Soon after, the Home Office became interested in the institute, and its work was suspended. Across the Atlantic, the magazine tycoon announced that the sexual revolution was over and that he had donated the miles of cine-film to the Kinsey Foundation. Leisure industries represented the wave of the future, and investment would be moved to new vacation sites in Hawaii and the Caribbean. Sex, with every regret, was left to fend for itself.

The setback was a blow to Dick. As he admitted in a moment of surprising frankness, he had naïvely hoped that the institute’s original work would be accepted for what it was. He knew that his reputation in the scientific community had been damaged and that the doors of most laboratories would be closed to him. Trying to help him, I introduced him to an interested publisher, and at my suggestion Dick quickly wrote the text of a pop-up guide to human psychology. Later, reading through this colourful bestseller, which seemed to have strayed from the back of a cornflakes packet, I was struck as always by Dick’s shrewdness, intelligence, and wit. Since its sales far exceeded those of my own books, Dick could continue to patronise me in his friendly way. I was still his gauche student, making the coffee in his laboratory and allowed to flirt with his secretary.

But had the rat in the Skinner box always controlled the experimenter? When I thought of David Hunter, of Dick and Sally, I sometimes wondered what part I had played in plotting the course of their lives, steering them towards goals that I had set many years earlier. I had never consciously manipulated them, but they had accepted their assigned roles like actors recruited to play their parts in a drama whose script they had never seen.

Peggy Gardner had no doubts about my responsibility. I visited her small Chelsea house after seeing David remanded in custody at the magistrate’s court, hoping that she might later testify as a character witness. She sat away from me in a straight-backed chair, surveying me as if I had been at the wheel of the Jaguar and she were a police psychiatrist called to give her assessment.

“Poor David. The last of your troupe. First Sally, then Dick…”

“Dick? I’ve had nothing to do with him.” I lowered my tumbler of whisky with such force that I cracked the enamel of her blackwood table. “Peggy…?”

“That tawdry institute and all those TV programmes.”

“He’s an actor at heart, who happened to stray into psychology. Dick’s … a shaman for the TV age.”

“For years you’ve been encouraging him to buy all those American cars, telling him—what was it, some nonsense?—that he’d make the first scientific discovery on television. How could he resist?”

“He never wanted to resist. Can’t you remember him at Cambridge?”

“I tried to avoid him. He was always so attentive and flattering.”