She pored over the Sunday papers while the roast beef was cooking and the snow fell steadily on the lawn outside. Sunday papers were part of the Bonham Sunday. During the week they only had the Independent and the Mail delivered; they kept tabs on their profession with the Sunday papers. She read reports of the trial in the Observer, the Independent on Sunday, the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the Mail on Sunday, the Sunday Express and the News of the World. As Elvira had said, everyone of them, the more responsible papers less overtly, somehow seemed to imply that Terence was guilty. Of course he would deny it, Mike Tyson had denied it also. Too many people in the Dorchester had seen Terence arriving with Miss X then leaving the hotel in the middle of the night, many of whom the Prosecution had called as witnesses.

The Under-Manager of the Dorchester, a very reluctant witness (furious that the top people’s hotel, a haven of class and service and privacy, was being dragged into the gutter in this way, nothing like this had happened to the Dorchester, he said, since Elizabeth Taylor nearly died of pneumonia there and he was aghast at the publicity), had been scathing of Terence’s intoxication on arrival and his rather manic behaviour in the Michelinstarred Cantonese restaurant: shaking hands with all sorts of people whether they wanted to be shook or not.

BLUE VERDICT TOMORROW? said the Mail on Sunday in big black letters.

It was clear from the court reports that the most damning witness of all was the Italian room-service waiter. He took to Miss X’s suite the bottle of whisky they had ordered. When he brought the tray with the whisky and the glasses and the ice into the room the waiter had been thrilled to recognise Terence and had asked him for his autograph. Terence had his shoes off and his coat off and all the buttons of his shirt undone and his belt undone and his fly buttons undone and he was lying back on one of the sofas when Miss X had answered the door. He had signed a napkin with a pen between his teeth, and had slapped Miss X’s posterior while reaching for the whisky. ’E wassa once my ’ero, the room-service waiter had said in great disappointment, now he is justa drunk. There was a sad little coda to the court report in both the Mail and the News of the World, of Miss X suddenly leaving the court during this last evidence, as if at last it was all too much for her.