Acceptable Loss - Anne Perry [43]
“I did not kill Parfitt,” he said clearly.
Rathbone continued exactly as if he had not spoken. “What was your connection with him? When and where did you first meet? If any of this is verifiable, I’d like to know that too.”
Rupert looked down at the scarred tabletop. “I met him just over two years ago. I was out with a group of friends, at Black Lion Lane again. We were all pretty high and bored. Somebody began telling tall stories about women they’d had, not just in London, but Paris, somebody said Berlin, and someone else said Madrid. The stories got taller and taller, most of them lies, I expect.” He took a deep breath. “Then someone said he knew of a place a lot more daring than anything mentioned so far. He said danger was the thing that really made your heart beat, and the blood—” He stopped. He was looking at Rathbone’s exquisite suit, his crisp, clean shirt.
“I can imagine,” Rathbone 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. There had 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