And with the clarity of adulthood and hindsight Benedict realised that he himself had also been a stick to beat Henry Dumas with. A hold over him. Something Isabel could use to get her own back for the barrenness of her marriage and her life.

Wasn’t that why he had hurt the woman back in that house? No other reason but that? Because through her he had been hurting all his life?

And now through his meeting her, and what he had just done to her, he would carry on hurting, only this time the hurt would be tinged heavily with shame and guilt.

Yet, through her, now he had it all. A good education, a good marriage, two healthy children, more money than he could ever hope to spend, and a place in society that had culminated in his inheriting his grandfather’s peerage. Benedict Dumas, now Lord Barkham. He smiled a twisted smile at he thought. Lord Barkham begotten by a man’s twisted desire for young children.

It was a heavy burden to carry around with you day after day, and yet he knew he would have to. For his own children’s sakes.

He felt an urge to run back to that house and into that woman’s arms, to cry on her shoulder and hear that deep husky voice tell him everything would be fine. Instead, he started up his Daimler and drove home to Fenella and Natalie and his son Henry Dumas the second. Home to his real life, that wasn’t really his life, had never been his life.

At over fifty years old he felt like an orphan, and strange as human nature can be, after the revelations of last year, that felt quite good.

Delia was in the Jack of Spades, a small club in Soho that played jazz music, served warm beer, and turned a blind eye to the smoking of cannabis. She looked at the youth with her, about nineteen, with a three-day stubble on his chin. Already she wished she had never met him.

He loved the thought that she was related to Kerry Cavanagh. The name Cavanagh haunted Delia. Jimmy Sellars had loved the fact she was related to all those people whom he admired, the twins most of all. It was just a pity Delia herself didn’t garner the respect her cousins and her aunts did. Then she might be a bit happier.

She accepted the tiny piece of blotting paper from Andy and looked at it for a second before putting it on her thickly coated tongue. It had a little smiling face printed on it. The LSD was called California Sunshine and was about as good as you could get. She felt the need for the rush tonight, a deep inner need that had nothing to do with Andy, her aunts or her cousins.

This was between her and her brain.

The thought made her smile.