It was a month or so after that, once he had resolved to cut all contact with Anna for the final time, that Andrea stepped into his world, in a bar in town.
He’d been at a meeting with Madeleine about a small job connected to her new position at the National Crime Agency. Harry wasn’t CHIS – not officially. No, his role was always off the books, just as he liked it. He was a ‘sole trader’, an expression he felt suited him, only ever paid off the record to do background investigations into persons of interest. Madeleine was a delegator, and he got that. Plus, she had shit-tons of money, Harry could tell just by looking at her. She had the balls of a woman who’d never known poverty, who knew what she wanted, was willing to pay for it and expected to get it. And she usually did.
In the end it was nothing much to get excited about – just a matter of digging into a person of interest in a trafficking case she had been working on in Eastern Europe. Madeleine’s rate was pitiful but it was some cash at a time when Harry had none coming in. And who knew what else it would lead to in the future? There was enough left in the kitty for now, but it wouldn’t do to become complacent. Especially when his usual journalistic revenue streams had dried up permanently.
He had just ordered another whisky when he felt the presence of a woman to his left. Glancing up at her, he took in the dress, nipped in at the waist, the perfectly blow-dried hair. She was more dolled up than his usual type, but when she turned and smiled at him, her fingers clutching a gold Amex card, he felt his jaw clench with desire.
They fucked in the recess of a doorway in the alley outside the bar, her dress hitched up around her waist – and then again back at her flat overlooking the river.
‘Where did you even come from?’ He asked as she dressed in front of the window, and she turned and smiled.
‘That would be telling.’
He woke at Andrea’s the next day, the morning sun stretching above the Thames. It was hard to believe this was an extension of the same canal on which his little boat bobbed. From here, London oozed with money and promise, the possibility reflecting on the surface of every building.
She had kept him up half the night, and he needed coffee. He was pulling on his trousers when she turned in bed to look up at him.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I thought I’d better be off.’
‘Why? It’s still early.’
He stopped. ‘I just assumed—’
‘You know what they say about assumption,’ she said, pulling the sheet away from herself.
They were preoccupied when Harry’s phone rang. It was only afterwards when he pulled it out of his pocket and checked the missed calls that he saw that it was Anna.
‘Who’s Anna?’ Andrea asked, propped up on one elbow.
‘No one.’
‘Good.’
That was the last time he heard from her. He had every reason to think that chapter of his life was over.
When Andrea first mentioned that the firm she worked for was putting on a charity auction the following February, Harry had recoiled. He didn’t know much about her job at the bank, but he knew enough to be confident that it would not be his choice of an evening out, surrounded by stuffy blokes in expensive suits making a show of their generosity for the women hanging from their arms.
But the truth was, more than ever this was exactly the sort of place he should be heading for: an event pulsing with wealth and status, with stories and loose tongues. You never knew who you might meet. And he needed to start thinking about new ventures.
As they moved along the Strand, Andrea spoke to the taxi driver. ‘It’s just here.’
The car stopped in front of great revolving doors.
‘Don’t worry,’ Andrea said, leaning in to kiss him. ‘We don’t have to stay long. I just need to show my face. You know what it’s like.’
Inside, the atrium lights were too bright, the ballroom pulsating with noise and male sweat. Andrea led Harry to a table laden with bottles of champagne, taking her seat on the opposite side of the table.
‘Let’s go back to mine,’ she said a while later, approaching him from behind as the auctioneer took bids on a Caribbean cruise. He smiled, grateful to be released from a devastatingly dull conversation with the husband of one of the firm’s partners.
‘You head out and get our coats. I’ll say goodbye and meet you out there in a minute,’ Andrea said.
He was almost at the door from the ballroom into the atrium when he heard a sudden swell of noise at odds with the heckling of the crowd. Turning, he saw them, the man’s hand gripping her wrist. From the way she held herself unsteadily on her feet, it was clear that she was drunk.
He watched them for a moment, frozen to the spot by a rush of blood to his head.
‘What are you doing?’
Harry turned towards Andrea’s voice. Did he imagine the sharpening of her gaze as she followed the direction in which he was looking?
‘I thought I saw someone I know … knew. Come on, let’s get our coats.’
‘I’m going to visit the ladies quickly,’ Andrea said, once they had collected their belongings from the cloakroom.
‘Why don’t we just stop somewhere on the way back?’ Harry said and Andrea looked at him, as if gleaning his obvious discomfort.
‘No, I need to go now,’ she said firmly, pressing her coat into his hands. ‘I won’t be long.’
Harry lingered as close to the wall as he could, resisting the temptation to look back through to the dining hall to check Anna and David weren’t coming through here.
He didn’t so much hear her presence as feel it. When he looked up, their eyes met and he saw her physically lose her breath. For a split second neither of them spoke and then Anna broke the silence, her voice cracking.
‘What are you doing here?’
Before Harry could answer, he heard another voice, ‘Are you ready? Oh …’
‘Harry,’ Anna said, appearing to gather herself. ‘This is my husband, David. You know Harry …’
What was she saying? For fuck’s sake, Harry wanted to shake her. Of course he knew David. Was she so drunk that she had forgotten which part of her life was real and which was imagined?
‘My God,’ she said, ‘but it has been years.’
David hardly flinched. ‘Harry, of course. Good to see you.’ And then he looked to Harry’s right. ‘Andrea?’
Harry watched them. ‘You two know each other?’ He struggled to think of what to say next, to fill the silence that opened up between them.
‘Andrea works for the firm who put on the charity ball,’ Harry said finally.
‘Of course,’ David replied, apparently unperturbed by this unlikely connection. ‘That’s my old firm. Andrea and I, we did work experience together back in the day.’
Harry regarded them both as David moved forward and kissed her on both cheeks. ‘This is Anna, my wife.’
There was a moment’s silence and then David spoke again. ‘We’d better be off, our taxi …’
‘Please,’ Harry said, relieved, the room suddenly spinning around them. ‘Good to see you.’
‘You know David Witherall?’ Harry said quietly, as Andrea took her coat from under Harry’s arm.
Andrea widened her eyes, moving in conspiratorially. ‘Not a fucking clue. I’m usually good with faces, but that guy I can’t remember ever having seen before in my life. Awkward. Did I make a convincing job of pretending? And what was with his wife? She couldn’t take her eyes off you, or maybe she was trying hard not to fall over. She was rat-arsed.’
Leaning out a little, Andrea straightened up, her eyes responding to something in Harry’s expression.
‘Are you OK? Was Anna an old girlfriend or something?’
‘No,’ Harry said. ‘Nothing like that.’
He put a hand on the small of her back, a cold wind rushing through the hallway as David and Anna moved out onto the Strand.
‘Let’s get out of here.’