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visits to the doctor might become a real pleasure.
    From the kitchen came a yelp of delight. Suttle had been checking the line of cupboards over the neat stack of dishes on the granite-veined work surface. A shelf full of spices beside the six-ring ceramic hob had yielded a roughly crafted wooden box divided into three compartments. Winter inspected it, then invited Richardson to lift it down. One of the three compartments was brimming with a snowy-white powder.Suttle’s grin spread even wider. Couple of grand’s worth. At least.
    ‘What’s that, then?’ Winter nodded at the box. ‘Bicarb of soda?’
    Richardson was looking pained. A couple of minutes ago he’d been on the point of loading the dishwasher. Now this.
    Winter told Suttle to call in for a Scenes of Crime team, then escorted Richardson back to the other end of the room. Before he even thought of contemplating an arrest, he wanted the full tour.
    The last time Winter had been on this page in the Pompey book of villainy, he’d had to climb endless flights of greasy steps in almost total darkness to bust a couple of middle-aged toms doing the business in some top-floor doss off the seafront. The punters were being serviced side by side on rubber blow-up mattresses, there was a pit bull chained up in the corner, and you couldn’t move for empty cider bottles from the Happy Shopper down the road. At the time it had felt like a kind of victory – at least the dog went to a good home – but even hours later, taking statements from the women back at the Bridewell, he hadn’t been able to rid himself of the smell: White Lightning, body fluids, plus gristly bits of discarded kebab from the van round the corner. Three good arguments, thought Winter at the time, for staying in with a bottle of Scotch and a lifetime’s repeats of
The Sopranos
.
    Camber Court, thank God, belonged on a different planet.
    ‘What’s this, then?’
    ‘A television.’
    ‘I know that, but what’s on it?’
    Winter invited Richardson to press the PLAY button on the DVD. Two men appeared on the huge wall-mountedplasma screen. A third man – tanned, young, supple, inventive – was obliging them both. Winter watched for a moment, his head cocked left and right as he tried to follow the action, warmed by the sheer class of what he’d stepped into.
    ‘These perverts for your benefit?’
    Richardson nodded, drawn in by a sequence he’d probably enjoyed a thousand times before.
    ‘Cook’s nips,’ he agreed. ‘Keeps an old man very happy.’
    ‘What else have you got?’
    ‘Pretty much everything.’ He indicated a line of DVDs on a shelf beneath the player. ‘Depends what you’re after. Sado. Foot fetish. Wee-wee. Animals.’ He looked pained again. ‘Black men with ten-foot willies.’
    ‘Your punters have a favourite?’
    ‘Of course. But it wasn’t me who told you.’
    He shot Winter a quick, conspiratorial look then bent to the DVDs and extracted a disc. Slipping it into the player, he stepped back, evidently resigned to whatever followed. Winter summoned Suttle with a nod at the screen. A man in his forties was flat on his back, straddled by a tall white girl with a string of pearls round her neck. The man’s head hung over the end of the bed, his upside-down face a foot or so away from the camera lens. His eyes were closed and blood was pulsing into his big, jowly face as he paced the rhythm of her body above him. ‘Slower,’ he kept telling her. ‘Slower.’
    The girl was moving almost imperceptibly now, an inch up and down, exquisite control. Her long white fingers tipped with black nail varnish were cupping her breasts, and when the command finally came she reached sideways for a bulging plastic bag, then half twisted backwards as she pressed the bag downbetween the man’s legs. The mouth in the camera lens opened wide, then wider still, a strangled cry, pain and pleasure; then the girl’s other hand sank down across her belly and she began to masturbate,