VIII.

Tipworth Police Station, 5.30 p.m.

I GIVE THEM JUST ENOUGH TO PIQUE their curiosity – the car, the Pitt Club, Vicky, the slipperiness of an unfamiliar road – and when Grey Suit asks me who was driving, I look him in the eye and say: ‘No comment.’

That should do it, I think. It’s up to them to fill in the blanks. I don’t see why I should make it too easy for them.

But this should set them along the right course. After all, even two police officers as dense as this pair can’t fail to be a little bit excited by the careful trail of breadcrumbs I’ve left leading them into the heart of the labyrinth. Ben Fitzmaurice. Aristocratic scion. Wealthy socialite. Future MP. I can see the cogs whirring in their over-exerted little minds: there’d be a lot of media coverage, wouldn’t there? And surely they’d be commended for doing their jobs so thoroughly. An award, perhaps: the professional equivalent of a feather in the cap.

‘Yes, sir,’ I can imagine Grey Suit saying as a florid-faced superior pins some ridiculous medal to his lapel. ‘At first, we thought it was just a domestic incident but then we ascertained the facts and saw it was a much larger crime.’

I have no loyalty left to Ben. For years, he traded off an arrogant certainty that I wouldn’t say anything. That is now over. It has to be. After what happened that night at the Fitzmaurice party, I don’t feel I owe the ungrateful little shit anything. And when he falls from his great, self-appointed height, I will be there to see it.

I think of the tricoteuses, those women who sat next to the guillotine during the French Revolution and knitted during the intervals between public executions. Knit one. Purl one. Knit one. Purl one and soon I’d have my own Phrygian cap to wear while he bled.

‘It must have been a very traumatic episode for you, Martin,’ Beige Hair says.

We have just returned to the interview room after a short break and she smells of tuna mayonnaise and something else, some background note of manufactured saltiness – smoky bacon crisps, perhaps. You’d think she could have popped a mint in her mouth.

‘It was very upsetting,’ I say. But I hadn’t been especially upset at the time. I was sad about Vicky, I suppose, but I had barely known her and afterwards, in the confusion that followed, I was so worried about Ben’s well-being that I didn’t have much time to wallow in my own feelings.

After the accident, we waited by the car’s crumpled carcass until the paramedics came.

Ben didn’t say much in the back of the ambulance on the way to the hospital. His shoulders were wrapped in a metallic blanket, the sort marathon runners wear after they cross the finish line. His face was pale apart from a scratch running from the outer edge of his eyebrow to the centre of his forehead. At one point, I remember, I reached out and touched the side of his face. He let my hand rest there and then shifted to one side, the blanket rustling. I had wanted to reassure him, but we both knew it was overlain with so much else. I was aware that we had reached some pivotal point in our friendship: that from now on, no gesture would be taken at face value. It would always represent something else.

‘At the same time, Martin, I’m guessing it was a bonding experience,’ Beige Hair says. ‘I mean, as tragic as it was, when you go through something like that, it brings you closer?’

Again, the unnecessary sound of a question mark at the end of a statement.

There is a pause. Beige Hair glances at me expectantly.

‘Wouldn’t you say?’

‘We were already close.’

Grey Suit, who has been staring at me throughout this exchange, now makes a point of turning to look at the wall.

‘So,’ he says, still looking at the wall. ‘Why were the Fitzmaurices paying you all this money, then?’

‘Like I said, I was a son to them—’

Grey Suit gives a forced laugh; a showy guffaw intended to demonstrate how ludicrous he finds me.

‘I’ve got a son, Martin, and I don’t pay him £40,000 a year.’

‘Possibly because you don’t have that kind of money at your disposal,’ I say coolly.

Grey Suit’s eyes harden.

‘Even if I did,’ he says slowly, ‘I wouldn’t give anyone that kind of money without a very good reason.’

I sigh.

‘How much longer is this going to take? I already—’

‘Shall I tell you what I think, Martin?’

‘I’m sure you’re going to whether I like it or not.’

‘I think Ben was driving the car that night. I think he’d been drinking. I think he took the wheel and drove the car off the road because he was so hammered he couldn’t even see straight. And you—’ He jabs his finger at me. ‘You decided to take the blame for him. And you know what that is? That’s wasting police time. That’s obstructing the course of justice. That’s helping someone get away with murder—’

‘Hardly murder,’ I mutter under my breath.

‘I’m sorry – what was that?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Serious charges, Martin. Serious charges that you don’t seem to be taking that seriously. So I want you to think very, very carefully before you say anything else.’

Grey Suit sits back. I imagine his heart beating with such force beneath his chest that it sucks the skin out of shape.

Beige Hair interjects, her voice soft.

‘You were acting from the best of motives, Martin,’ she says. ‘You wanted to save your friend. But now? Now, it’s time to tell the truth, yeah?’

My face is blank but underneath, I feel adrenalised: a surge of cortisol roaring through my bloodstream. I’m glad they’re taking the bait. And when Ben Fitzmaurice is hauled up on murder charges, I suspect he and Serena will be very sorry they underestimated me.

‘Why does he deserve your loyalty?’ Beige Hair asks. ‘Help us to understand, Martin. We need to know what happened.’

‘I can’t see what any of this has to do with it. It’s ancient history.’

‘But it’s all connected, isn’t it?’ she says.

Yes, yes it is. I’m aware, even as I’m doing this, that I will go down too. But I’m ready. It’s inescapable. If I thought DC Nicky Bridge were clever enough to understand, I would tell her the problem is that everything is now so deeply intermeshed I no longer know where I finish and where Ben starts. We are, in the end, just two chambers of the same poisoned heart.

2 May

Marquee, Tipworth Priory, midnight

WE HAVE BEEN DANCING FOR TOO LONG. My feet are tired, the hard leather of new shoes pinching my toes and rubbing against the tender part of my ankle where the nub of a blister is starting. Lucy is whirling her arms above her head, spinning around so that the hem of her dress flares out. She is holding a glass of champagne aloft and as she moves, drops of it spill out onto strangers’ shoulders and I spot one balding gentleman looking startled, then baffled before taking out his pocket handkerchief and using it to mop his shiny pate. He leans in to an elderly lady with grey-blonde hair set like concrete around her face, and he says something in her ear and points up to the marquee roof and she follows his gaze and cranes her scraggy neck and then they huddle more closely to each other and leave the dance floor, transmitting wordless disapproval as they go. Lucy, oblivious, whirls on.

There have been several speeches, each one delivered from the central stage by Ben’s friends and family. I wasn’t asked to say anything. I pretended not to mind and told myself it was because Ben knew I had a horror of public speaking but I was hurt. Especially when Andrew Jarvis took the microphone and delivered some boorish nonsense about what a ‘legend’ Ben had been at school. Nauseating.

Serena stood in her shimmering dress and dabbed at her eyes and apologised for being emotional and then told us what a great dad Ben was and how lucky she was to have him and then, horrifyingly, she said, ‘This one’s for you’ and a small jazz band appeared from nowhere and Serena, who had never as far as I knew sung anything in her life other than in the shower, launched into a patchy rendition of ‘My Funny Valentine’. Everyone cheered and applauded but, really, she was barely in tune the whole way through.

Ben bounded onto the stage and kissed her, placing his hand on the arch of her naked back. The buttons on his shirt were coming apart and his eyes were simultaneously floating and focused and I could tell that he’d taken some coke and that he was surfing the crest of a wave of his own manic confidence.

He gave a brilliant speech. Of course he did. At one point, he invited his mother on stage. I hadn’t known Lady Katherine was at the party but there she was, walking up the stairs in her recognisably upright way: a posture that was half-diffidence, half-elegance and entirely untouchable. Her hair was white and looked as if it would crinkle to the touch. She was wearing a belted jacket and skirt in raw silk. Her face was powdered and her neck was weighted down by an enormous emerald and diamond necklace.

I hadn’t been in touch with her since George’s funeral. His death had made her even more unapproachable. At the door to the church, she had taken my hand as if it were something rotten. I had kissed her lightly on the cheek and said how sorry I was and she had nodded and said, ‘I know, Martin. Thank you.’ But there had been no warmth and over the months that followed, I realised I didn’t want to see her again. Perhaps it was grief. Whatever it was, I had the uncomfortable sense that when Katherine looked at me, she saw something I was trying to hide.

I stared at Ben on stage, bathed in a halo of light, grinning and boyish and charming. I thought, briefly, of Magnus: the dead little brother, that small boy with the pudding-bowl hair I had only ever seen in pictures, whose existence was never mentioned by the family. The Fitzmaurices grew their silence like scar tissue.

After the speeches, a purple curtain suspended across the back of the stage was cut loose. As it dropped, we heard the strains of a popular song currently dominating the charts and then, emerging from the shadows, we saw the silhouetted shapes of the world’s biggest boy band taking formation. All five of them were dressed in matching floral-printed suits. I guessed Gilly had been wrong about the middle-of-the-road rock band.

‘We gotta get through what we gotta get through,’ they sang, wholly committed to the nonsense of the lyrics. ‘You gotta help me and you know it too-oo-oo.’

Lucy threw herself into it straight away. It had always surprised me how much she loved to dance. You wouldn’t expect it of her, but there she was, mouthing all the words, stamping her feet in time to the beat. Before long, a crowd had gathered around her and I could only just make out the back of her neck and the glinting clasp of her necklace.

I wasn’t going to join in but then I saw the Prime Minister and his wife on the outer edges of the circle. Edward Buller was doing his best to shimmy his hips but was too stiff to make it seem natural. His wife clicked her fingers and shrugged her narrow shoulders, pecking at the music like a bird. I slid towards them. The song ended and everyone stopped, embarrassed they’d been caught out by the silence, and then a new guitar chord struck up and we resumed our positions, becoming once again a heaving mass of movement.

I moved closer. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. The music swooped and swerved and bounced. I reached out and placed my hand on the sleeve of Edward Buller’s jacket. He didn’t notice. I tugged at the sleeve.

‘Edward,’ I said, raising my voice so it could be heard. ‘Ed.’

He turned, his face lightly coated with sweat.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Martin. Martin Gilmour.’

Behind him, his wife had stopped dancing.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course, Martin. How are you?’

I knew he didn’t remember me but I was so relieved not to have made a fool of myself that I played along.

‘Good, thank you. I think the last time we met was at Ben’s summer party a few years ago.’

‘Ha! Must have been, yes. Must have been.’

I realised I was still holding on to his jacket sleeve and he was trying to pull away. I let it go.

‘Well, very nice to—’

‘I’m Ben’s best friend,’ I blurted out. ‘From Burtonbury.’

The smile on Buller’s face froze and then dropped.

‘Darling,’ his wife was saying, ‘we really should go and get some food.’

‘Yes. We should. Enjoy the party – ahh …’

‘Martin,’ I said. ‘Martin Gilmour.’

‘Great meeting you.’

He pumped my fist up and down. As he left, I noticed his social smile stuck back in place like a nicotine patch.

I stood there for a moment surrounded by people but circled by that familiar loneliness. Drink, I thought. I must get more drink.

‘Sweetie!’ I heard Fliss’s voice and then felt her wrap her arms around me from behind. I was awash with gratitude.

‘Fliss, darling.’ Too late, I realised she had her face pressed as closely as possible to mine and then her lips were on my mouth and she was trying to kiss me.

‘Fliss,’ I said, extricating myself. ‘No.’

She threw her head back, roaring with laughter.

‘Oh Mart, I keep forgetting. You’re not into me like that. I know, babe, I know. But you can’t blame a girl for trying.’

Her hair was glittering, full of tiny shiny scraps of silver that she had threaded into plaits. She hugged me and I could smell her body odour. She was one of those women who didn’t believe in anti-perspirant. Her mustiness was part of her attraction. It was unregulated, like the rest of her.

‘Gorgeous Mart,’ she drawled and then, suddenly serious, she added: ‘You know, whatever happens, you have to believe I …’

She stopped and put the tips of her fingers to her mouth and then Serena, silently, was at her side, a toned, tanned arm around her sister-in-law’s shoulders.

‘Felicity,’ she said. ‘There you are. I have to kidnap you, I’m afraid. Family photograph.’ She looked at me. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Martin?’

‘No, no, of course.’

They disappeared back into the tidal pull of the party. I left Lucy on the dance floor and walked back into the main house.

‘Gimlet, sir?’

A waiter passed me a glass. It was the one from earlier, who looked like a ballet dancer. He smiled at me, accentuating the groove underneath each cheekbone.

‘You looked like you needed that, sir.’

‘Mmm. I did.’

I let my eyes trail over his chest, down towards the trousers, the buckle on his belt, the shoes scuffed with mud from the garden. And when he moved away from me, I followed him through the doors and the long warren of corridors until we got to the temporary kitchen that had been set up by the caterers and I could feel my heart thumping with expectation and I wanted to reach out and touch him because I was worried, then, that this was not happening and he was not real and then he turned and smiled at me again and so I kept following.

He put down his tray on a steel table and carried on through the kitchen, moving with that same fluid grace, and beyond the tent was the grassy lawn and the maze in the distance where the ghost of the monk was said to walk and then there was a low wall and he sat down and lit a cigarette and offered me a drag. I took it, sharing the space where his mouth had just been and then we were kissing and his tongue was in my mouth and I could taste his smoke and my smoke and the sharp, cool juniper of the gimlet and his hands were in my shirt, tracing the concavities between my ribs, and I let him do everything and I tried not to think too much about what it meant and I tried to let my mind unfurl and expand and be consumed by this moment and I felt all the strange conflicting thoughts that had jangled in my cerebral cortex since the beginning of time, I felt them start to evaporate and blow away in the night’s blackness.

Behind us, the sound of whooping and the thud of a low, persistent bass note.

He knelt on the grass in front of me, unzipped my trousers, pushed them down to my ankles and then, as if he owned me, as if he knew exactly what I needed, he pulled me towards him roughly and took my cock in his mouth. I groaned. He slid his mouth up and down, stroking the tip with his tongue. I pushed my dick back into his mouth, holding his head in my hands so that I could push further into him. I wanted to fuck every part of him, to ram my dick against the back of his throat until he couldn’t contain the size of me. He sucked and licked and cupped my balls and I moved my hands from his head to his shoulders, wanting simultaneously to push him away and pull him into me, wanting to say yes and no and yes and no and then, with his mouth wet and smooth, I came and there was nothing but the bright, white bliss of release.

A second of silence. Another.

I disentangled myself.

The waiter, still on his knees, looked up at me.

I couldn’t bear it.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what happened. Too much to drink. You see, I’m not … I’m not … like you.’

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘You are wrong,’ he said, his voice accented and precise. He shrugged his shirt back into place. ‘You are exactly like me.’

He left me sitting on the wall. For a long time, I didn’t go back into the party.

Notebook of Lucy Gilmour

AT FIRST, I DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE HE’D GONE. I was so used to Martin disappearing as and when he felt like it that it took a while to register his absence from the marquee. Besides, I was having fun. The music was great.

I was dancing with a man I’d met once before at one of Ben and Serena’s awful soirees and although I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name, he turned out to be a pretty good mover. When the boy band left the stage and the DJ started, things heated up. The man drew me closer to him and somehow managed to manoeuvre himself so that my legs were straddling his left thigh. He started nibbling at my neck.

‘What are you doing?’ I said.

‘What does it look like?’

‘I’m married.’

‘So am I.’

‘OK, but …’ I disentangled myself. ‘No offence,’ I said.

‘None taken.’

And we carried on dancing as if nothing had happened. It’s not that I wasn’t tempted – I was – but I’m constitutionally monogamous. The idea of cheating brings me out in a rash. I’m pretty sure Martin’s never cheated on me.

Anyway, the music was pumping and there I was having fun for the first time that evening. For the first time in months, actually. Then Ben came up behind me and put his hands proprietorially on my shoulders.

‘Hi, babe. Know where LS has got to?’

And that’s when I saw he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere in the marquee either. Or in the main house. Wherever I looked, I couldn’t find him. Arguably it didn’t help that I couldn’t exactly walk in a straight line. I kept going up to people I thought I knew and asking them if they’d seen him and it was only afterwards I realised I didn’t know them at all, it was simply that they were famous and that’s why I recognised them. I was drunk. Drunker than I’d been in a long, long while. But the only way to withstand it was to drink more, I told myself, and I swiped a bottle of champagne from one of the tables and started sipping it straight from the neck.

I wandered through the main hall, past the enormous fireplace, and then outside onto the front lawn where the cloakroom girls were slouching and giggling and the purple and white lights were still beaming across the front of the house. In the trees, the gasping sound of a couple; a tangle of legs and arms. I stood for a moment on the gravel feeling the prick and crunch of it through the thin soles of my party shoes. I looked up at a full moon. I lifted the bottle of champagne to my lips and took a sip. It had been an all right night after all, I thought to myself. Much better than expected. In the tipsy headiness of that moment, I caught myself thinking that life wasn’t all that bad, when you thought about it.

A bird made a noise. An owl, maybe. I was useless with birds and had always found the flap of their wings and the sharpness of their beaks disturbing: alien beings with their feathers and tiny, darting black eyes. I turned in the direction of the sound and saw the outline of the chapel and beyond it a dark mass of space where Ben had said the maze was. The darkness shifted and a human shape became visible, walking rapidly across the grass until it was swallowed up by the shadow of the house.

‘There you are.’

Serena.

‘What are you doing out here all on your own?’

She appeared beside me, the skirt of her silver gown bunched up in one hand. Hair was falling loosely from her chignon in a way that made the disarray seem intended. Her eyelashes were dense and spidery. When she blinked, she did so slowly, as if they were too heavy for her face.

‘Taking a breather,’ I said, refusing to be embarrassed by the bottle of champagne I was holding.

‘Mmm.’

She summoned over a man in a black suit brandishing a walkie-talkie.

‘Carlos, darling, do you have a cigarette I can cadge?’

‘Of course, madam.’

He took out a packet of Marlboro Golds from his inside jacket pocket and offered her one, stooping to light it for her. Serena took a long drag. When she removed the cigarette from her mouth, it was sticky with lip gloss. She shivered and closed her eyes in rapture.

‘God that’s goooood.’ She offered it to me. ‘Want some?’

I shook my head.

‘That’s right. I always forget you don’t smoke.’

(I don’t think Serena ever actually forgets but she pretends to do so in order to demonstrate that I’m not important enough for her to think about.)

‘Looks like you’re pretty well covered in the drinks department anyway,’ she continued, craning her neck to see the bottle.

‘It was going spare,’ I said.

Serena didn’t reply. She was a woman unafraid of silence. She took her time finishing her cigarette and then stubbed out the butt with the toe of her silver stiletto.

‘Cleaners’ll pick it up. That’s what we pay them for, right?’ She stared at me. ‘We need to talk to you.’

She took my wrist, holding it tightly and started leading me back into the house.

‘What the …’ I tried to shake her off but her grip was strong. ‘Where …’

‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘This way.’

She pushed through a door I hadn’t noticed before and we found ourselves in a narrow corridor, away from the rest of the party. The hallway was dimly lit. At the far end, a bulb flickered arrhythmically. Clearly the interior decorator hadn’t got to this bit yet.

‘I don’t know where Martin is,’ I said. ‘He’ll wonder where I’ve gone.’

‘Oh he’s here already,’ Serena replied, pulling me along. ‘Ben found him.’

She guided me into a room about half the size of the kitchen with a desk along one wall and floor-to-ceiling shelves which were empty of books. A large scene of Venice hung to my left, the oils dulled by cracking varnish. There was a bulky shape in one corner covered by a dust-sheet and an unlit fireplace in front of which were four leather armchairs. Ben and Martin sat in two of them, facing us as we approached.

‘Found her,’ Serena said. Ben grinned but the grin made no difference to the rest of his face. Martin angled his head towards me but didn’t turn. He seemed to be focusing on some unfixed point in the mid-distance. The atmosphere was skewed. Something was wrong.

I clutched the champagne bottle closer to me and walked over to sit in one of the armchairs.

‘What’s going on?’ I said, and that was when Ben started to speak.

3 May

Study, Tipworth Priory, 1 a.m.

BEFORE A THUNDERSTORM HITS. Electric current in the air. A certain heaviness in the sky, squeezing your head like a tightening clamp. The water waiting to fall. A mass of it accumulating in the belly of a cloud, droplet upon droplet until the skin breaks. A storm ‘gathers’ like a crowd or the bunched-together pleating of a skirt, each stitch adding volume, each person adding density, until it reaches the point of being too big to contain. And then? Explosion.

‘Come and sit down, darling,’ Ben said to Lucy. I heard her walk into the room, my wife’s familiar footstep, and part of me wanted to get up and push her back outside, to warn her not to venture one inch closer. I couldn’t look at her. Every time I tried to meet Lucy’s eye, I thought of the waiter outside, kneeling in front of me on the night-damp grass.

I was angry at her, still, for believing I was good enough. That I had it in me to try.

She sat on the armchair next to me. She had a bottle of champagne in one hand and for a brief moment this afforded me the flicker of a smile. Lucy crossed her feet. I focused on the straps of her new shoes. I knew that, as soon as we got back to the hotel room, she would take these shoes off with a sigh of relief. She would have a bath, no matter how late it was, and she would wash her face with a scrap of white muslin and brush her teeth before going to bed. In all the years I had known her, Lucy had always done this. A creature of routine.

I thought of the Tipworth Premier Inn with longing. How I wished we were back there right now, lying on the cheap foam mattress, with nothing to do except fall asleep. Instead, we were here, in this room, listening to the dying sounds of the party outside, waiting for someone to say something.

Serena perched on the edge of Ben’s armchair, draping an arm around his shoulders. Her dress fell to the floor like a mermaid’s tail. Her earrings glinted in the low lamplight. Outside, there was the sound of dismantling. I wondered where it was coming from. Too early for the marquee to be taken apart by the Fitzmaurice minions.

The guests had started to trickle out into the night, back to their normal lives. The beneficence of Fitzmaurice hospitality would soon be just a glittering memory to be held up occasionally to the light and the events of the last five hours would collapse into vague reminiscence. The party would dissolve from solidity into a series of dissolving half-questions: ‘Do you remember …?’ ‘Wasn’t it fun when …?’ ‘Didn’t we meet at …?’

They were dazzling, these Fitzmaurice parties, and then they were nothing. The fizz of a sparkler burnt to its end and then discarded, a bent piece of metal suddenly revealed for its disappointing self.

Next to me, Lucy took a sip of champagne straight from the bottle. I circled her wrist with my hand. I felt safer with her here.

‘Sorry to drag you guys away from all the fun,’ Ben said. He leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, hands steepled together. The shoulders of his jacket bunched up. He looked like he was about to explain something in the manner of a trendy lecturer, one of the popular ones the girls have crushes on and the male students want to go for drinks with.

Serena was stroking the back of his neck as he talked. I found the soft movement of her hand intensely distracting. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. Up. Down. Up. Down. It was a gesture of intimate possession. With every trace of her fingers she seemed to be staring more directly at me.

See what I have, Martin? See? He’s mine.

Ben coughed.

‘There’s something I—’

‘We,’ murmured Serena, her hand still moving.

Ben corrected himself: ‘… we want to talk to you about.’

And because I was trying to pretend that this was normal, because I still wanted it to be so, because I so desperately wanted our friendship to go back to how it had been when we were boys and nothing had yet complicated it, I said ‘Montenegro?’ as calmly as I could, even though I knew it wasn’t to do with that, and that the prospect of investing in one of his schemes had been used like a bribe to get me into this room.

Serena was still stroking his neck.

‘Darling, would you get me a whisky?’ Ben asked, and Serena unfolded herself from the chair and went to a drinks cabinet in the corner. I heard the ice clink against the glass. The sibilant hiss of the soda syphon.

‘You know, LS, how much we value your friendship,’ Ben started again. His pupils were dilated. A tiny pulse at the corner of his mouth was twitching. ‘That goes without saying.’

Next to me, I felt Lucy bristle.

‘But friendships evolve, don’t they?’ he said as Serena handed him the drink and resumed her perch, one arm outstretched across the top of the chair. ‘And I – we – wanted to talk to you about …’ He lifted the glass to his lips but didn’t drink. ‘About going forwards. There are various …’ He made a show of searching for the right word but I sensed this was a well-rehearsed speech and the hand movements were part of the masquerade. Too studied to be real. ‘Various complications we need to discuss with you.’

He shifted in his seat, pulling up each trouser leg with a pinch at the knee. Serena twiddled the hanging globe of one earring with her fingers, swinging it lightly to and fro.

‘I’ve been asked by Ed Buller to stand for parliament,’ he said.

Lucy made a sound that was somewhere in between a gurgle and a snort.

‘Ben,’ I said, ‘that’s wonderful news. You’ll be fantastic.’

I meant it, too. I forgot to calculate what this news might mean for me. Because of course Ben wanted to stage this announcement with the appropriate build-up and gravitas. He was a Fitzmaurice, after all. They pretended they never courted attention but they always did. Why else would they have wanted me around so much growing up? It was because they had this innate desire for an outside observer, for a misfit who could double-source their smugness. I was their mirror, placed at just the right angle to provide them with their most flattering reflection.

And now, Ben needed my help. That was why we had been asked here.

I felt lighter. Stupid of me to question our friendship after all this time. I thought back over the party and realised how tense I had been, how everything around me had seemed to shake and vibrate with unease, how I had latched on to Lucy as ballast. I should have had more trust in Ben. My Ben. He was still my Ben.

‘It’s a great move,’ I carried on blindly. ‘I can’t think why you haven’t done it before. You’re so electable. You’ve got the ideas, the mind and—’ I laughed. ‘The charm.’

‘But Ben,’ Lucy said, ‘don’t you need to have opinions to be a politician? What do you actually believe in?’

His face hardened. He tried to smile but couldn’t.

‘Lots of things.’

‘It’s just I’ve never really heard you outline a political philosophy,’ Lucy continued, the ‘s’ in philosophy sliding around like a marble on glass. ‘I’d love to hear it.’

‘He doesn’t have to justify himself to you of all people,’ Serena said quietly.

‘What does that mean, Serena? “Me of all people”? Am I not worthy of his … his …’ Spittle was gathering at the corners of her mouth. Lucy wiped the flecks away with the back of her hand. ‘Is my vote somehow less valuable, is that what you’re saying? I’m sorry if I’m not up to the Fitzmaurice standards. I realise I don’t have a title or a TV career or millions of pounds’ worth of cash, but—’

‘Lucy,’ I said. ‘That’s enough.’

She glowered at me. The skin around her clavicle was stretched and pink.

‘You’re drunk. Please. You’re embarrassing yourself.’

She shook her head.

‘You’ve no idea, Martin. You’ve no fucking idea what’s coming.’

She sat back.

‘I don’t know what you—’

I was interrupted by the sound of Ben standing and walking to the fireplace. He leaned against it, clasping his hands easily in front of him. Where did he learn all this stuff? Or was he somehow born with it?

‘The reason Serena and I asked you here tonight was to say that we’re incredibly grateful for all your many years of loyalty and friendship,’ he said, not catching my eye. ‘But we’re entering a new chapter of our life, one which requires a degree of …’ He cleared his throat. ‘Discretion.’

‘You know you can always trust me, Ben,’ I said. ‘You don’t even have to—’

‘Please.’ Pause. ‘Let me finish.’ The tumbler of whisky was on the mantelpiece, the ice slowly melting in the heat. ‘A career in politics is something I’ve worked towards all my life, but as I’m sure you can appreciate, it doesn’t come without its associated risks. One of those risks is that my past life will be raked over by unscrupulous members of the tabloid press and I need to be sure, Ed needs to be sure, that nothing embarrassing will ever come out.’

And then I thought of her. A glimpse of a half-remembered moment. Blonde hair swept up. Head snapped forward. Blood on the windscreen. Legs twisted. A semi-colon of broken glass on the hem of her blue, blue dress. A crumpled, lifeless thing where once there had been the full, vibrant youth of Vicky Dillane.

‘Vicky,’ I said, and it all made sense.

‘Please don’t mention that name,’ Serena said. Her voice trickled down my neck. I glanced at Lucy. So Serena knew, even though I had thought Ben and I had an unspoken pact that no one else would ever be told. He had betrayed me. And I, stupidly, had never thought to do the same.

Ben, pale in the lamplight, turned towards the wall.

‘I know you have been very loyal, Martin, and I trust you feel the Fitzmaurice family have rewarded you handsomely for your efforts.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Ben, it wasn’t an effort—’

‘But the time has come for us to part ways.’

Somewhere in the back of my head, a string was stretched taut. It pinged with a single high note and then it snapped.

‘What?’ I was bleating, pathetic. ‘What are you saying? What the fuck are you saying?’

My brain folded in on itself. The few things I had once held certain started to collapse. I was swimming in darkness. Above me, the rain had started to fall and I didn’t know where the wetness began or ended or where to find the straight line of the horizon and I was disappearing, as if my skin were becoming the liquid that surrounded it and Ben was on the shoreline: unreachable and watching.

‘You will, of course, be suitably compensated,’ he was saying. ‘It’s unfortunate, but there we have it. It would be better, for all of us, if this evening marked the end of our public friendship. You know, of course, that you will always have our deeply held affection, but—’

‘But you want him to fuck off out of your life and never breathe a word about the fact you killed someone,’ Lucy said, her voice rising. ‘Where the fuck do you people get off?’

I stared at her. So she knew as well.

Ben recoiled. Serena rose so quickly she seemed almost to be levitating.

‘You really are a foul-mouthed bitch,’ she spat, launching into Lucy with venom. ‘I don’t know how Ben’s put up with you all this time. You’ve always been so superior, always acting so meek, like butter wouldn’t melt. Do you think I didn’t notice? Think I was too stupid, did you?’

‘Darling—’

She brushed Ben aside.

‘I’m done,’ Serena said. ‘They’re not worth our time.’

Lucy took a swig from the champagne bottle.

‘You’re a joke,’ she said.

‘Well you’re a fat, ugly nobody,’ Serena shrieked. Her face, usually so composed, was twisted and shrunken. The veins on her neck throbbed.

‘Sweetheart.’ Ben came to his wife’s side and put his arms around her. ‘Please. Let’s try and keep this civilised, shall we?’

A high-pitched buzzing sound started up in my right ear. I shook my head, trying to silence it.

‘Are you saying …’ I started and then I had to stop. I gasped for air. My throat was constricted and the next words came out as a whisper, ‘You don’t want us to be friends any more?’

Ben made no move to come towards me. Was I imagining it or was there a ghost of a smile on his face?

‘Well, look, Martin. You have to admit we haven’t exactly been close for quite a while now. I know we got on when we were boys but, if we’re honest, we don’t have a lot in common, do we? I mean, I have the utmost respect for you but I think it’s time to go forwards and follow our own paths and—’

Going forwards. That phrase again. That meaningless phrase.

‘He’s been trying to get rid of you for years,’ Serena hissed. ‘How do you think it will look if he’s publicly associated with a … with a … well, with someone who killed an innocent young girl?’

I couldn’t tell if she really believed what she was saying or whether it was the narrative that most suited her purpose.

‘You’re a leech, Martin,’ she continued. ‘A leech. And I’m not just talking about the money – although, God knows, that’s been a small fortune. You exploited us all! George, Katherine, Fliss …’

At the mention of Fliss’s name, I felt tears start to form.

‘Does Fliss …’ I ventured. ‘And Katherine. I mean, is everyone else in agreement?’

Ben nodded.

‘George … George never would have allowed this. Ben, you know I didn’t …’ I couldn’t bring myself to say it, to say Vicky’s name. ‘You know I took the fall for what you—’

He spoke over me, unmoved: ‘I’m sorry you’re taking it so badly but, really, there’ll be a healthy sum in it for you. I’m not going to leave you in the lurch, financially speaking.’

‘But Ben,’ I pleaded. ‘Mate. It’s never been about that. Never.’

He was impassive. I pushed myself off the chair and knelt on the floor in front of him.

‘You must know that, you must. You’re my best friend. I … I … I’m nothing without you.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Serena muttered. She turned to Ben. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Tragic.’

I wanted to reach out, to touch him, to grab the edge of his jacket. I needed to feel the physicality of him, to pull him down so that he could look me in the eye. I was sure that if only I could touch him he would understand, he would become my Ben again, rather than this stilted facsimile of himself.

‘Ben. Ben.’ I kept saying his name. ‘Ben. Please. Please don’t do this.’

‘Get up, Martin.’

‘I’m nothing without you.’ The words kept coming without my being able to stop them. But it was true. I existed only in relation to Ben. I had constructed myself around his edges, brick upon brick, assessing each concrete millimetre for what it might mean to him and what it might bring me back. I had wanted so desperately for him to need me that I had forgotten to defend myself from loving him.

I looked up at him. On his face, something like pity.

This was it then. He didn’t love me. He never had. I felt very tired. I closed my eyes, sat back on my haunches and waited for the pain to pass. In a moment, I told myself, I would get up. In a moment, I would stand and push back my shoulders and breathe in and out and pretend it didn’t matter. I would erect the necessary facade and no one would be able to get close to me. I knew how to do it. I had done it before.

I stood. I was crying. The final humiliation. I covered my face with my hands, not wanting Ben to see.

‘We’ll arrange for a substantial sum to be transferred to your account,’ he was saying. ‘In return for which you’ll agree to sign a confidentiality agreement drawn up by my lawyers …’

‘So,’ I asked stupidly, ‘the Montenegro deal …?’

He looked at me as though he had only just become aware of my presence.

‘Martin,’ he said, almost kindly. ‘There was no deal. It was a way of getting you to stay. But of course, I’m sure I can see a way of letting you in,’ he said. ‘If that would … help.’

He went on speaking. On and on and on in the same dry, toneless way. He was so far away from me, so alien. I wondered if I had ever truly known him or had I been deluded all these years, a pawn in a game that was being meticulously played out around me, of which I had no knowledge.

‘… will be enough … financially secure … appreciation … great sadness … realistic … hope for the future … elections … have to think of the party … sad state of affairs …’

Disconnected phrases and words seeped into the room. I could make out only half of them. The walls shrivelled and squeezed inwards. The floor spun. I stumbled back to my chair and sat heavily on the leather, waiting for the movement to subside.

‘It was never about that,’ I said, more to myself than anyone else. ‘It was never about the money.’

I could hear Serena’s intake of breath and I could imagine, from the backlit cocoon of my hands, the set of her features. She had never liked me. I had never been able to win her round. I hadn’t thought it mattered. I hadn’t thought she mattered. Wrong again. I had been so focused on fighting the battle, I had forgotten to identify the enemy.

Eventually, the words stopped and there was silence.

Outside, the unnatural sound of a woman giggling.

Then Serena spoke.

‘Right. I think you two should be getting back. We’ll have our lawyers contact you next week. Where was it you were staying?’ She dripped contempt from every pore. ‘The Premier Inn, wasn’t it?’

‘You know,’ Lucy said. ‘You can’t treat people like this.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You should be.’

‘No, I meant—’

‘You think you’re so bloody special. The Fitzmaurices. Like you were born to rule over the rest of us. You think you can chew Martin up and spit him out when you get bored? You can’t. You fucking can’t. You’ll destroy him. Ben,’ she said, appealing directly to him, ‘he’s done nothing but love you all his life, you know that.’

Serena laughed sharply.

‘Oh we’ve all known that for a very long time. It’s embarrassing.’

‘You’ve got no heart.’

Serena smiled. She moved with deliberate slowness to the window, the sequins on her dress shifting shape like the sea.

‘You know what you need, Lucy?’ She picked a stray thread from the curtain and held it between her thumb and forefinger, examining it carefully. ‘You need a child. It would make you less … less …’ She pretended to search for the right word. ‘Bitter.’ There was an icy pause. ‘Shame you can’t find a real man.’ Her voice was rising. ‘Shame we all know Martin would rather fuck my husband than his own wife.’

The words hit me with full force. I stood. My body felt leaden. Serena came towards me.

‘Did you think we didn’t notice?’ she said, face twisted. ‘Wake up, Martin.’

Without warning, she brought the flat of her hand across my cheek and slapped me.

The sound of it radiated outwards like a tuning-fork note.

I didn’t see Lucy get out of her chair. By the time I noticed she was standing with the champagne bottle in her hand, it was already too late. A beat passed. Another. Something popped like a bubble and I realised my wife was screaming – a sound I had never heard before. I blinked, then looked at her. Her teeth were bared and the muscles in her arm were gleaming. I was fixated by those muscles. Where had they come from?

She was shouting. The words slipped into each other until they became white noise. She was pointing the finger of one hand towards Serena, moving closer with every jab. Jab. Jab. Jab.

Serena took one step back, then another, then her ankle twisted and her high heel slipped from under her and as she was falling, Lucy launched herself across the room.

‘You bitch,’ Lucy was shouting. ‘You fucking, fucking bitch!’

Serena was flailing. She gripped hold of Lucy’s wrists and tried to wrestle her off but Lucy kept pushing her until Serena’s back was shoved against the wall.

I couldn’t move. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ben sprint across the room but Lucy was already raising the champagne bottle, holding it high with one arm stretched upwards, every tendon strained and flexed. I had a moment of pure admiration for the beauty of that arm, for the strength I had never known was there, and I felt pride. Sheer, generous, loving pride. Ben tried to reach out and grab Lucy’s wrist but it was too late. Because then Lucy smashed the bottle against Serena’s beautiful head.

A gasp. A whimper.

An earring skittered across the parquet floor.

Serena sagged forwards and slumped to the ground.

Lucy dropped the bottle. It didn’t break. Rivulets of red trailed across the yellow label.

There was silence.

I moved towards the window and took Lucy’s arms, pinning them behind her. I could feel her shaking, the delicate shivering of her flesh. She looked at me wildly. A bruise was forming on her lower lip.

‘Shhh,’ I said. ‘Shhhh now. It’s all right. It’s all right.’

Ben was on the floor, his ear pressed to Serena’s chest shouting at me that we needed an ambulance and would I fucking call a fucking ambulance Martin and there was the rush of footsteps and a sudden crowd of people around us and in the midst of the confusion, I pushed Lucy towards the door and slipped out of the room. In my hand, I had the champagne bottle.

Outside, I flung it hard and long into the lake. The bottle landed with a faraway splash. I held Lucy more tightly to me.

In the darkness, we walked the length of the gravel driveway and out of the gates. I felt detached, as though removed from my own skin, watching these two solitary figures at a distance. What struck me most as we walked was my absence of guilt. For the first time in my life, I had not seen it as my obligation to shield Ben from the worst of what was to come. I was no longer his ‘Little Shadow’. Beneath my ribcage, my heart seemed to expand. And behind us, the outline of Tipworth Priory receded against the early-morning sky.