He caught Redfyre’s anxious look in Rosa’s direction and hurried to say, “Oh, it’s all right! Stand at ease, Inspector! It doesn’t disturb Rosa to hear this. She’s a London girl, you know. Bloomsbury,” he confided as indisputable proof of her worldliness. “No, it’s not sexual licence they indulge in. I should more properly have compared his social occasions to an ancient Greek gentlemen’s drinking party—a symposium as described by Socrates or Xenophon. But without the acrobatic and obliging young lady flute-players. And certainly without the suggestions of orgiastic goings-on that have recently scandalised us in certain publications seeking to reinterpret the classical texts. No, it’s torture that excites them. Mental torment of a selected victim in the pursuit of some gratification my own mind thankfully cannot grasp.”

“Father is trying to avoid mentioning the name of the Frenchman de Sade,” Rosa said primly. “But I expect he’s wasting his time trying to spare the blushes of a police inspector. Can we just agree that these fellows are twisted, inhuman creatures? What they do when the urge to inflict pain on a fellow man comes upon them is trawl the streets of Cambridge looking for a suitable victim. He must be of low intellect, eccentric, negligible on the social scale—any or all of these. With charm and grace, they engage his attention and invite him to dinner. What an honour! Once there, they ply him with the good food and wine they all enjoy and tear him to shreds. No, not physically—at least, that’s what we first thought—but mentally. They have a game, scoring points like runs at cricket for each telling quip they make. They encourage the victim to talk, express opinions, then make fun of him, and when they’ve had enough, they turn him loose back on the streets. We had a very derogatory Anglo-Saxon term for that sort of nonsense at my Academy for Young Ladies in Kent! I bet Freud has a Greek-based word for their mental condition.”

“Several,” Redfyre said gloomily. “In the force, we come into contact with more psychopathic types than you’d believe. Nothing surprises me. Though I remind myself that, to the Greeks, ‘psyche’ was ‘the soul.’ A disease of the soul rather than of the mind, I often think, and therefore incurable by human agency. The mind is receptive to improvement, education, enlargement, but who can influence or even locate the soul? That’s what every day finds me struggling to comprehend.”