ABSTRACT
A concentration on Maxwell Confait’s sexual identity and his relation with Winston Goode, himself said to be bisexual or homosexual, and with whom he had had a voluble argument the month before his death, fleetingly translated Goode into ‘a very close suspect’. James Fryer’s investigation was intended to aid the work of the Maxwell Confait Inquiry, and to ‘see whether any living person other than Lattimore, Leighton and Salih was involved in Confait’s death’, and it took place after there had been a successful appeal against conviction. The circumstances and cast of the death of Maxwell Confait were regarded as unsettling by the prosecuting authorities, counsel and, indeed, the judge, who all appeared to wish to preserve their distance from the victim and the defendants. Maxwell Confait had been racially and sexually marginal, an outsider whose private sexual behaviour had only been decriminalised and whose public importuning remained criminal.
