‘Well, yeah. He had a real thing, a detailed fantasy. He said that all women were bitches but that if he could get a girl at the right age, the right kind of girl, if she showed potential and if she measured up, she would be a fitting mate for him. He actually used that word. Mate.’

‘Apart from Rhona, were you aware of other underage girls?’

‘Not aware, as such, but I had my suspicions. I don’t want to give a name. It wouldn’t be fair on them, to tag them as a victim or whatever when they may not want that.’

‘Gill told you about Rhona, not about anyone else?’

‘No. I didn’t know anything about that girl from Cork you mentioned. I think he knew from my reaction to what he told me about Rhona that I wasn’t that comfortable with it.’

‘You were okay about all the adult women, just not the younger ones?’

‘Kind of that, yes. Though, I was starting to get uncomfortable about the women as well. Maybe I’d always been uncomfortable about it. I think I was beginning to see that maybe there was undue influence, maybe not quite full consent.’

‘You think?’

‘I do. It probably sounds odd to you, that I was only starting to realise it then?’

‘A bit odd, I suppose, all right.’

Bile rose from my belly and my throat burned.

‘Yes,’ Dalton said. ‘But Gill has this power over people. I don’t know if you noticed. He brings people with him, like a boat with shoals of fish and dolphins following. Everyone’s too busy watching Jeremy, trying to see if they’re in or out of favour with him, to notice what he’s doing, to have the distance to make a judgement call on it.’

Reluctantly, I had to admit to myself that I knew what Dalton meant. I recalled my meeting with Gill in the Opera House, and how I had felt when he’d moved on from me. And the audience. How they had been mesmerised. It was easy to condemn Dalton for his inaction, and condemn him I did, but with Gill, everything was complicated and ambiguous.

‘I have some idea what you mean,’ I said. ‘But you said that you had suspicions?’