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sluts were flaunting themselves at DB, honestly, they’d feel him up right in front of me. So we fix on this cute little one with porn hair, you know, dead flat, snow blond? And we get it together back in David’s. Didn’t think much more about it really.”
    “Until when?”
    “Until a couple of weeks ago, I get a call from David — we broke up last month, when I was going to Trinity, totally my call, just that thing of girls dragging their boyfriends from school to college is a bit tragic, isn’t it? Anyway, got this call, and he’s in a major fucking
zone.
Seems Miss Porn Hair took some shots on her mobile, seems her old man found them, seems she was only thirteen when she got with us. So he’s up in arms — but he’s also a bit of a dodgy geezer, the father.”
    “Did you get a name?”
    “I assume David did. But he didn’t tell me. What he said was, this guy and his daughter would press charges against both of us, which would be, like, a whole child abuse pedo trip, unless we did what he wanted. And what he wanted was, first off we’d do this porn thing, then we’d blackmail some money out of my dad.”
    “And where did Jonathan come into it?”
    Emily looked at Jonathan, her eyebrows raised.
    “Ve haf alvays been, how you say, kissing cousins,” Jonathan announced in a stage German accent, then curled up with his head in Emily’s lap.
    “And did David Brady know that?”
    “Sure,” Emily said. “It was his idea that Jonny be involved. Easier for me to handle.”
    “Keep it in ze family, ja? Unt also, ze question I am alvays asking myself is, fot vould Jesus do?”
    “And the answer you got was, Jesus would make some porn?” I said.
    “Jesus vould do fot he could to help his cousin,” Jonathan said, and they both howled with hysterical laughter. I felt like I was minding a couple of tots who’d broken into the booze cabinet and scarfed some Baileys: it was bound to end in tears; I just had to wait it out.
    “It’s not a major deal,
Daad,
” Emily said, increasingly irritated that I couldn’t see the funny side. “I mean, everyone’s done homemade these days. I used to do it all the time with DB, we’d watch it, then tape over it. The whole scenario this time was, it would never go public.”
    “But that would be the threat.”
    “To Dad? Sure. But like, fifty grand, so what? That’s like fifty cents to anyone else. All that old Howard lolly. Why not give someone else a suck?”
    “And the idea that he might be upset, or anxious, that he might think you had been kidnapped and raped — the distress you might cause him: none of that was a worry to you?”
    Emily’s expression shifted in an instant from the bad-girl bravado of her mother to the blank implacability of her father; she stared at me as if I understood nothing, and when she spoke, it was with deliberate, glacial force.
    “Of course it was a worry. I’d never want to hurt my father. Or at least, not like this. But what else could I do? You think he’d’ve been happier if I was up on some child rape charge? The crucial thing was, it was never going to go public.”
    “Except it may well have. The film Jonny made?”
    “Mit Vendy unt Petra, ja?” Jonathan said, still skittish, almost hysterical.
    “I have a few hundred copies of it, ready to be sold in pubs and door-to-door,” I said. “So whoever you were dealing with wasn’t to be trusted.”
    “Jonny’s in shades, no one will recognize him.”
    “Anyone who spots his tattoo will. I think the blackmailer could make a case to Jonny’s parents that Jonny’s identity could easily be uncovered by anyone who’s seen that tattoo.”
    Jonathan sat up abruptly, his antic mask replaced by a cold stare he directed first at Emily; when he turned it on me, it was accompanied by the curling of his lips into a sneer.
    “Is that what you think, Mr. Loy? Your ‘professional’ opinion, is it?” he said, his reedy voice shaking but stoked with the insolence of