‘Valance got me a girl,’ he said. ‘I went to Liverpool for the Grand National meeting—he’d booked me six rides spread over all three days. I would have preferred to drive back and forth each day to Malton but he insisted I stay over or else I’d be too tired to ride, he said, especially on Saturday with all the National traffic.

‘Anyway, on the second night I was down there, he calls me and says he knows how to cheer me up after none of my rides thus far had won. Next thing I know, this girl arrives at my hotel room and says she’s dead keen to be ridden by a real jockey. She ends up staying the whole night, not that we got much sleep.’

‘So? Nothing criminal in that.’

Stupid, I thought, but not criminal.

He sighed once more. ‘You don’t understand. She was a real girl. Turns out she was only fifteen.’

‘Ah.’

‘Ah, indeed,’ he said. ‘Sexual activity with a child. You can get fourteen years for that.’

‘But if you honestly believed that she was older, and didn’t know she was only fifteen, is it still a crime?’

‘It seems that the Crown Prosecution Service always consider it’s a crime if the man is more than six years older than the girl. I was twenty-three at the time, so they’d claim I should have known better, or that I should have asked for proof of her age. And maybe I should have done.’

He stared up at the ceiling.

‘I knew she was young, just not quite that young. She told me she was eighteen, but I had my doubts, even then. Seventeen maybe, I thought, but not as young as fifteen or I wouldn’t have touched her. She was certainly well developed—lovely tits—and she wasn’t a virgin either, I can tell you. Not with all that knowledge. And she was keen as mustard for me to get on with it. Stripped off all her kit almost as soon as she was through the door.’

Jimmy wasn’t the first man to be seduced in such a manner, and he certainly wouldn’t be the last. Throughout human history, the male of the species has had a tendency to move all his brains from his head to his underpants in such circumstances.

‘But Valance must have known how old she was.’

‘Course he did, but he denies it.’

‘But procuring a fifteen-year-old for sex with someone else is a far worse crime than actually having it, so Valance must be culpable as well.’

‘Yeah, maybe, but it’s not his face on the damn video, nor his cock.’

‘What video?’

‘Of the girl and me having sex.’

‘How come there’s a video? Did you take it?’

‘Of course not. Neither did she. There was a secret camera set up in the hotel room. Filmed everything.’