There’s a large brown envelope at the bottom of the box, once sealed with Sellotape which has long since gone dry and brittle. It crumbles in my fingers.

Inside are prints, maybe twenty in all, taken in the same studio on the same day, Mervyn posing against a black curtain in boxer shorts, in a white pouch and, finally, naked. He’s hard.

And I’m hard too, harder than I’ve been for months, without Viagra, without Tina, without GHB. I push my pants down round my knees and wank like a schoolboy, in such a hurry to come that I can’t even get to the bathroom or the bedroom.

Before my eyes close and my orgasm comes, the last thing I see is Mervyn, staring back at me across time. A man I only ever saw as a shape on a stretcher.

I can’t remember the last time I came. I can’t remember. I try, in that last moment of rationality, to remember, as if it matters, but I can’t, and then all thought is washed away.

Ten

The charges against Mervyn keep mounting up. Not only is he suspected of murdering Gerald, and stealing money and expensive photographic equipment from the ransacked studio, and attempted arson – there is now an additional charge of buggery. Certain negatives have been found in the studio – according to what I hear, they were in a safe concealed in the brickwork behind a framed picture – which show just how far Gerald had gone into the realms of hardcore pornography. These were the photographs that he sold to trusted clients only – some of them, it appears, overseas. If it can be proven that the photographs went by Royal Mail, then there will be yet another charge on the table, for sending obscene materials through the post. Mervyn may only have posed for the pictures, but in the absence of anyone else to charge in what’s beginning to look like a very juicy vice case, he’ll do. The police are gunning for a conviction, so that they can put this down as a successful ‘clean-up’ and get the Sunday papers off their back.

As to the content of the photographs, reports differ, and Mervyn is reticent. He says it was ‘a bit of larking around’ in Gerald’s studio with a fellow bodybuilder who also happened to be doing the rounds at the same time, both of them broke and hungry and eager for admiration. But they must have been pretty convincing if the police think they can hang a buggery charge on them.

I’ve been to see him as often as I can over these last dreadful weeks. Incarceration doesn’t suit him. He’s losing weight, and I fear that he’s starting to lose his mind. He alternates between vicious bouts of temper and pitiful wheedling. He vents his frustration on me, and has even suggested that it’s somehow my fault that he ‘got caught up in the queer world’ at all. In fairness, he immediately regretted saying this, and apologised, but I’m beginning to worry that he sees me as part of the problem. If I hadn’t taken those photographs, taken him to Blackpool, and everything that followed, he could now be shooting his first starring movie role out at Pinewood opposite the delectable Maxine Trent. When he heard that the long-delayed boxing epic had been announced for an autumn release under the title The Gloves are Off!, starring Edward Templeton’s latest discovery, he became even more discouraged.