How much can I do for Mervyn? And what is the point? If he gets off this time, he’s going to turn his back on me and everyone else. I can’t alter the facts – Gerald is dead, Mervyn had motive and opportunity galore – and I can’t provide an alibi. Even if I could, I’d be putting myself in danger of prosecution as well. No doubt it will all come out at the trial in any case, and I could be the next one in the dock. It’s happened to enough people I know, including one man who went to the police to complain about blackmail and ended up being charged with gross indecency himself.

None of us is eager to stand up to the law. The police are getting vicious, seizing address books and letters and paying calls in the middle of the night. Those of us who can are hiding our true nature, keeping our hair short and our clothes drab. The pubs and clubs, those that have escaped the raids, are empty. There aren’t the parties any more. Edward Templeton, once the host with the most, the reigning queen of London queenery, has relocated to the south of France, officially to set up a distribution office down there, more probably to avoid unwelcome questions from the police. The house in Pimlico is closed up, Don has mothballed his chauffeur’s uniform, the Bentley is in a garage somewhere. Rumour has it that Templeton’s extensive collection of military uniforms, and the photographs in which they featured, modelled by those convenient soldiers from the Wellington barracks, have been consigned to the waters of the Thames.

And those who can’t hide? What of them – the screaming queens who flocked in the bars and clubs of the West End, who flapped across Leicester Square like brightly-coloured parrots, defying the police and the bashers and the blackmailers, high on bravado, confident that good times were just around the corner? Where have they gone, now that the Wolfenden Report is on the shelf and the vultures of the law and the jackals of the press are circling, eager for reprisals? I’ve searched for Stephen in all the regular haunts, the Standard, the Captain’s Cabin, Lyon’s Corner House, the handful of other seats of gaiety, but he’s nowhere to be seen. I knew so little about his life, his connections outside our little world. Of Tony – our landlord, his employer, lover and possibly pimp, I knew nothing beyond the name. Muscle Boy magazine has closed, the office, above a chemists shop in Kensington, gutted by fire. I’ve even tried to contact some of the other photographers who contributed to those titles, on the off-chance that they might know Stephen, or Tony, or something, anything, that might help – but their addresses turn out to be sweet shops or newsagents or dry cleaners, PO Box numbers or ‘gone away. The world in which Stephen lived and worked seems to have evaporated like a feast in a fairy tale, and Stephen with it.