How wretched it always is when I return here from the pleasures of your retreat! The depression in this house is appalling. The mournful face, the whimpering child, the greyness! Oh! For light! For glory! For excitement and the touch of hungry lips! To pleasure myself I have been rereading some of my Agendas. Remember them? I have kept them faithfully since our first encounter all those years ago, as you know. It is quite fascinating to watch the development from callow youth-unaware to – I trust! – faithful and experienced servant. How much I learned from you. You who made me aware for the first time that the Oxford Dictionary is sometimes short of a meaning and that the word penetrate does not only apply to ‘thought’ or ‘thicket’! What fun! Could you perhaps give me some advice on where to place these little pieces of erotica? Seems such a waste to leave them rotting in a drawer in the studio. I think Stern or Spiegel in Germany, and others in France and Holland, would be quite interested. And I desperately need the money. Solly has been generous, but I want so much to get away. To start anew before it is too late and I am too old. Perhaps you could advise me next time I am ‘summonsed’?

Your trusting slave, pupil, and ever-humiliated servant.

This ugly piece of work was signed simply with a ‘J.’ Must have caused a ripple of unease in the white and yellow room up on the third floor. I was not amazed that Millar had kept it. Copied it, and attached it to the pieces which Millie, and obviously he himself, had chosen for my education.

How much of all this did Florence know? Did she have the very least idea of her ‘husband’s’ other life? Of the whips, the belts, the chains, the desperate need for ‘humiliation’ and pain. His need, as these pages showed so clearly, for domination and degradation, when only the screamed word ‘Pax!’ could bring torture to a stop. Did she know? Could she know? She had once said that sex had an odour. She had practically ripped a thumbnail off when she had spoken of Jojo and Daniel Jacquet. She must have known something.

He writes of

the supreme excitement of being straddled by your black glossy boots. The slippery delight of that oiled plastic sheeting … tied and helpless, waiting your command to Jojo to administer my punishment.

Now then, come on! Surely she must have known? How could he hide his cuts and bruises, for God’s sake? I assume there had to be some? Did she ever see Daniel

all in his leathers, so tight that you could not have slipped a playing-card between the taut black skin and his hard flesh. Feeling the heat of him straining against my lusting mouth…

And so on.