‘You don’t think he suspected that you had looked through those five private pages of his innermost thoughts?’

‘I was incredibly careful not to show it. No, he couldn’t possibly have known.'

‘Oh Ned. Poor Ned. Think back on yourself. Think back on the pretty, smiling lad you were. How much did you know then? How well were you able to hide anything? What guile did you possess? Don’t you see that a sophisticated, prickly, bitter and self-aware creature like this self-styled Barson-Garland could have read you more easily than you read his diary? Snobs see social slights wherever they go and frauds can read exposure in every glance. Even if he did not know, can you not believe that he. might have suspected?’

Ned chewed his bottom lip in irritation. ‘All right, but even if he did, why would he hate me?’

‘Use your imagination.’

‘I thought you told me to examine everything dispassionately. If I use imagination I can dream up anything, what help is that?’

‘Don’t confuse imagination with fantasy. Imagination is the ability to project yourself into the mind of others. It is the most hard-headed and clear-eyed faculty we have. If you use your imagination, you can see that from Ashley’s point of view you were every single thing that he was not. My own instinct, I must tell you, is that he was also in love with you but unable to see it.’

‘Oh for God’s sake!’

‘Think back what you read. Masturbating with all that fury into the boater he kept. I won’t labour the point, it’s just a theory.’

‘That’s all any of this is, just theory.’

‘Then why does it upset you so much?’

‘It doesn’t upset me …' Ned’s knee began to bounce up and down, a thing that had not happened for a long time. He stopped himself. ‘All right, perhaps it does. Because it’s so useless. Because it doesn’t get us anywhere.’

‘It upsets you because it is not useless, because it might get us closer to the truth. The truth that others may not have seen you as you believed they did. Maybe they saw you as arrogant, thoughtless, obnoxious and vain, as so self-assured that even your politeness and charm were like daggers in their poor fucked up adolescent hearts. But you re a grown man now, and you should be able to see all that without hurting yourself.’

‘Well even so,’ said Ned irritably, ‘you can’t tell me that Ashley Barson-Garland would go so far as getting hold of drugs deliberately to have me thrown out of school. He didn’t know the first thing about… Cade!’ Ned brought his fist down on the table, crushing the paper doubling cube. ‘Oh Jesus, Rufus Cade.’

‘Never mind that,’ said Babe, as Ned tried to reassemble the cube. ‘Rufus Cade. That’s not a name you’ve mentioned before.’

‘He wasn’t anyone. I did drop him from the First Eleven … but that’s ridiculous. No one, I mean no one could be so vindictive and petty-minded as to … he smoked cannabis though, I do know that. All the time.’

‘Well now, suddenly we have two boys with motives, however trivial. And one of them even has access to what we might call the murder weapon.

‘Do you know,’ said Ned, only half-listening. ‘I think deep down I always had a feeling that Rufus didn’t really like me. I can’t quite explain it. There was something in the way his eyes slid away from mine when we talked. He was never exactly rude, but I do remember the time I had to skipper the Orphana back to Oban, after Paddy died. Rufus was on board then and he was horrid to me. I think he resented my taking command. It really puzzled and upset me. Maybe I was arrogant. But you’re asking me to believe that he and Ashley were like insane Iago figures plotting to bring Othello down. I wasn’t Othello for God’s sake, I was just a schoolboy.’

‘What was Othello’s crime? He was big, handsome and successful. And he had Desdemona.’

‘But Rufus had never even set eyes on Portia. Ashley met her the same day that I did, but Ashley … I mean, there were always rumours that he might be, you know, queer … not that that means I agree with you when you said that he might be in love with me,’ Ned added quickly. ‘After all, he can’t have loved me and hated me at the same time.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten all that Catullus I once tried to ram into your head,’ said Babe sorrowfully.

‘Odi et amo, yes I know. And if you’re trying to tell me that Portia hated me too then I’ll just walk away and never talk to you again. I know that isn’t true. But if…’ Ned’s voice trailed away and he stared down at the table, thinking furiously.

‘An idea taking shape, is it?’ Babe asked after a long pause. ‘If there were an art to find the mind’s construction in the face, then I would say you were thinking imponderable thoughts and that light was beginning to break.’

‘Gordon. Gordon Fendeman.’ Ned drew the name out slowly. ‘Portia’s cousin. If I think very hard … the way they were when I met them at the airport. They’d been on holiday together and it irritated me the way he stood next to her. I wasn’t jealous exactly, but I remember that I didn’t like it. It made me uncomfortable. And Portia told me she had never read my last postcard to her because Gordon had ruined it. Accidentally, she said, but maybe not.’

Babe listened carefully to everything Ned had to say about Gordon.

‘Let’s see if I’ve got this clear,’ he said. ‘Ashley and Gordon went off together to look at the House of Commons the day you got back from Scotland and Portia and Gordon got back from Italy?’

‘That’s right, I remember thinking that it would be nice for Gordon to see the Mother of Parliaments.’

‘Dear me, I hope you didn’t actually say that?’ Babe smothered a smile.

‘And just what exactly would be wrong with that?’

‘Just a tiny bit pompous perhaps?’

‘Well, perhaps…’ Ned smiled too. ‘Anyway, the point is that later, when Portia and I were still…, when we were still upstairs making love, they came back.’ Ned struck the table again. ‘God, that must be it! That must be it!’

‘Gordon and Ashley came back?’

‘Yes, but with Rufus. Don’t you see? Ashley must always have been going to meet up with him in a pub somewhere. He and Rufus were thick as thieves. Rufus came down to London from Scotland on the same train as me. Ashley took Gordon off to meet Rufus in a pub and they all came back while Portia and I were still upstairs.

‘What did they say?’

‘It was only for a moment. Ashley said … what did he say? Said there was something he had to fetch. He called up to me. “You young people enjoy yourselves…“ those were his exact words. And Babe, listen to this! My jacket was hanging on the banister in the hallway downstairs. Jesus, they must have sat there in the pub and planned it all. They even knew where I was going! They knew I was going to Knightsbridge with Portia to…’

‘Calm down, Ned. Calm down.’

‘Can’t you just picture them sitting there, getting tanked up around a pub table and moaning about Ned bloody Maddstone and how they’d like to see him come crashing down? That’s when they decided to ruin my life. All they had to do was make an anonymous phone call to the police. And they laughed as they planted the stuff in my jacket. “You young people enjoy yourselves!” Those are the words that Ashley called up and I heard Rufus and Gordon smothering their giggles. I remember feeling touched and proud. I thought my friends were giggling like naughty schoolboys at the thought of me and Portia upstairs and I was proud. But they were laughing because they knew I was about to be destroyed. And I’ll tell you something else! They watched it all happen!’ Both Ned’s legs were jogging up and down uncontrollably as revelation after revelation poured into his head. ‘I distinctly remember laughter from the doorway opposite as the police pushed me into their car. They destroyed me and they laughed.’