Chapter Twelve
“How are you this evening, Martin?” came a familiar voice behind me.
Piers Compton was a diminutive man in his early sixties I regarded as wholly typical of his class and hated as the catalyst whose own depravity had led me to my current situation. Scion of a wealthy landowning family, there was no sign of the strength of will that had enabled him to expand that family’s steel business into a worldwide brand and to extend their already bursting coffers in such a way as to make all future money concerns a complete irrelevance. Though there was plenty in his pale and self-regarding face with its trademark weak chin and the thin, almost ascetic, body below to indicate the depths of weakness and perversity that had led him to place both perverse mind and unimpressive body at t
