It was my turn now to stare at him, dumbfounded.

‘Valance must have fixed it. He assured me that, as my agent, he would take care of everything for my Liverpool trip, booking the hotel and such. All I have to do, he says, is turn up and ride. He bloody did take care of me too, stitched me up good and proper, with a full-frontal view of me riding all right.’

‘How did you find out the girl was underage?’

‘I was emailed a copy of her passport. Her name was blanked out, but the photo on it was definitely of her, and it showed her date of birth clear as daylight. On that night in Liverpool, she’d been two weeks short of her sixteenth birthday.’

‘Was the passport copy sent to you by Valance?’

‘I didn’t think so at the time. The email address it came from wasn’t his, and I thought it must be from the girl, or her pimp or something, and they were going to blackmail me. But now I believe it must have been Valance that fixed it all. He certainly knew about it later.’

‘But how would he get a copy of her passport?’

‘God knows. Perhaps he’s her father.’

I thought it very unlikely that a man like Valance would use his own family in such a sordid manner, but who knew what lengths some people will go to in the pursuit of illicit gains.

‘When did you get this email?’

‘The following July. Came with the video attached. Looked like some cheap porn movie. I was terrified my girlfriend would see it. She hadn’t wanted me to stay down at Liverpool in the first place.’

‘Is she still your girlfriend?’

‘She certainly is,’ he said gloomily. ‘I’d been planning to ask her to marry me but … how can I now?’

‘Where is she?’ I asked, looking past his bare shoulders into the house.

‘Not here, thank God, not with you turning up. She’s staying with her mother in Cleethorpes for the weekend.’

So Valance had a double stranglehold over Jimmy—not only having had sex with a minor, but also sleeping around when in a steady relationship. He only had to send the passport and the video to either the police, or to his girlfriend, to totally destroy his life.

No wonder Jimmy had done what Valance demanded of him.

At eleven o’clock I called the two local taxi companies and cancelled my bookings to be collected from York station, telling them that I was so very sorry but I had missed my train.

Five minutes later, Jimmy Shilstone left home for Market Rasen races. It was a little after he would have liked, but he would still be in time for his ride in the first, provided there were no major holdups on the Humber Bridge.