He wore a designer tracksuit top, zipped to his throat, and a wary expression. This was 'Witness A', whose identity as an alleged victim is protected by the Sexual Offences Act.
To breach his anonymity is to invite prosecution and potential imprisonment. You might come to think that is what he deserves himself.
For in the course of a two-hour conversation with the Mail, Witness A made a series of disturbing and sometimes sensational allegations. They concerned the senior public figures he claimed to have met and had sex with while working as a teenage prostitute in the 1970s and 1980s.
As he talked, his gaze often slid away from scrutiny. He is a liar by habit.
But at least one of his statements had the ring of authenticity — and it goes to the heart of a scandal that raises profound questions about the leadership and priorities of the Metropolitan Police.
'The police wanted me to join up the dots in the Harvey Proctor case,' said Witness A, who has never spoken publicly before.
'They realised their investigation [into him] wasn't going anywhere. 'So . . .they wanted me to say Harvey Proctor did this and that, and that I saw him [do it]. They wanted me to implicate him.'
And implicate Proctor — and others — Witness A obligingly did, in interviews with detectives from Operation Midland, the disastrous Metropolitan Police investigation into an alleged VIP paedophile ring.
The extraordinary story of Witness A and another fraudster known as Witness B, which we can tell today,...
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