Wells sighed. “The boy left my shop. I never saw him again.”

“Are you certain?” Banks asked. “Are you sure he didn’t come back, or you didn’t meet him somewhere else? Your house, perhaps?”

“I never saw him again. Why would he come to my house?”

“I don’t know,” said Banks. “You tell me.”

“He didn’t.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Did he come back to the shop? Did something happen there? Something bad. Did you kill him and then move him after dark? Maybe it was a terrible accident. I can’t believe you meant to kill him. Not if you loved him.”

“I didn’t love him. Society has seen to it that I’m quite incapable of loving anyone ever again. No matter what you think of me, I am not a fool. I do know wrong from right, Chief Inspector, whether I agree with the definition or not. I am capable of self-control. I am an emotional eunuch. I know that society regards my urges as evil and sinful, and I have no desire to spend the rest of my days in jail. Believe me, the prison of my own making is bad enough.”

“I suppose the money was an afterthought, was it?” Banks went on. “But why not? Why not make a little money out of what you’d done? I mean, you could do with it, couldn’t you? Look at the dump you spend your days in. A crappy used-book business in a dank, cold dungeon can’t be making much money, can it? An extra ten thousand quid would have set you up nicely. Not too greedy. Just enough.”

Wells had tears in his eyes again, and he was shaking his head slowly from side to side. “It’s all I’ve got,” he said, his voice catching in his throat, his whole body starting to shake now. “My books. My cat. They’re all I’ve got. Can’t you see that, man?” He pushed his florid, bulbous face toward Banks and banged his fist to his heart. “There’s nothing else left here for me. Have you no humanity?”

“But it’s still not very much, is it?” Banks pressed on.

Wells looked him in the eye and regained some of his composure. “Who are you to say that? Who are you to pronounce judgment on a man’s life? Do you think I don’t know I’m ugly? Do you think I don’t notice the way people look at me? Do you think I don’t know I’m the object of laughter and derision? Do you think I have no feelings? Every day I sit down there in my dank, cold dungeon, as you so cruelly refer to it, like some sort of pariah, some deformed monster in his lair, some…some Quasimodo, and I contemplate my sins, my desires, my dreams of love and beauty and purity deemed ugly and evil by a hypocritical world. All I have is my books, and the unconditional love of one of God’s creatures. How dare you judge me?”

“No matter what you feel,” said Banks, “society has to protect its children, and for that we need laws. They may seem arbitrary to you. Sometimes they seem arbitrary to me. I mean, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen? Fourteen? Where do you draw the line? Who knows, Norman, maybe one day we’ll be as enlightened as you’d like us to be and lower the age of consent to thirteen, but until then we have to have those lines, or all becomes chaos.” He was thinking of Graham Marshall as well as Luke Armitage as he spoke. Society hadn’t done a very good job of protecting either of them.