“Just under three months. I work for the BBC, and I was researching a Panorama feature about the use of illegal immigrants in printing sweatshops, and I interviewed Andy. Like everybody else, I thought he was the archetypal macho man of the print unions. He suggested going for a drink afterwards, and I thought he’d made a mistake when we ended up in this little back bar in Islington that was wall-to-wall denim and leather.”

Oh God, thought Lindsay. It’s always the same. First they won’t talk, then they want to tell you their life story. At least it had stopped him twitching.

“Anyway,” Jed continued, “he started asking how I’d come to be involved in setting up AMWU’s Gay And Lesbian Action group. I didn’t know he’d even heard of GALA, but he seemed really interested, you know, not taking the piss, or being embarrassed. Then a couple of days later he rang me at the BBC and asked if we could have dinner to carry on what we’d been discussing. Over dinner, he told me he was gay, that he’d been in the closet for twenty years because of his career in the union, and he asked if I was involved with anyone. Well, I wasn’t and that night, he came back to my flat, and we’ve been seeing each other ever since. It’s been really difficult sometimes, because he’s so paranoid, and that’s hard for me to reconcile with my politics, but it’s been worth all the hassle,” he ended defiantly.

“Wasn’t it a bit of a risk for him, sleeping with you at conference?” Sophie asked.

“Not really. I mean, if you’re not in your room, people assume you’re having a legover with someone. And in Andy’s case, they’d always assume it was a woman. He’s very attractive to women, you know.”

Lindsay found it hard to imagine the beefy Scottish deputy general secretary fighting off women. His thick pepper-and-salt hair was cut in the straight lines favored by Japanese tourists, his skin was scarred with the remains of teenage acne, his smile had always reminded her of the grin of a barracuda. Then she remembered those china blue eyes with their deep laughter lines. Maybe Jed wasn’t so far off the mark after all.

“So what exactly happened this morning?” she asked.

“Like I said, he arrived about two. We had sex, then we fell asleep. I woke up when you started screaming. Andy leapt out of bed and started scrambling into his clothes. His first thought was to get out of there fast before anyone found him with me. He usually got me to check the corridor before he left, but this time he just shot off. Then the police hammered on my door, and I pretended they’d just woken me up.”