‘But Abbott moved with the times. Come the millennium, he had his own satellite TV station: the Adult Channel. At the same time, all his publications had moved online, of course. And in the middle of it all, inside this great spider’s web of filth, there was one website that was only available to a very select group of subscribers. The title didn’t give very much away either, even though it described exactly what it was offering. It was called Asia Minor.’

‘Child pornography.’

‘Kids from Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, mainly. And it was in a different league to the rest of his stuff. He’d be looking at a twenty-year sentence for supplying and distributing hard-core pornography with young children. So here’s the question you might like to ask yourself. Why would a man who was making millions out of legal porn, as well as all his other business interests, want to risk the whole thing on a single website that hardly even paid for itself? By the time it was closed down, it only had a few hundred subscribers, dirty old men paying twenty quid a month. Why was he doing it? That’s what the Paedophile and Child Pornography Unit who were running the investigation wanted to know, and in the end they found out. Derek Abbott, the CEO of Free for All, was getting access to the models. That was his little perk. Some of those kids were eleven and twelve years old, and Asia Minor was giving him a constant, fresh supply.’

He took out a cigarette and lit it with cupped hands.

‘When Derek Abbott was arrested in London, he didn’t care. I still remember the day he came in, sitting there with this look on his face like he was the lord of the manor who’d accidentally wandered into the servants’ quarters. The police weren’t going to get anywhere near him, not in a hundred years! He knew from the start that he’d set up his business in a way that made him untouchable and he’d brought in a team of lawyers who didn’t care who he was or what he’d done so long as they got their retainers. He’d pay his way out of trouble no matter how much it cost – and that’s exactly what happened. No-one could connect him to Asia Minor. His own staff had been paid off or intimidated. None of the witnesses, the kids he’d abused, came forward. He’d cocked his nose at us from the very start and he was right.’

‘But he went to prison.’