Mary Soames, it was, who had told him that Aurora's father, Earl Ray, had been a bad influence on the children; and so he had been, for Charles at least. Though Hakim could have been no more than four and protected by the innocence of his tender years, the same couldn't be said for Charles. So much older than his two half-siblings, he would have been at a vulnerable age when his mother took up with the bad lad drug dealer. What was more likely in that ill-run menagerie than that the boy would be encouraged to experiment with the drugs from which Ray made his precarious living?
Rafferty addressed his next remarks to Charles Ogilvie. 'I'd guess you owed money to some pretty nasty people. Drug dealers who were threatening violence if you didn't pay up. But you couldn't pay up, could you? You
