When everyone had been served, she sat on the sofa, lit a cigarette, which she attached to a long ivory holder, put her legs up and stretched her smoking arm along the back, holding the gin close to her breast. It might have been the nineteenth century, and she might have been reposing on a chaise longue. “Now do tell,” she said. “Don’t tease. You haven’t come all this way just for the view.”

“No,” said Banks, trying to hold his teacup delicately, without snapping off the fragile handle. “It is about your ex-husband. The first one.”

“So what has Danny boy been up to now?”

“Now?”

“A figure of speech.” She wagged her finger and spilled a little gin. “You policemen! I can see I’m going to have to watch what I say.”

“Sorry. Just habit. Well, you’ll hear about it soon enough, so I might as well tell you that your ex-husband has been accused of a rape in 1967, and that other similar incidents are being investigated.”

“1967?”

“Yes.”

“We were divorced in 1965.”

“Yes. But were you ever aware of anything like that while you were married to him?”

“I wouldn’t have put it past him. Danny was always rather forceful, shall we say. I mean, his idea of foreplay was, ‘You awake?’” She laughed. “He liked it rough—but that’s not to say he ever hit me or anything—and he liked it often and anywhere. I always assumed he had other women, but I’d never have imagined that he had to rape them. He was very attractive, was Danny. Lots of women fancied him and I’m sure plenty of them were only too willing to spread their legs.”

“These were young girls.”

She chewed her lip. “How young?”

“Underage. Fourteen. The one we talked to.”

She put her cigarette hand to her mouth. A half inch of ash dropped onto the front of her T-shirt. She ignored it. “Oh my god.”

“That surprises you?”

“No, no. Not particularly. But it does shock me.” She took a hefty slug of gin. “As much as I’m capable of being shocked these days.”

“But it doesn’t surprise you?”

Carol Canning thought for a moment, a little pale, took another gulp of gin, then whispered, “Nothing about Danny surprises me. He was a law unto himself, that man. What he wanted, he took.”

“He wanted young girls?”

“Christ, I was only sixteen when he took me. And there was no hesitation on his part. I didn’t even have time to say no.”

“He raped you?”

“He took me. I wasn’t unwilling and I wasn’t a virgin. I was a little bit tipsy. I don’t think I wanted to say no. It was flattering, getting attention from a star like Danny Caxton. See how naive I was? There was a time when I was flattered by the attention of celebrities. It took me long enough to learn better. You wouldn’t find a bigger pack of deviants outside an institution.”