William Monk 17 - Acceptable Loss

said drily. “You don’t have to fill in the details of what he described. The risk of ruin was the ultimate temptation.”
    “Yes,” Rupert said very quietly. “I can’t believe now that I was so stupid!”
    “It was a boat on the river?”
    “You know what it was.”
    “I still need you to tell me.”
    Rupert winced. “I went out, with the others. I suppose there were half a dozen of us, something like that. The boat was moored up on the other side of the Chiswick Eyot. Quite a row. With the cooler air I was close to sober when we got there. At first it looked like another brothel, except on a boat. We were made welcome, given some of the best brandy I’ve ever had. Then … then there was a kind of performance, very explicit … men and little boys. Some of them were not more than five or six years old.” His voice cracked, and his face was scarlet.
    Rathbone waited.
    “It … it was a form of club. There were … initiation rites. We had to … take part … and be photographed. It was a dare—the ultimate risk … in which you could lose everything. We all did it.” His voice sank to a whisper. “I didn’t have the courage to refuse. Afterward I scrambled up the gangway and vomited over the side into the river. I wanted to leave, but there was no way, other than jumping into the water and hoping to survive.” He gulped. “If I’d been worth anything, I’d have done that. Wading out of the river covered in mud and sodden to the skin on the streets of Chiswick would have been better than the hell that followed.”
    Rathbone could imagine it more easily than he wished. Therehad been some days at university when he himself had been less than sober, less than discreet. He would greatly prefer that his father did not know about those days, even if he might guess. His excesses had never been of this magnitude, but the hot burn of shame was just as real.
    “Please go on,” he said more gently.
    “I staggered back toward the gangway downstairs again, and one of Parfitt’s men came up behind me. We collided, and somehow the next thing I knew I was falling downward, thumping and bashing myself against the walls, until I landed at the bottom. I can remember faces peering at me in a sort of haze, and I felt dreadful. Then I must have passed out, because the next thing I knew I was lying on a bed in one of the cabins, and Mickey Parfitt himself was looking at me, sneering.
    “ ‘Shouldn’t drink so much, Mr. Cardew,’ he said with satisfaction oozing out of him. ‘Fell downstairs, you did. But had your bit of fun first.’ At the time I didn’t remember the staged show with the little boys, or the photograph, so I didn’t feel anything much. He gave me a stiff jolt of brandy and helped me to my feet. I went back over the river with my friends—what a damn stupid word for them!” For a moment bitterness flashed across his face.
    Rathbone felt himself sympathizing and, to his amazement, also believing him. “Then what happened?” he asked, although he knew.
    Rupert looked down again. “About a week later Parfitt sent a letter to my home, inviting me to join them on the boat again. I burned the letter.”
    “But he wrote again?”
    “Yes. I ignored it the second time. Burned it without opening it, actually. The third time he sent a letter to my father. I recognized the writing. I burned the one to my father, but I read the one to me. He said that I had entered into a contract with him, and there was a photograph to prove it. Whether I went to the boat again or not, I still owed him the money.”
    “Blackmail.” Rathbone nodded. It was cleverer than he had thought, much harder to prove in court. How could he show thatthere had been no “gentleman’s agreement”? Such things were often unwritten, especially regarding something like gambling, or the services of a prostitute. No one put those “agreements” in writing.
    Rupert nodded. “I realized it only then. God, I was so stupid!” His voice was heavy with self-disgust.
    “Did you pay?”
    Rupert’s face tightened. “With that photograph? Of course I did. I meant to buy myself a little time, and then think what to do. I knew if I didn’t do something, the bastard would have me paying for the rest of my life.”
    Rathbone looked at him, searching his eyes. He saw desperation, profound embarrassment, even shame, but curiously, no awareness of having just admitted to the perfect motive for murder. Was that because he