‘Why are you here? Why did you agree to come to Alderney? And don’t tell me it was anything to do with our book. This is about Derek Abbott, isn’t it? I know you don’t want to talk about it, but you’ve got to tell me. You knew from the start that he was living here. When we were invited that day in London, I guessed you were up to something. I don’t want to have an argument with you, but you can’t keep me in the dark, especially if I’m going to end up writing about all this. So what’s going on?’

Hawthorne took his time before replying. We were standing on the very edge of the beach, with the rocks behind us and nobody else in sight. It was still early and the great stretch of sand looked wild and unwelcoming. With the wind tugging at the seaweed and the steel-coloured waves rolling in relentlessly, this was not a beach for deckchairs and pedalos. A seagull hovered overhead. The sun was behind the clouds.

‘I will tell you about Abbott,’ he said. ‘But only if you never ask me again. All right? It makes me sick even to talk about him.’

‘He was a paedophile.’

Hawthorne nodded slowly. There was a terrible bleakness in his eyes. ‘He was more than that,’ he began. ‘Mr Derek bloody Abbott. He wasn’t some barrow boy selling dirty DVDs off the back of a lorry. And he wasn’t weird and bearded, downloading stuff off the net and sharing it with his friends. He was a businessman. He was respectable.’

Hawthorne made that last word sound the exact opposite.

‘He started out as a teacher, but when that didn’t work for him he moved into classified advertising and by the end of his twenties he was advertising manager for a big group of leisure magazines. Sailing, horse-riding and – as it happened – naturism. From there it was a small step to founding his own company, Free for All. Their first big success was a listings magazine given away outside tube stations. He was ahead of his time. I’ll say that for him.

‘Listings didn’t pay, so he moved into lifestyle and celebrity and from there it wasn’t such a huge step into porn. This was the early nineties, Tony. We hadn’t quite arrived at the day when you could get it all at the touch of a computer keyboard, so Abbott’s girlies often came folded in the middle with staples running down their chest. And it was all legal. Bored Housewives. Ladies of Leisure. My Secret Fantasies. The sort of stuff you’d find on the top shelf of any corner newsagent.