‘No, he won’t. Trust me. He’s invested far too much time and effort getting you into the predicament in which you now find yourself. He’s not going to undo all that just because you win once when he’s told you not to. Sure, he’ll probably be very angry, and he might even threaten you with exposure, but he won’t do it.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I just am. And it might just bring him out of his cosy safe shell so that he becomes more open to attack. I intend to nail Mr Anton Valance and free you from his tyranny, but I’ll need your help to do it.’

He didn’t seem at all keen. Quite the reverse, in fact. And I fervently hoped I was right about Valance not sending the video to the police if Shilstone won on Oscar Mike. Or to the girlfriend, for that matter.

‘Think about it, Jimmy. You can’t spend the rest of your career dancing at the end of his puppet strings. He’s never going to go away unless you and I do something about it.’

‘But I still have a career of sorts. And it’s better than being locked up in a cell twenty-three hours a day for the next fourteen years. Do you have the slightest idea what happens to sex offenders in prison?’

Actually, I did.

I’d once been falsely accused of child sex abuse, and I was all too aware of the aggressive attitude towards the well-being of kiddie fiddlers, as the police privately called them.

Taking down Anton Valance and, at the same time, keeping young Jimmy Shilstone out of jail might prove a tad more difficult than I had thought.

CHAPTER

23

ANTON VALANCE HAD put on quite a few pounds since the Yorkshire Post had snapped him at the charity event two years previously. But I still recognised him immediately. Just to be sure, I’d had another quick look at a printout of the newspaper photograph and had also given it to Chico to look at on the journey from Malton to Harrogate.

I was already lying on a daybed in the long waiting gallery outside the treatment rooms at the Turkish Baths when Valance arrived. I was wearing a newly purchased pair of swim shorts and I had two white towels—both issued at reception—one placed over my head in the manner of a boxer and the other covering my left forearm. Valance was similarly attired, with one of his white towels doing its best to stretch around his ample waist, while the other was in his hand.