“Twice a week. We had a lot to choose from then. Lyric, Crown, Clifton, Western, Palace—and they were all within walking distance. There were the Odeon, the Gaumont, the Tower, the Majestic and the ABC in town if you had to see something as soon as it came out. And lots of other local fleapits if you were willing to get a bus to Hyde Park, Headingley or Harehills. The local cinemas all showed double bills, too, so you could easily see four films in each a week. More if you wanted to go to a different cinema every night. Melanie and I looked old enough to get into X films at some of them when we were fourteen. We loved horror—Hammer, Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, Edgar Allan Poe, all that stuff.”

“I remember doing the same,” said Banks, then he paused. “It doesn’t really matter, but you just told me you looked old enough to get into X-certificate films when you were fourteen. Were you often mistaken for someone older?”

“I see what you mean,” Linda said. “Might Caxton have thought I was older? Yes, maybe. Though I told him my age. I suppose he might have assumed I was lying. Though why, I don’t know. Girls of fourteen usually add something when they lie about their age, rather than subtract a year or two, the way I do now. I don’t think he cared. He wanted me, so he forced me. It was rape whichever way you look at it, my age or my lack of consent.”

“As I said, it doesn’t really matter if he says he thought you were twenty-five. It’s just the kind of thing the media might seize on.”

“I’ll be sure to keep my childhood secrets from them.”

“So you didn’t read the newspapers. Did you watch the news on TV?”

“It was on sometimes, if my dad was watching, but I can’t say I paid much attention. I saw the papers at newsstands, and we had the Yorkshire Evening Post delivered at home every day, so it was lying around the house. I’d see the front pages, I suppose. Sometimes read the sports page, if Leeds United were playing.”

“You were a fan?”

“They were golden back then.”

“Do you have any recollection whether it might have been a minor celebrity you saw, someone on the fringes of Caxton’s world, maybe in another show in Blackpool at the same time? Or could it have been a sports personality, someone like that?”