On the ebullience of the little man, all four of us were carried inside. We followed the woman through the hall into what you would have thought of as the front room of a family house. When I looked round for the little man as a protector, he had vanished. There was a table with glasses and bottles and when she asked us what we would drink I noticed for the first time that she had a trace of an Irish accent. The glass she put into my hand was an expensive whisky tumbler, solid and comforting.

When the door opened, I looked round expecting to see the little man who had vouched for us. Instead it was a young girl who might have been seventeen. She was wearing a tweed skirt and a soft wool sweater – the kind of outfit worn by daughters of what my father would call ‘the gentry’ – very genteel.

‘Yours, I think,’ Brond said.

On her cue, she smiled at me.

‘Angela,’ she said. ‘Nice to have you here. Would you like something else to drink?’

I said, no. Mine?

‘I think you’re wanted somewhere else,’ the Irish woman called Maisie said sharply as if she had authority, but the girl ignored her.

‘Perhaps you’d like to see upstairs?’

I looked at her. In my head, I knew she had given me an invitation and what it meant; but in my stomach I did not believe it. Not because of Brond and all the dangers and strangenesses that had brought me here – that would have been too rational. I believed in the place as a brothel. What I did not believe was that any girl who spoke and dressed like the expensive daughters of the gentry would ever get into bed with me.

But she did.

Undressed she still looked expensive. She had little breasts and her stomach was flat. Her skin shone. She looked very healthy.

‘Let’s fuck,’ she said, and it didn’t sound like a whore, but like one of the expensive permissive girls I had dreamed about meeting at a party and seducing with my charm.

I got on top of her and as I slid inside could not help a little cry of triumph.

When we had finished, she half sat up on the pillow and yawned. The sheet was caught round her middle. She held one of her breasts, rubbing her hand on it back and forward.

‘That was your first time,’ she said.

I felt too good to care. In a little while, being one of those who took pleasures sadly, I would start to worry about herpes, crabs and the rest of the sad litany of public lavatories.

‘I’m a late developer. A country boy.’

She had a nice accent. I wondered if it could be genuine. Maybe she was a rich man’s daughter doing this for excitement – and going back later to some rich girls’ boarding school, in Surrey, say, or St Andrews.

‘Should we get up now?’

‘No hurry,’ she said.

From what I had read about prostitution, it seemed to me this must show we were in a very high class establishment indeed. Maybe I would save her from herself; we would marry and I would be taken into daddy’s business.

‘Let’s see what’s going on,’ she said and rolled like a cat out of bed.

I lay and looked at her. She was brown all over except for a narrow band of paler colour round her hips. Even her breasts were lightly tanned.

‘Come on,’ she said and held out her hand.

She was standing in front of what I had taken to be a mirror.

‘Put out the light.’

‘Why?’

‘Go on! Do it!’

I did not know what all this cost but it began to seem like unusual value. The lamp by the bed was lit and I switched it off. At first it was dark but then I could see the shape of her glimmer by the wall. My sex stirred and rose as I moved towards her.

She must have touched the mirror in some way for I found myself looking into a room. It was brightly lit: lamps by the bed and door, an overhead cluster of bulbs, all were on.

Brond was kneeling in front of a woman. He was naked but he still had on his shoes and black socks. I think the idea must have been that this would be humiliating. He was holding up to her a long tube or series of tubes, tapered at one end and with a thick handle at the other.

‘It’s an electric prod,’ the girl’s voice said beside me. ‘They use it on cattle.’

He was showing the woman something on the handle. It might have been a ratchet he turned. I saw his mouth moving but no sound came to us. The woman took the tube from him and laid the end of it between his legs. Suddenly his body convulsed and jerked away. The woman beckoned him back into place. He shuffled forward and she laid the tube again in the same place and nothing happened and then his body jerked away for the second time. The woman stood unmoving and made the same beckoning gesture, but he hesitated. She stood with the tube in her hands and said something and she looked at the handle and made some kind of adjustment.

I felt a hand on my back and the girl ran it down and rubbed against me. Her warm breath tickled my ear.

‘You can put it to different settings,’ she said. ‘She’s giving it more power.’

This time when the prod touched him his body was thrown back, but when she gestured him forward he came at once. When he had reached his former place, she stepped back and he had to approach her again, but again she went back two or three paces. As he crept nearer, she made the same movements as before on the handle.

‘My God,’ the girl said, ‘she’s going to give him more.’

It should have been marvellous to feel unafraid of Brond for the first time. It should have been marvellous to catch her smell mingled with my own like the sharp tang of citrus fruit; it should have been marvellous to think how healthy we were and how natural as we stood there watching.

At last she laid the prod against him and his body did jerk and shudder but his instinctive movement was so immediate that it must hardly have touched him. That seemed to anger her and she tugged him by the hair to his feet and set him with his face against the wall.

‘He won’t be able to get away from it there,’ the girl beside me said. ‘Christ, she’s giving it more. If she gives it full power, she’ll destroy him.’

Brond stood with his arms at his sides so that his forehead and the palms of his hands were against the wall. He opened his legs and the tip of the prod went into his body in the passage between his buttocks. His hands flew up in clenched fists and his spine arched impossibly and then he crashed to the floor; his heavy body writhed like a cut worm and with a final shuddering of the legs lay still. Too still. The woman backed away with both hands over her mouth. There was no way for us to know what kind of noises she might be making.

‘Oh, God,’ the girl whispered. ‘Look.’

The head of the corpse was slowly raised from the floor. Then Brond stood up. He was naked and in those ridiculous shoes with the black stockings wrinkled round his ankles; and he looked as terrible and as frightening as on the first day I had seen him. He gathered up his clothes and began to put them on and he must have said something to the woman for, as he was dressing, she stripped. She was not a young woman and her flesh sagged and hung on her like strips of soiled dough. Her face was half crazed. When he picked up the prod from where she had dropped it, she stood with her face against the wall but he must have told her to turn round. The hair between her legs was grey and he put the prod there and she bent with the pain of its entry. Although the woman’s body winced in expectation, nothing happened. As the prod slid free and nudged the nipple of each breast in turn, her head hung watching in helpless confusion.

‘It’s a fake,’ the girl said. ‘There’s no charge in it at all.’

He slapped the woman as if angered and her head flew back and struck the wall, and at that he seemed to lose all control. As he caught her by the throat, she might have been screaming. Before his shoulder hid her, I saw her tongue stretched forward and the spittle fly out of her open mouth. The girl’s hand rubbed at the base of my spine.