What must it have been like for her to be living there again all on her own where the memories are? What were they thinking of, sending her there if they didn’t want her to remember things? I should have stopped her going there again, even after so long, but they said the house was hers under the divorce settlement and that I had no rights at all.

But psychiatrists don’t know everything I know what happened.

And he understood that whatever the cost to himself she must be kept out of court, there couldn’t be a big sensational court case about this – EX-ACTRESS NICKY: ANOTHER OF TERRY’S LOVERS – he could not allow it.

And there was another thought also during the long dark nights. I was drunk when I went to Brighton. I haven’t talked to her for more than thirty years. I should have talked to her before I held her.

And I should never have put my hand on her breast.

That was like rape.

I frightened her. I wanted to hold her too much.

And then, finally, in deep, private shame: it’s time to stop drinking.

Terence Blue never once thought of Nicola Abbott as a mad person. What he thought was: after this ridiculous rape trial I will get her back.

Some people may have thought that Terence Blue was mad himself.

*

Finally he was glimpsed briefly in a corridor of the London Clinic by a reporter: TERENCE BLUE WALKING said the headlines. He talked with his accountants about finances, with his American agent and his two American lawyers about sueing the film company who had gone ahead without him on the film he was about to make. His secretary dealt with all the mail and all the flowers and hid from him the pile of abusive letters that called him a double rapist. He talked to his English lawyers about Simone Taylor and the rape case: she’s nuts, I didn’t do it, he said tiredly, I couldn’t possibly be convicted in this country, I want to go for it, get it over as soon as possible, I didn’t do it, so I won’t be convicted.

A photographer rented a room across the road from the London Clinic: with a telephoto lens and a ladder he managed to get a photograph of Terence in a dressing gown with an arm in a sling smiling at a nurse. Press clamoured still at the doors of the Clinic: Terence Blue was still more newsworthy at the moment than Princess Diana and Hugh Grant put together – a combination at least one columnist had suggested was devoutly to be wished for.

But Terence refused to talk to the press. The journalists felt very hurt, Tel was almost one of them, had been one of the boys, drinking with journalists all over the world late into the night.

And he continued to refuse to lay charges against Nicola Abbott.