not drug addicts, Superintendent Lynley.”

“Just buggerers of children,” Havers said. Then, she shot Sorry, sir in a look to Lynley.

He said, “What did this man look like, Mr. Minshall?”

“Two-one-six-oh?” Minshall thought about it. “Ordinary,” he said. “He had a moustache and goatee. He wore a peaked cap, like a countryman. Spectacles as well.”

“And did you never put all this down as a disguise?” Lynley asked the magician. “The facial hair, the glasses, the cap?”

“At the time, I didn’t think…Look, by the time a man’s ready to stop fantasising about it and to make it real, he’s beyond disguises.”

“Not if he plans to kill someone,” Havers pointed out.

“How old was this man?” Lynley asked.

“I don’t know. Middle-aged? He must have been because he wasn’t in very good shape. He looked like someone who doesn’t take exercise.”

“Like someone who might easily get out of breath?”

“Possibly. But look, he didn’t have on a disguise. All right, I admit that some blokes wear them at first when they show up at MABIL-the wig, the beard, the turban, whatever-but by the time they’re ready…We’ve built trust between us. And no one does this without trust. Because for all they know, I could be a cop undercover. I could be anyone.”

“And so could they,” Havers said. “But you never thought about that one, did you, Bar? You just handed Davey Benton to a serial killer, waved good-bye, and drove off with the money in your pocket.” She turned to Lynley. “I’d say we have enough, wouldn’t you, sir?”

Lynley couldn’t disagree. For now, they had enough from Minshall. They’d want a list of the calls he’d received on his mobile, they’d want to get over to the Canterbury Hotel, and they’d want to arrange for another e-fit to see if the one from Square Four Gym matched whatever image Minshall came up with of his client. From his description of two-one-six-oh, though, the points of comparison seemed to be not with the e-fit they already had from the gym, but rather with the description they’d been given earlier by Muwaffaq Masoud of the man who’d come to purchase his van. There hadn’t been a moustache and a goatee, to be sure. But the age was right, the lack of physical fitness was right, and the bald head Masoud saw could easily have been hidden by the peaked cap Minshall was familiar with.

For the first time, Lynley considered an altogether new idea.

“Havers,” he said to the constable when they were out of the interview room again, “there’s another way to go with this. It’s one that we’ve not looked at yet.”

“Which is?” she asked, stowing her notebook in her bag.

“Two men,” he said. “One procures and the other kills. One procures to give the other the opportunity to kill. The dominant and the submissive partners.”

She thought about this. “It wouldn’t be the first time,” she said. “A twist on Fred and Rosemary, on Hindley and Brady.”

“More than that,” Lynley said.

“How?”

“It explains why we’ve got someone buying that van in Middlesex while someone else waits for him in a ‘minicab’ just outside Muwaffaq Masoud’s house.”

WHEN LYNLEY arrived home, it was quite late. He’d stopped in Victoria Street for a word with TO9 about MABIL, and he’d given the child-protection-team officers what information he had about the organisation. He told them about St. Lucy’s Church, near Gloucester Road underground station, and he asked what the possibilities were of closing the group down.

The news he received in return was grim. A meeting of like-minded people to discuss their like-mindedness did not constitute a breach of the law. Was there something else going on besides talk in the basement of St. Lucy’s Church? If not, Vice had too few officers and too many other ongoing illicit activities with which they had to contend.

“But these are paedophiles,” Lynley countered in frustration upon hearing this assessment from his colleague.

“May be,” was the reply. “But the CPS aren’t going to drag anyone into court based on his conversation, Tommy.” Still, TO9 would send someone undercover to a meeting of MABIL when their burdens were lighter round the Yard. Barring a complaint or hard evidence of criminal activities, that was the best TO9 could do.

So Lynley was feeling gloomy when he drove into Eaton Terrace. He parked in the garage in the mews and trudged down the cobblestone alley and round the corner to his home. The day had left him with the distinct sensation of being unclean: from his skin right through to his spirit.

Inside the house, the ground floor was mostly dark, with a dim light shining at the foot of the stairway. He climbed up and went to their bedroom to see if his wife had gone to bed. But the bed was undisturbed, so he went on, first to the library and ultimately to the nursery. There he found her. She’d bought a rocking chair for the room, he saw, and she was sitting in it, asleep, with an oddly shaped pillow in her lap. He recognised it from one of their many trips to Mothercare in the past few months. It was meant to be used when nursing a baby. The infant rested on it beneath the mother’s breast.

Helen stirred as he crossed the room to her. She said, as if they’d only just been speaking moments before, “So I decided to practise. Well, I suppose it’s more like seeing what it will feel like. Not the actual feeding, but just having him here. It’s odd when you think about it, I mean when you actually stretch the thought out.”

“What is?” The rocking chair was beneath the window, and he leaned against the sill. He watched her fondly.

“That we have actually created a little human being. Our own Jasper Felix, happily floating round inside me, waiting for his introduction to the world.”

Lynley shuddered at the latter part of her thought: introducing their son to a world that often seemed filled with violence and was indeed a place of great uncertainty.

Helen must have seen this because she said, “What is it?”

“Bad day,” he told her.

She extended her hand to him and he took it. Her skin was cool, and he could smell the scent of citrus upon her. She said, “I had a phone call from a man called Mitchell Corsico, Tommy. He said he was from The Source.”

“God,” Lynley groaned. “I’m sorry. He is from The Source.” He explained how he was attempting to thwart Hillier’s plan by keeping Corsico occupied with the minutiae of his own personal life. “Dee should have warned you he might be in touch. I didn’t think he’d be quite that fast. She was intent upon giving him an earful to keep him away from the incident room.”

“Ah.” Helen stretched and yawned. “Well, I did assume there was something going on when he called me Countess. He’d spoken to my father as well, as things turn out. I’ve no idea how he tracked him down.”

“What did he want to know?”

She began to get to her feet. Lynley helped her rise. She set the pillow into the baby’s cot and put a stuffed elephant on top of it. “Daughter of an earl, married to an earl. Obviously, he loathed me. I tried to amuse him with my astounding mindlessness and my sad, fading It-girl proclivities, but he didn’t seem as charmed as I would have liked. Lots of questions about why a blue blood-this is you, darling-would become a cop. I told him I hadn’t the slightest idea as I’d much prefer it if you were available to lunch with me daily in Knightsbridge. He asked to come and visit me here at home, a photographer in tow. I drew the line at that. I hope that was the right thing to do.”

“It was.”

“I’m glad. Of course, it was hard to resist the idea of posing artfully on the drawing-room sofa for The Source, but I managed it.” She slipped her arm round his waist and they headed for the door. “What else?” she asked him.

“Hmmm?” He kissed the top of her head.

“Your bad day.”

“God. It’s nothing I want to talk about now.”

“Have you had dinner?”

“No appetite,” he said. “All I want is to collapse. Preferably on something soft and relatively pliant.”

She looked up at him and smiled. “I know just what you need.” She took his hand and led him towards the bedroom.

He said, “Helen, I couldn’t manage it tonight. I’m done for, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”

She laughed. “I never thought I’d hear that from you, but fear not. I have something else in mind.” She told him to sit on the bed, and she went to the bathroom. He heard the snick of a match. He saw its flare. A moment later, water began to run in the tub, and she returned to him. “Do nothing,” she said. “Avoid thinking, if you can. Just be,” and she began to undress him.

There was a ceremonial quality to how she did it, in part because she removed his clothes without haste. She set his shoes carefully to one side, and she folded trousers, jacket, and shirt. When he was nude, she led him into the bathroom, where the bathtub’s water was fragrant and the candles she’d lit cast a soothing glow that was doubled by the mirrors and arced against the walls.

He stepped into the water, sank down, and stretched out until he was covered to his shoulders. She fixed a towelling pillow for his head, and she said, “Close your eyes. Just relax. Don’t do a thing. Try not to think. The scent should help you. Concentrate on that.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“Helen’s special potion.”

He heard her moving round the bath: the door swinging shut, the sound of garments dropping to the floor. Then she was next to the tub and her hand was dipping into the water. He opened his eyes. She’d changed into a soft towelling dressing gown, its olive colour warm against her skin. She held a natural sponge and she was applying a bathing gel to it.

She began to wash him. He murmured, “I’ve not asked about your day.”

“Shhh,” she replied.

“No. Tell me. It’ll give me something to think about that’s not Hillier or the case.”

“All right,” she said, but her voice was low and she ran the sponge the length of his arm with a gentle pressure that made him close his eyes once again. “I had a day of hope.”

“I’m glad someone did.”

“After much research, Deborah and I have targeted eight shops for the christening clothes. We’ve a date tomorrow, devoted entirely to the excursion.”

“Excellent,” he said. “An end to conflict.”

“That’s what we think. May we use the Bentley, by the way? There may be more packages than can fit in my car.”

“We’re talking about a baby’s clothes, Helen. An infant’s clothes. How much room can they take up?”

“Yes. Of course. But there may be other things, Tommy…”

He chuckled. She took his other arm. “You can resist anything but temptation,” he told her.

“In a good cause.”

“What else would it be?” But he told her to take the Bentley and to enjoy the excursion. He himself settled in to enjoy her ministration to his body.

She did his neck and kneaded the muscles of his shoulders. She told him to lean forward so that she could see to his back. She washed his chest and she used her fingers to press at points on his face in a way that seemed to drain all tension from him. Then she did the same on his feet till he felt like warm putty. She saved his legs for last.

The sponge glided up them, up them, up them. And then it was not the sponge at all but her hand, and she made him groan.

“Yes?” she murmured.

“Oh yes. Yes.”

“More? Harder? How?”

“Just do what you’re doing.” He caught his breath. “God, Helen. You’re a very naughty girl.”

“I can stop if you like.”

“Not on your life.” He opened his eyes and met hers to see she was smiling gently and watching him. “Take off the robe,” he said.

“Visual stimulation? You hardly need it.”

“Not that sort,” he replied. “Just take off the robe.” And when she did so, he shifted so that she could join him in the water. She put a foot on either side of him and he reached for her hands to help her down. “Tell Jasper Felix to move over,” he said.

“I think,” she replied, “that he’ll be happy to.”