But Pauline leant across the kitchen table where they sat and kept on talking. She had enough information now: Harry had given her knowledge of the past and the knowledge was her power. And Elvira Pugh, crime-writer, had made the important connection. All he cares about is keeping Nicky out of court: Nicky is the most important thing in his life. I suspect this – illness – will be something to do with Nicky. Make him see how he can help her: put it in his mind that he could use the first trial to prevent the second.

Pauline continued long into the night, talking; her eyes glittered, like ice. ‘I was thinking about Nicky Abbott,’ she said.

The other man remained silent.

Terence Blue said I will not do it over and over again.

32

On the first day of the Terence Blue rape trial it snowed very heavily. The roads around the looming Old Bailey had been white, were now slushy; pedestrians had made icy tracks through the snow on the pavements and now it was treacherous to walk. That did not stop the journalists arriving early or the public queuing eagerly at the gallery entrance or huge groups of winter tourists hoping for a glimpse of a famous British film star, all milling about the Old Bailey stamping their feet in the cold.

‘I used to save his picture for years,’ one woman said, blowing her nose on tissues she kept pulling out of a box. ‘We’re exactly the same age,’ and a press photographer took a photo. She had a woollen scarf tied round her head and fur-lined boots: she looked like a Russian in a food queue, was actually a dental assistant from Ruislip with a bad cold (Karen Williams, 58) who had taken a week off to catch the trial.

Dozens of photographers in thick wet-weather jackets wiped the lenses of their cameras, gossiped in groups; journalists cupped red hands around a match, coughed, watched the road carefully. Policemen at all the doorways were photographed by foreigners.

When Simone Taylor arrived, in a startling pink dress and a fur coat and wearing dark glasses, there was a flurry; no one was supposed to know the identity of the complainant but lights flashed in the white morning, journalists crowded around the chauffeur-driven car as she got out. She waved, but with a serious look on her face, at the press; was hurried inside the building.