Copyright © Simon Kernick 2009

Two weeks ago

Sir Henry Portman was a man who liked his vices. He drank like a professional, gambled like an amateur, and still managed a pack of cigarettes a day, the odd Cuban cigar and a good four thousand calories of the kind of rich, fatty food that makes dieticians tear their hair out, and everyone else salivate.

But his favourite vice – the one he could least do without and the one, if truth be told, that kept him at a half-reasonable thirteen and a half stone rather than the twenty he'd probably otherwise have been – was extra-marital sex. In twenty-eight years of marriage, Sir Henry had enjoyed a total of 347 sexual partners (348 if you included his wife), a figure he kept constantly updated in a small black leather notebook he'd bought for that express purpose. Even now, in his mid fifties, his appetites were showing no signs of diminishing.

What had diminished, however, were his looks, so more and more these days he had to rely on the services of prostitutes. This didn't bother him unduly. He found that paying for sex had many advantages. There were none of the complications associated with having secret lovers, nor the potential embarrassments caused by asking them to do things that might be considered unusual. Because where sex was concerned, Sir Henry's tastes were somewhat eclectic, which was why he was currently tied to a bed wearing a shiny PVC blindfold and not much else in an upscale Islington brothel, waiting for a svelte nineteen-year-old beauty called Nadia to come in and tease and torment him to the heights of sexual ecstasy.

He heard the door opening and Nadia making her soft, slow entrance. As she approached the bed, Sir Henry licked his lips and swallowed, barely able to stand the incredible sense of anticipation he always experienced in these first moments.