I pan-fried the sausages very quickly to brown the skins, and then I put them in the Le Creuset which Sharon had bought me last Christmas. I’d picked the sausages up from Molise’s on the Farringdon Road, along with a couple of tins of Italian tomatoes, the ones that don’t have acetic acid or any sugar added, and the smell of which makes you think of Tuscany, whether or not you’ve actually been there. I opened the tins and tipped the contents over the sausages, along with a large glug of extra virgin, six crushed cloves of garlic, a little white wine, a splash of Lea and Perrins, and two small dried Indian chilli peppers. I mashed the tomatoes up with a wooden spoon, remembered the tablespoon of honey, and then put the pot on to bubble for an hour. I made up some polenta, mixed it with two chopped, steamed leeks, and put that on to bake. Then I sat down on the sofa with some photocopies of material from the file which Andy Gold had been kind enough to show me.
It was clear that my friend and his colleagues had no doubt about Edward Morgan’s murder being part of the series of gay slashings which the tabloids had taken such great delight in over the past six months. Teddy’s details were in there alongside the details of the other two deaths.
John Evans was killed in the cab of his lorry. He was parked in a lay-by on the A1, just south of Stamford, and current theory believed that his assailant was probably a hitchhiker who he had propositioned, and who reacted with greater energy than the usual yes or no. Two severe contusions just above the hairline show that Evans was rendered immobile with what forensic scientists are certain was his own ten-pound hand wrench. Evans was then attacked with a broken bottle, receiving abdominal and chest injuries, which caused internal laceration severe enough to cause his heart to fail before he had time to bleed to death. The absence of any glass fragments in Evans’ cab, to match those found in his body, led to the conclusion that the attack was to a large degree premeditated, because the assailant clearly had the weapon ready before he got into the lorry. Why a bottle was used in this way instead of a knife, is not known. These days, seriously effective knives are just as easy to get hold of as beer bottles. If the attackers were teenagers, then a knife would actually have been easier to obtain than a beer bottle.
As for motive, the report stated that a theory of simple violent robbery was hard to sustain. While it is true that John Evans was robbed of what is believed to be about a hundred pounds, Evans had no defence wounds on his arms and hands, nothing to show that he had tried, as would be natural, to stop whoever it was from stabbing him to death. He was, therefore, unconscious, or at least completely defenceless before he received the wounds to his stomach area which killed him. A mugger would usually have taken what he wanted after immobilizing his victim, and then left him unconscious. He would avoid murder if he could help it, and in this case it seems that he definitely could have done.
But he didn’t.
The police appealed for witnesses, posting pictures of the driver in service stations and truck stops up and down the A1, and they interviewed all of Evans’ friends and workmates. But nobody came forward with anything useful. The murder was privately put down to a crackhead getting carried away, and while the usual amount of manpower was still spent on it, it was assumed that the perpetrator would get caught sooner or later for doing something else. At this stage of the investigation no homosexual link was established.
I turned the page.
A young lad with smooth light brown skin and a big, goofy grin stared out at me from an A4 blow-up of a studio photograph. I could just make out a blue shirt, and a red and green striped school tie. I looked at the shot for a second or two, not really wanting to turn the page again. Then I put the picture aside.
James Waldock worked as a male prostitute, probably controlled by a Brixton outfit called the 22 Crew. The 22 are an enterprising bunch of dudes who hang out in a cafe on the Railton Road, and are gradually maturing into an efficient whores and scores team, expanding operations as far as the Yardies will let them and as long as they give them a big enough piece of the action. For a male prostitute in the City of London and its boroughs James was a couple of years older than the estimated average. He was fourteen.
James Waldock came from what the report politely termed a deprived background. Free of any fatherly influence, his mother was a user, and it was probably she who introduced him to her own profession, anxious that at his age he should begin to pay his way. His form teacher’s report, which was in the file, stated that he was a quiet, surprisingly bright kid who, when he did attend school, was always attentive and liked to ask questions. He was, however, easily led by older boys, and he often tried to hide his intelligence behind an assumed bravado which didn’t seem to come naturally to him. This happens a lot to young black males, so the teacher reported. White males too, I thought. I see it all the time. The peculiarly harsh way in which some boys aged fourteen or so rebuke the child in them, as if they hate the naivety within themselves, a naivety which has conned them into some sort of hope which they begin to see can only cause them frustration and disappointment. I remembered it myself, how I’d once challenged my father to a fight, just him and me, after he’d used his belt on Luke for coming home ten minutes late. How he had kicked the shit out of me. This tacked-on manfulness can look ugly and be dangerous, but it usually passes. If the kid is left alive long enough to grow out of it.
James was conscious through most of what happened to him. His body was found in the basement of a condemned block of council flats which is being taken down slowly, floor by floor from the top. Police believe that he was being buggered in a standing position, and that during or immediately after this, his head was battered hard against the wall he was being pushed up against. His nose was broken and scrapes of dry paint were found on his skin and in his mouth. Nonoxynol, the chemical used to lubricate certain brands of condoms, was found inside his anal canal, as well as two types of semen, along with the two types found in his stomach. The presence of the semen suggests that James was not exactly Aids aware, and that the Nonoxynol came from his attacker, the wearing of the condom being his attacker’s idea; a way of avoiding DNA profiling. The condom was not found.
Cuts on both the inside and outside of James’ wrists, and on his hands, show that he tried to defend himself against the Lucozade bottle which was repeatedly thrust into his chest, face and neck, and eventually left embedded deep in his stomach. The amount of cuts James received suggest that it took him some time to die, although it is impossible to say how many of them he received after he was actually dead. Once again, no trace of the bottom of the bottle, or the lid, were found. Like Evans, James was also robbed. It was clear that he had had at least four other clients that night, but there was no money on his body when it was found. The police, however, couldn’t say for definite that it was his assailant who took the money. There are people who will rob a corpse, even if the corpse is that of a fourteen-year-old boy lying in a dismal basement, on top of enough blood to fill a bathtub. Some of these people, I thought, as I went to turn the heat down from under my Le Creuset, are police officers.
The picture they had of Edward Morgan, or Teddy, as his brother had referred to him when we parted from each other, and he urged me to do all I could to find out who killed him, could have been lifted straight out of the BA catalogue. Teddy was tan, fortyish, squared-jawed and blue-eyed. I could see no resemblance to his older brother. Teddy looked just the man to get you down safely when they had trouble with an engine, or calm your nerves during turbulence with a joke about rollercoaster rides. Perfect white teeth. I’d always wanted teeth like that. It seemed strange to think of such a confident, strong-looking person as a victim, someone weakened, viciously humiliated. Murdered. Looking at his clear, open face, I tried to decide whether or not I thought he was gay. The picture didn’t tell me anything.
I read what had happened to him, what had been done to him. Already my mind was trying to see it, to see it happening as if it were a scene from a film. I read the statements given by the co-pilots, the stewardesses, the barman at the airport and then I read the scene of crime report. I read how his wife had discovered his body and a statement from her saying that she had no idea that her husband was involved in homosexual activity. Possible images of death flitted into my head like the ghosts of pinned butterflies. I was just getting to the forensic report when the door buzzer sounded.
It was very good to see Sharon. I was surprised by how well she was looking, and how delighted I was to see her standing in my doorway with a bottle of wine in her hand. We kissed hello. I took the bottle from her and she followed me into the kitchen, towards the smell which she was already congratulating me on.
I’d done a quick tidying-up job and my place didn’t look too bad. I live in a converted photo-studio with black blinds, a small open-plan kitchen and floorboards which I haven’t got round to sanding yet. Sharon has often promised to come round and help me do the place up a bit, and to this end she bought me a framed Salgado print for my birthday which is the only thing breaking the purity of the whitish walls. Every time she comes over she tells me my flat looks like I’ve just moved into it. She uses the words shelving, cupboards, uplighting and Ikea a lot.
I poured Sharon a glass of the Rosso di Montalcino she’d brought with her and then put some broccoli on to steam. As we sat on the sofa chatting I couldn’t help thinking of how I had met her, and the thing that bound us to each other. The reason we have dinner once a month or so, go to the theatre or the movies every so often. The reason why sometimes she is the only person I can, or want, to talk to, or why I spend ages looking for her Christmas present. Why, once in a while, on a particular date perhaps, she calls me in the middle of the night, her voice breaking, and asks me to drive over.
I never used to get on particularly well with Sharon but in the last few years that has changed. Sharon was my brother Luke’s fiancée. As a matter of fact she still is, technically. She certainly hasn’t actually broken it off with him. It has been nearly four years since Luke was injured and if I think about it I know that Sharon must have seen somebody else in that time. But on the occasions that we meet she is discreet enough not to mention anything. I still see her as Luke’s girl, though I would completely understand if one day she turned up at my flat with a nervous-looking man who she would like me to meet. It might be strange, but I would understand.
Luke and I were sharing a flat at the time he met Sharon, and as soon as he started to tell me about her I could tell it was something special. Luke was working in a bar on Camden High Street at the time, having yet to establish himself as the new star of the British stage, and Sharon had come in for a coffee. Luke said that when he saw her he just knew, and he was so nervous that he spilled her cappuccino all over the table. He wasn’t too nervous to make sure he had a chat with her and find out her name though. Sharon, a law student. Sharon was immediately embarrassed about her name and assured Luke that she wasn’t the stiletto sort and that her parents had been into the Bible; the Rose of Sharon. In that case, Luke said, it suits you. When Sharon got up to leave he told her to make sure that she came in again soon, and Luke put himself on the rota practically every hour the place was open over the coming week to make sure that he didn’t miss her. He needn’t have bothered, however; she came in again next day.
When I first met Sharon I was pretty sceptical. I couldn’t believe that all the hyperbolic nonsense issuing from my lovestruck little brother’s mouth was actually true. I just didn’t venerate women the way he did. I’d asked Luke what it was about her and he’d spent hours trying to tell me. It wasn’t so much that she was drop dead beautiful, he said, but that she had a constant, radiating warmth inside her, a kind of simple, mesmerizing energy which made him feel slightly childish. She also had a steely quality that kept Luke spellbound when, over dinner in our flat, she told us about what she wanted to do with her life, how most people went into the law to make money, or because they couldn’t think of anything else to do. I thought it sounded just a little prissy, but when Sharon told how she wanted to make a difference, to use the legal system to help people, it actually was quietly inspiring. She asked me if that was what I felt about being a policeman, which I still was at the time. I remember feeling uncomfortable under her earnest glare, unable to match Sharon’s fervour but then telling her yes, it actually was, and being happy and surprised to know that I was actually telling her the truth. Then.
Luke and Sharon soon started seeing each other seriously and his view of her never tempered. He agreed with almost everything she said, and I could see him trying to change to match up to her. This surprised me because Luke had always been flighty and noncommittal about most things, especially women. But even though Sharon was two or three years younger than Luke, she seemed to mature him. He took himself much more seriously. He worked a lot harder at his acting, going to evening classes at the Actor’s Centre, sending out CVs all the time, and I have to admit things did start to go well for him. He got a good role at the Kings Head, and then a couple of bit-parts in the West End, and some TV. Luke had always written poetry, which he never showed anyone, not even me, and Sharon persuaded him not only to show it to her, but to work on it and send it off to magazines. He did, and after a while his stuff began to appear in the Rialto, Stand Magazine, and once Poetry Review. In general Luke began to approach things the same way that Sharon did, with a determined, though quiet confidence which was impressive but, I thought, somewhat forced and even unnatural. He became a graver, more weighty person and I wasn’t sure I really knew him any more.
When Luke and Sharon told me that they were getting married I remember having mixed feelings. Luke was twenty-six, Sharon twenty-three, and I thought they were too young. I thought that Luke was perhaps growing old too soon, that he had completely shunted aside the child in him in an effort to keep up with Sharon. Sharon seemed to monopolize my brother and the times when they were in company she could never quite relax, giving the impression of marking time until she could get him alone again. I knew, however, that this was probably jealousy. I missed Luke’s infantile sense of humour, and realized that it was Sharon’s distrust of any sort of frivolity which bugged me. I had begun to miss my brother (and the aspiring actresses he used to introduce me to). I was pissed off that Luke never seemed up for a big night any more, or that he suddenly started getting a ridiculously sour expression on his face when I cut up a line on the coffee table. Fuck it – I was the Fuzz, for God’s sake! I thought he was taking things too seriously, something which, ever since Luke could talk, he was constantly accusing me of.
I didn’t think that Luke should marry Sharon, not yet at least, but my reservations would have only caused a rift between us so I put them aside. I kissed them both and told them they were stupid and that I would happily be best man at the divorce as well. Sharon kissed me back and told me, with that unnerving certainty of hers, that it wouldn’t come to that. And she was right. It didn’t come to a wedding either.
After we had finished the sausages, Sharon asked me what I was working on at the moment. I told her about the usual runaways, and then I told her about the MP. I told her what the MP had told me. He wouldn’t have liked it but he didn’t know Sharon. She wouldn’t tell anybody.
‘Peter Morgan is gay?’ she asked, surprised.
‘Sir Peter Morgan.’
‘He doesn’t look it,’ she said. ‘Does he?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘I have no way of telling. Unless it’s obvious of course.’
‘Like when someone is all in leather, with a Freddie Mercury moustache?’
‘I suppose,’ I said. ‘But it doesn’t have to be that obvious. I know it’s a cliché, but some people just look gay.’
‘Maybe that’s because they choose to look gay,’ Sharon said, ‘in whatever they’re wearing. If they chose not to then you would never be able to guess, not even if they were in the leather. Peter Morgan chooses not to. It’s still surprising though. I wonder how he voted on the age of consent debate?’
‘Probably against, especially as he’s keen that none of his political colleagues know about his orientation.’
‘Damn hypocrite.’
‘I know. But in a strange way I actually feel sorry for him.’
Sharon put down her wineglass.
‘For being gay? And being a Tory at the same time!’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Because he’s realized that the way he’s been living his life is wrong. All the intrigues and lies, the pretence, it all seems pointless to him after what has happened to his brother. But he’s too far immersed in it to break out.’
‘To return is as tedious as to go over?’
‘Something like that. He knows that it doesn’t matter, not really, if people know he’s gay. He knows that it would probably make him happier if they did know. But he won’t ever let it out. His wife, his position. He’s stuck.’
Sharon sat back in her chair. ‘It sounds like you quite liked him,’ she said, with more than a hint of disapproval.
‘I did,’ I admitted, ‘after a while. After he told me he was gay. It took courage to do that to a complete stranger. I could tell that he cares, or cared, about his brother.’
‘So does Michael Howard I should think,’ Sharon said. ‘If he’s got one.’
‘Then maybe I’d like him too,’ I said. I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I don’t know, there was just something about Morgan that I liked. Something intangible. He has a kind of wistful, removed quality about him.’
Sharon laughed. ‘He doesn’t on Question Time.’
‘No,’ I answered, thinking about it. ‘You’re right. He definitely doesn’t look wistful on Question Time!’
I served the tiramisu, and after we’d devoured it with the animalistic relish which it deserved, Sharon told me what she had been doing recently. Sharon finished her pupillage two years ago, and works as a barrister for the Refugee Legal Centre, defending asylum seekers against deportation orders. It’s a difficult, dispiriting job, given the current attitude towards refugees, or burdens on the state as they are portrayed. Sharon’s success rate is a little higher than the average at about six per cent. She spends a lot of time in miserable detention centres, talking to people who are scared and desperate. They tell her about Nigerian prisons, Turkish punishment squads, and they show her bruises and scars from cigarette burns or knife cuts, which Sharon can never prove they did not inflict upon themselves. She watches their faces when she fails to win their last appeal, and then she imagines their faces when they are sent back to their country of origin, and she never hears from them again.
Sometimes though, there are lighter moments, and Sharon is the first to admit that some people do try it on. I sat listening to her tell me about a woman whose boyfriend was applying for asylum on some invented grounds of abuse, and who wrote to his girlfriend in Albania telling her exactly what to say at the airport when she came to England to join him. Customs officials found the letter in her bag, which not only blew her claim but her boyfriend’s as well. I watched Sharon as she told the story. Her lipstick had dissolved into thin lines, which exaggerated the fullness of her mouth. She systematically pushed an errant strand of her dark blond hair back behind her left ear, as it kept repeating its offence of escape. Her teeth were stained by the wine, her eyes so clear and green you could see why unimaginative people often asked her if she wore those coloured contact lenses. I thought about Luke, and remembered the time he told me about them. How he had described those eyes just like they were, and I didn’t believe him, thinking he was just a love-sick fool.
I laughed at Sharon’s story, and apropos of nothing I suddenly told her that I was glad she had been able to come, and that it always meant a lot to me to see her. She smiled, and we looked at each other for a second. Neither of us said anything. Neither of us were self-conscious, we just sat there looking and smiling at each other. I don’t know why. Then her smile took on the faintest, most distant tinge of sadness, like caramel which has just begun to burn. I looked down at the table, at a small stain of red from a drop of wine which had missed the glass. I saw Sharon’s hand, resting on the table a few inches from mine. Her engagement ring. I didn’t know she still wore it. I looked at the simple ring, one small diamond set into the gold band, for several seconds. I had lent Luke the money to buy it. He still owed me seven hundred quid, the bastard. I put both my hands on the table, pushed myself up without looking at Sharon, and went to make coffee.
In fact, I had no coffee. I had stood talking to the youngest Molise boy in the deli for a full ten minutes while I tried to remember the thing which I knew I had to get. But it never came to me. I apologized to Sharon, a little too much. She said she didn’t mind though. She looked a little nervous, but then she smiled at me again, softly. I looked away from her. All of a sudden I didn’t want to be in my warm, cosy flat with Sharon. I was beginning to feel claustrophobic and heavy.
I clapped my hands together, trying to make the atmosphere disappear like a magician with a fake bunch of flowers. I had an idea.
‘Do you want to see the famous William H. Rucker, Private Eye, scourge of the evil and corrupt, in action?’ I asked her.
‘You bet,’ she answered with surprise, picking up quickly on my lightening of the mood.
‘Are we going to catch a killer?’ she asked.
‘Nothing so exciting,’ I told her.
The drive down to King’s Cross only took five minutes. I parked the Mazda and then took Sharon, and my second-hand Nikon, into the twenty-four-hour-cafe at the bottom of the Pentonville Road. As usual, the cafe looked shabby and the tables were all dirty. The waitress came over but she didn’t bother to wipe up from the people before us. We ordered cafés au lait. I took the camera out of my bag and rested it on the seat beside me. Remembering a very embarrassing time earlier in my career, I made sure that the film was in it. I smiled at Sharon and kept one eye on a group of teenage lads who were standing around on the corner of the Pentonville Road and Calshot Street.
‘You take me to the loveliest places, Bill Rucker,’ Sharon said, using her serviette to create a stain-free square of Formica for herself.
I was looking for Dominic Lewes, whom I had found once before. His mother didn’t want me to tell her where he was, which I would not have done anyway, she just wanted to know that he was alive, and what sort of state he was in. I didn’t really expect to find him. It had been eight months since I had discovered him in this very spot, and I’d learnt over the past ten years that absolutely anything can happen in eight months to a young boy from Grimsby who’s run away from home. Cold, hunger, death to name but the obvious and there are plenty of things which occur that are far from predictable even to someone who has seen a lot of it before. It would send you mad to think of all the things that can happen, that are happening right this second, to all of those young Odysseuses who have broken free from the ties that bound them and come to the damp rooms and stinking alleys that make up their London. Any number of things could have been done to Dominic in any number of places but still, it didn’t hurt looking in the place I had found him before. We had wanted coffee anyway.
The coffees arrived, and Sharon and I sipped them, chatting, while I kept an eye out on the street.
‘One thing though, Billy,’ Sharon said, resting her elbows on the table and leaning forward. ‘You never tell the parents where their kids are. I still don’t really understand.’
‘It’s simple,’ I told her. ‘Kids run away for a reason. The kids who are happy don’t run away. The kids who are quite miserable don’t run away. It’s the kids who are very miserable that run away. They wouldn’t view what they had to go through here as acceptable unless the alternative was worse. When I first started I found this girl, twelve or thirteen, and took the dad down to this squat in Streatham where she was living. I thought I had just reunited a misunderstood teenager with her worried and non-recriminating family, and saved her from all sorts of bad shit. But you should have seen the poor kid’s face when her loving dad showed up. The sheer terror. I thought she was going to vomit. And the dad’s face. There was no relief, no joy. His face just sort of set when he saw her, hard as granite, and I knew immediately what I had sent the girl back to. He didn’t say anything, he just pulled her into his car. Of course, not all the parents would be like this, but how can I know? I never tell them. Sometimes I tell the Bill, who tell social services, if the kid is very young and into some bad shit. But I’m not sending some poor kid back to a dad who thinks he’s Nigel Benn, or an uncle who can’t keep his cock in his drawers.’
I took a sip of coffee. It was surprisingly good. Outside, a car drew up and one of the lads on the corner pushed himself off the wall and walked over to it. He leant into the passenger side window for a second or two and then got in. The car drove away.
’But,’ Sharon continued, ‘and I don’t mean to be rude about your abilities as an investigator, Mr Rucker, but if you won’t tell the parents where their kid is, then why do they hire you? Most other agencies don’t have your scruples, I shouldn’t think.’
‘They don’t hire me at first,’ I said. ‘I usually get used when some agency or other, made up of overweight failed ex-cops pushing sixty, fails to find the kid, or when they’ve run away so many times that the parents know there’s no point bringing them back again. It’s the mothers usually, who hire me. Often I’m told only to contact them, that the father doesn’t know about me. Some of the mothers, I swear, are glad that their son or daughter has escaped what they haven’t been able to. They don’t want them to go back, they just want to know that they are OK.’
‘I see,’ Sharon said, putting her long glass down on the saucer. ‘I bet you still lose money though, doing it the way you do.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I probably do.’
At that moment, a boy in white jeans and a black MA1 walked around the corner and started talking to the other lads. The boy had short, bleached blond hair, but I was pretty certain it was Dominic. I pushed aside my coffee.
’Bingo,’ I said.
I reached for my bag and pulled out a copy of the photo I’d taken of him last time. I looked at it, then at the boy on the street and yes, in spite of the hair, which had been long and dark, it was him. I grabbed hold of the Nikon.
’Wow,’ Sharon whispered, ‘action!’
I focused in on Dominic Lewes, but he was in shadow. Even with the lens I had I knew I could only get him if he stepped out into the light of the lamppost. I wasn’t worried about it. By the look of him, the way the other lads treated him, I could tell that he came here often. If I couldn’t get him tonight I could easily come back. I was amazed once again how easy my job sometimes was. I put the camera down on the chair beside me, and smiled broadly at an old lady who was looking very nervously at my distinctly suspicious behaviour. She turned away.
I kept an eye on the street, and we sat drinking coffee until Sharon said that she had to leave. She had a case to prepare for the morning. I put three pound coins on the table before she could do anything herself, and then gave her a look which told her that I didn’t want a fight about it. As we were standing up she suddenly thought of something and delved into the postman’s bag she always carries. She pulled out a slim blue A4 file.
‘I don’t know if you’ve seen all these,’ she said, holding the file out to me. ‘I went through Luke’s books again a couple of weeks ago and collected together most of his poems. I also found some that he’d hidden in his acting notes.’
I took the file and looked at the sky-blue card. I didn’t open it.
‘Thanks,’ I said, after a second or two. I felt that I should say something more but I didn’t know what. I held the file gingerly for a second and then I opened my bag and put the file inside, careful not to bend it. Luke’s poems, his private thoughts about Sharon, about me. About our father. I put the Nikon in next to them. I picked up the bag and walked over to the door with Sharon.
‘Aren’t you going to wait and take his picture?’ Sharon asked, surprised that I was leaving, nodding over towards the corner where Dominic Lewes stood with his colleagues.
‘It’s too dark,’ I said, ‘but I know where he is. And it gives me yet another excuse to visit this delightful establishment.’ I waved goodbye to the waitress, and pointed to our table to indicate that we weren’t doing a runner. Sharon opened the door for me and we walked out into the sharp October air, redolent with eau-de-kebab and carbon monoxide.
I offered Sharon a lift home but she refused and hailed a cab before I could begin to persuade her. I opened the door for her, kissed her goodbye, and then closed it after she had climbed inside, in the ungraceful fashion only a London cab can enforce on you. Sharon slid the window down and thanked me for the evening. She said it was good to go out and just be together without mulling over the past like we were prone to doing. I said yes, it was. I wanted to fix up a day when we could both go and see Luke together, but just as I started speaking I noticed that Dominic Lewes was walking away from his pitch. With a man.
The man was taller than Dominic and from the side looked to be a lot older. He had a travel bag in his hand – probably just got off the train. I told Sharon I would phone her, then kissed her goodbye again hurriedly, feeling her cold hand on the side of my face. The cab U-turned and just made the lights before heading along the Euston Road towards the Westway. I waved. Then I walked off after Dominic Lewes and the man to whom he was about to purvey the delights of his fifteen-year-old body.