“What had she done?” I ask.

“Shoplifting,” says Tam.

There is a silence.

“People have their own little guilt trips,” says Tam. “They look around. ‘Who’s a beast? Who’s a pedo?’ Now it’s on my record for the rest of my life. If I want to go into business, I have to state that I was done for lewd and libidinous. Gross indecency. People think, ‘Oh my God! He must have been crawling about in a nursery.’”

“Can I ask about the boys who live here?” I say. “What do they do?”

“They clean up,” he replies, a little sharply. “They feed the dogs. They take them for walks. They help me with my property business. They are eighteen years of age, and I don’t have a relationship with them. You can interview them until the cows come home. Maybe I just like nice people floating about. We don’t have orgies. There’s no swinging from the chandeliers. Even if there was,” he adds, “it would be legal.”

Tam believes he was targeted because of his fame, because he was a celebrity Svengali. He blames his arrest, then, on the pop business. And now he is out of it. He has become a property millionaire, with forty flats in Edinburgh’s West End.

“I do get myself upset,” he says. “I’ve given away all the Roller albums to charity. I want to forget it all. I’ve had two heart attacks. And now the same thing is happening with Jonathan. A foxhunt. Everyone wants to see the death of the fox. They would never have gone after us if we were heterosexual. But if you’re a poof, my God.”

I change the subject.

“Do you think you have emotionally scarred any of the boys for life?” I ask.

“Oh my God,” he says. “I hope not.”

•   •   •

IN MID-OCTOBER 2001, I have coffee with Jonathan King’s brothers Andy. He’s just visited Jonathan in Belmarsh for the first time.

“How is Jonathan doing?” I ask.

“Great,” says Andy. “He seems really cheerful. Talking ten to a dozen.”

“Really?” I ask.

“He’s wearing pink pajamas as a silent protest,” Andy tells me. “He says it’s aesthetically reminiscent of the way gays were treated under the Nazis.”

On November 20, things take a turn for the better for Jonathan. He is acquitted of buggery and indecent assault in the second trial—the witness admits on the stand that he was sixteen and not fifteen. The Crown Prosecution Service announces that same day that it won’t proceed with any more trials—this includes the allegations from boys who said Jonathan King had picked them up at the Walton Hop.

The next morning, Jonathan is sentenced to seven years. Judge Paget says that the case is a tragedy. This otherwise honorable man, he says, this successful celebrity, used and abused his fame and success to attract impressionable teenagers. But there was no violence, no threats used.

Jonathan smiles and nods as he is sentenced. One journalist says that he looks smug; another says that he looks pale and beaten. His name is placed indefinitely on the sex offenders’ list. The police say he may have abused hundreds of boys over the past thirty years.

POSTSCRIPT

Jonathan King wrote to me throughout his prison sentence, and sent me Christmas cards, etc. I wasn’t the only one. The Observer’s Lynn Barber published a brilliant article about their pen-pal friendship. Her husband, David Cardiff (who was my teacher at college), was dying, and Jonathan had proved to be a “wonderful confidant,” she wrote. She visited him at Maidstone prison and reported that he was walking around wearing a T-shirt that read “I’m a celebrity—get me out of here!”

“The very qualities—the relentless cheeriness, bumptiousness and optimism—which made him seem quite irritating on the outside seem absolutely heroic in prison,” she wrote.

Just before Christmas 2001, a few weeks after the Guardian published my story about the case, I received a telephone call from the former Radio 1 DJ Chris Denning. Back in the seventies, Denning and Jonathan were best friends and business partners. Denning had, days earlier, been released from a three-year jail sentence in Prague for child-sex offenses. The night before his deportation from the Czech Republic, I met him at a down-at-the-heels hotel off Wenceslas Square. He wouldn’t say which country he was going to. (It turned out to be Austria.) He faced a number of similar offenses in Britain, and he told me he’d be arrested if he ever returned here.

He turned up with a boy. He introduced him as one of the boys he’d just been in prison for, and he said he brought him along to prove they were still friends. The boy had the flu, and throughout the interview he sat on the bed, sniffing, and looking bored and ill.

I asked Chris Denning if Jonathan King had learned how to pick up boys from him.

“That’s possible,” he said. “He did steal some of the things I did.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“I would make funny remarks,” he said. “I’d be walking down the street with a couple of my younger friends and I’d say something absolutely absurd to a passerby. I remember one joke I had. I’d say to a passerby, ‘Excuse me, do you know where so-and-so street is?’ And they’d say, ‘No. I’m sorry, I don’t.’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, I can help you! It’s just down there on the left . . . !’ And for young people—for somebody like me to make a joke like that—it was hilarious.”

Chris Denning—despite his various jail sentences and the fact that he’d been sleeping rough in a Prague cemetery for the past week, on and off—still had the looks and voice and demeanor of an old-style Radio 1 DJ.

“But Jonathan’s humor always had a streak of cruelty,” Denning added, “and I’ve always tried not to do that. I hate that kind of thing. Once, I was going along in his car to Brighton. He’d invited a couple of young people I knew. He’d said, ‘Why don’t you bring them along for the trip?’ He had a chauffeur. He said, ‘James! To Brighton!’ I was sitting in the Rolls-Royce with my shoes half off and he grabbed them and chucked them out of the window. I said to the chauffeur, ‘James. Can you please stop? I want to get my shoes.’ Jonathan said to him, ‘If you stop, you’re fired. Drive on.’”

“What did the boys in the car think of it?” I asked.

“I don’t think they liked it,” he said. “It was funny, you see, but it was cruel.”

Chris Denning asked me if I wanted to know the worst thing about being attracted to underage boys.

“Sadly,” he said, “they grow up. They disappear. The person you were attracted to has gone. He doesn’t exist anymore. You can never have a lasting relationship with them. It’s very sad.”

In August 2005, Chris Denning returned to London from Austria. He was arrested at Heathrow Airport and in February 2006 was convicted of child-sex offenses dating back to the seventies and eighties. He was sentenced to four years in prison. That same week, I received the following e-mail:

Dear Jon,

I was abused by King’s mate Chris Denning who, as you know, has just been banged up. I recently sent this e-mail to King. You may find it amusing.

Dear Jonathan, I see your old mate Chris Denning has been given another serve of porridge. Hardly seems fair that he only got four years and you got seven, but then again you are an extremely repulsive and smarmy cunt and one can’t really blame the judge for wanting to shaft you.

You are no doubt aware that your ex employer the Sun has published a piece linking you to Denning as members of a “paedophile ring.” May I make a suggestion Jonathan, this could be a blessing in disguise, an opportunity to restore your tattered reputation. Why don’t you sue the Sun Jonathan? How dare they link you to that vile pervert Denning! After all you are a wronged man, a “victim” of your own celebrity. A modern day Oscar Wilde. And after all it’s not your fault that twelve year old boys are so damn sexy, and of course they all wanted it, why wouldn’t an adolescent boy want to be pawed and fucked up the arse by a slavering, fat, ugly pig like your good self. I expect they were beating down your door Jonathan, how unfair that you should be persecuted for providing these boys with a “service.” Such a cruel world.