Don Fisher and Lavender came into the room. He was wearing a blue lounge suit like mine, and Lavender was wearing the equivalent in burgundy. Rather inappropriately I thought, if I took a picture of them dressed like that I could blackmail them for a million pounds and get it, no questions asked.

Lavender went to Dee and hugged her, kissing her on the cheek, before running her fingers down the other cheek.

“Oh Dee, your face is all bruised. Is it OK?” Sonny’s fist had indeed left an ever developing bruise that ran from her jaw line to her cheekbone. All hues of yellow, blue and purple were now represented in the swelling.

“It’ll heal quicker than the bullet wounds,” Dee joked weakly.

Lavender came over to me and gave me a hug, too. She hung on for quite a while before Dee reminder her that I was ‘her man’. Lavender kissed me on the lips for devilment.

“Oooh, he’s a good kisser,” she said to Dee, laughing at my blushing face. “I’m Lavender, by the way.”

“I know,” I replied. “I’ve seen your pictures.” The room fell silent. “In the papers,” I added hastily, but too late. “Not the Polaroids. I didn’t look,” I spluttered, digging myself deeper in. “Sorry.”

Lavender, Dee and Fisher laughed out loud.

***

Don Fisher asked if he could speak to Dee privately, and so Lavender and I retired to her room, which was identical to Dee’s but in mirror image. We sat and spoke for a while, and she told me about Dee’s sacrifices on her behalf, which included her pushing Lavender onto the roof of the offices and pretending that she had escaped, even though she knew she would be punished.

The plan had been to make them believe that Lavender had escaped, so they would have been forced to abandon their hideout, leaving Lavender to raise the alarm by calling the police from the phone in the office.

She was in tears as she recounted how Dee had been shot and tortured whilst stubbornly refusing to give Lavender up. After tearfully explaining how Dee had stood in front of her, ready to take a bullet, Lavender said something that touched me. Taking my hands in hers, she began.

“No-one has ever done anything like that for me before. All the time I was thinking to myself, why is she wasting her life for me? She’s so much more valuable than me. I’m just a spoiled child, like people say, and I couldn’t see it until today. I thought we were going to die. Josh, why was she prepared to die for someone she had just met, someone so shallow and selfish like me?”

I had to think for a while, but then I found the words. “I’ve only known Dee for a week and a half, but she entranced me from the beginning. Isn’t there a song called ‘You had me from hello’? Well, that’s how I feel. A person like Dee is rare. If you want my opinion, I don’t think she was protecting the spoiled child in you, I think she was protecting the vulnerable person underneath. She was protecting the person you have become, not the person you were on Friday.”

The tears were flowing freely now, and Lavender squeezed my hand. I hoped that she would find her way in life and be happy. She seemed like a good kid on the whole. She didn’t deserve a shallow celebrity life; she deserved so much more.

Don Fisher came into the room and, for the sake of something to say, he joked.

“I’ve tried to get Dee to see sense, but the drugs are messing with her head and she’s still insistent on marrying you.”

“Can I be a bridesmaid?” Lavender trilled, her eyes widening in expectation.

“You can be the chief bridesmaid,” I replied.

The phone rang and Fisher answered it. He listened for a moment and then explained that we needed to go next door. Inspector Boniface was on his way up.

***

Once he had explained what they had discovered in The Tottenham Press building, Inspector Boniface asked the girls to confirm the sequence of events leading to their eventual rescue. Other than the fact that “Dave the soldier” had given his life to save them, things had unfolded pretty much as the police had surmised.

Having expressed admiration for their courage and resourcefulness, the Inspector explained that Dee and Lavender would each be required to give a formal statement later.

“Now,” he said brightly. “I need to explain what happens next.”

He paused to ensure that we were all paying attention. I could see that he was relishing this next part.

“Lord Hickstead has been kept in sterile conditions all weekend. That is to say, he’s heard nothing of the day’s events, and nor will he. There is a press embargo on the Europol action until a press conference is held tomorrow afternoon, aimed at the evening news programmes.

At ten o’clock in the morning he will be back at Scotland Yard. As far as he’s concerned, the only evidence we have consists of the fingerprints on the photographs and a lot of circumstantial evidence. He will also believe that Josh and Don are pressuring the police to allow him to plead to a lesser charge and walk away with a non-custodial sentence. I think we can expect him to be unbearably smug, at least for a while.

My question is this. Do the two of you want to watch that interview from the conference room?”

“I suppose it’s too much to ask for me to be left in the same room alone with him for five minutes?” Don Fisher asked, without any hope of a positive answer.

“The offer is restricted to watching on a video screen, I’m afraid, but if you do want to see him face to face, I have an idea.”

I was torn between staying with Dee and watching Lord Hickstead’s world collapse around him. In the end, both Don and I agreed we would be there.

“Will you be wearing those attractive matching tracksuits?” Boniface asked, barely holding back a guffaw.

We both scowled at him, and bid him farewell.

Chapter 81

No.2 Parliament St. Westminster, London. Sunday, 8pm.

Alan Parsons, Lord Hickstead’s solicitor, sat on the Chesterfield sofa facing the peer, who looked comfortable as he sat in the wing chair sipping brandy.

“Arthur, we have a difficult meeting tomorrow morning, and based on what I have heard, the police are close to arresting you. I appreciate that the safety deposit box is now empty and that your papers have gone. I also understand that whatever the police hoped to find in there is not there, either. But - and this is a big but, Arthur - they still have witnesses who can connect you to the blackmail plot, and blackmail in this country carries a sentence of up to fourteen years.”

“Relax, Alan. They’ll do a deal. They won’t want the publicity, and by the time the politicians put the pressure on...”

“Yes, Arthur. Actually I was coming to that.”

Hickstead thought that this sounded rather ominous, and he was right.

“I did a ring around Friday and yesterday. No success, I’m afraid. The Commissioner wouldn’t speak to me, but had his assistant tell me that he couldn’t interfere in an ongoing investigation. The Home Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary wished you well in establishing your innocence, but they will not take your calls. The two Labour Leadership contenders you asked me to call said that the charges were so serious that they were unwilling to intervene, although one of them did say that if there was any hint of a political element in the prosecution he would try to help.”

“So, basically, they’re all running for the hills, are they?” Hickstead spat bitterly. “I’m on my own after all that I’ve done for them individually and for the Party.”

The lawyer looked down, in order to avoid the look of self-pity in his client’s eyes. For goodness’ sake, he was at least a blackmailer and probably a murderer, and he was behaving like some kind of martyr. ‘Everyone deserves a good defence’, he reminded himself, before imparting the last bit of bad news.