“Well, this fourteen-year-old girl wasn’t flattered, and she says he raped her.”

“Is this for certain? Are you sure she’s telling the truth, and not just out for what she can get?”

“Sure as we can be. At least, we’re investigating the allegation. Why should she lie?”

Carol snorted. “Men. Why wouldn’t she lie? If she was ashamed of what she did, or regretted it too late? Got a bit pissed, and things went too far. Women do that all the time.”

“Do what?”

“Cry rape.”

“We don’t think that’s what happened,” Winsome said.

“But you’re not sure, are you, love? And you have no evidence. Besides, they’re all coming out of the woodwork now, after Jimmy and Rolf. They can smell the money in it, you ask me.” She turned back to Banks.

“Did you know any of Mr. Caxton’s friends?” he asked.

“Danny didn’t have any friends. Just hangers-on. They came and went.”

“Do you know any who hung around longer than others? Or any from 1967?”

“I told you, we were divorced by then. I have no idea who his cronies were.”

“You must have been very young.”

She smiled flirtatiously. “Flattery will get you anywhere. We were all young once.” She looked at Winsome. “Some of us still are. I was nineteen. We’d been married two years. I suppose it was ’62 when we first met. My fifteen minutes.”

“You must have heard things about him, though?”

“I can’t say I paid a lot of attention. I had an exciting enough life to live. You know about his background, don’t you?”

“Some things,” Banks said cautiously. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it wasn’t all public knowledge. He had a hard time of it when he was young, did Danny.”

“You mean being taken away from his parents?”

“Partly that,” said Carol Canning. “But it wasn’t until much later that he found out what really happened, around the time we were married, in fact.”

“What do you mean?”

“What happened to his parents.”

“It says in his official biography that they both died in the war,” said Winsome.

“That’s true enough, love. At least, his mother died in a concentration camp.”

“And his father?”

“He was a member of the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz.”

“What was that?” Banks asked.

“It was a paramilitary group made of up ethnic German Poles. Danny’s father was half German. They basically did all they could to help the German war effort, including massacring fellow Poles. For years Danny thought his father had died in the camp with his mother, when it’s not entirely impossible that he had helped put her there. One day an old family friend called by, a camp survivor. He knew Danny’s family. You can imagine how upsetting the news was for Danny. Of course, he was famous then. He felt he needed to keep it quiet. He was ashamed. It seemed unsavory. I suppose it helped that he couldn’t really remember his parents—after all, he hadn’t seen them since he was three—but even so, it’s a devastating thing to happen to someone, and no matter what he’s done, Danny isn’t without sensitivity.”