‘As I said in my statement to the police that was read to the court, we drank a lot in Simone’s room, but I was not in a state of undress as has been implied by the waiter who brought us more whisky, I don’t know why he said that, it wasn’t true. I couldn’t get drunk properly that night no matter how hard I tried. At some stage Simone passed out, on her bed, sometime late in the evening. She was actually –’ and Terence sounded almost apologetic ‘– snoring. I left her there and drove home to my house in Hampstead. The first I knew of any rape was when the police came to my home at about six o’clock the following evening and said they were arresting me and took me to St John’s Wood police station. I did not rape Simone, I understand that something must have happened to her after I left the Dorchester but I did not rape her.’ And for the very first time he turned to where Simone was sitting. ‘You know that Simone,’ he said.

She looked at him, dark glasses hiding the expression in her eyes.

He turned away, closed his eyes very briefly.

‘No further questions,’ said Mr Tweed.

Bits of Terence Blue’s life had fallen into place to the people who were sitting in the courtroom, so that’s why he was attacked, it wasn’t that he was trying to rape someone else, he had a mad wife. Even the judge seemed subdued, caught up in the story.

The cross-examination of Terence Blue that followed as the winter dusk fell was something of an anticlimax: there was no new information, only a going-over of the old. He answered everything in a dull, quiet voice.

The prosecuting barrister Mr Lee said, over and over again, that this myth of impotence had been set up so that Terence would be acquitted of rape; even if Mr Blue was found to be impotent in a medical test, how could it be proved that he was impotent at the time of the rape? He reminded the jury that there was no question of Miss Taylor not being raped: who did it if not the man who was drinking in her hotel room all evening?

Terence answered all the questions put to him in the same dull voice, always coming back to the same theme: I wouldn’t go through all this and have my private life made so glaringly and humiliatingly public if I didn’t have to, it seems the only way of proving my innocence.

‘But that’s the point, it doesn’t prove anything. You are doing it to try to get public sympathy.’

‘Would you discuss your sexual inadequacies in public if you didn’t have to?’ snapped Terence finally. ‘Have you ever suffered from this ailment Mr Lee?’