Ken leaned back in his chair, puffing his cheeks out. ‘You do paint such a pretty picture,’ he said morosely, imitating Lorne’s manner of speech. ‘So, what do you reckon? That we cut our losses and drop the matter?’
‘No,’ Lorne told him, feeling unspeakably empty. ‘Bloody hell! I don’t know what we’re going to do. Don’t you realise what this means? It means we’re being set up. That we’ve been set up since the very beginning. That this evidence we’re being fed may well be coming from these buggers right here,’ Lorne told him, thumping the photos of the cropped porn actors with an index finger for emphasis. ‘They’re taunting us and setting us up at the same time.’
After three years of working on the case, the enormity of what Lorne was saying finally sank home. ‘All this because we got upshot of that smartass porn distributor, Gary whatsisname-’
‘Stockhouse.’
‘That were the one. Gary Stockhouse.’
Lorne nodded. ‘That clever bastard! It’s his doing; I’d lay odds on it. He’s been leading us on a little at a time, until we’re in so deep that we can’t stop. Meanwhile, he keeps turning out legitimate porn, if you can call it that, ducking under the radar.’