And then, two weeks after the SFAX launch, he had been lying down in the creatives’ room, idly throwing a foam ball at the ceiling and listening to Ronan discuss how best to solve a glitch in the payment software when Sidney, the finance director, had walked in and he had suddenly understood that there were far worse problems you could create for yourself than overly clingy girlfriends.
‘Ed?’
‘What?’
A short pause.
‘That’s how you answer a phone call? Seriously? At what age exactly are you going to acquire some social skills?’
‘Hi, Gemma.’ Ed sighed, and swung his leg over the bed so that he was seated.
‘You said you were going to call. A week ago. So I thought, you know, that you must be trapped under a large piece of furniture.’
He looked around the bedroom. At the suit jacket that hung over the chair. At the clock, which told him it was a quarter past seven. He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Yeah. Well. Things came up.’
‘I called your work. They said you were at home. Are you ill?’
‘No, I’m not ill, just … working on something.’
‘So does that mean you’ll have some time to come and see Dad?’
He closed his eyes. ‘I’m kind of busy right now.’
Her silence was weighty. He pictured his sister at the other end of the line, her jaw set, her eyes raised to Heaven.
‘He’s asking for you. He’s been asking for you for ages.’
‘I will come, Gem. Just … I’m … I’m out of town. I have some stuff to sort out.’
‘We all have stuff to sort out. Just call him, okay? Even if you can’t actually get into one of your eighteen luxury cars to visit. Call him. He’s been moved to Victoria Ward. They’ll pass the phone to him if you call.’
‘Okay.’
He thought she was about to ring off, but she didn’t. He heard a small sigh.
‘I’m pretty tired, Ed. My supervisors are not being very helpful about me taking time off. So I’m having to go up there every weekend. Mum’s just about holding it together. I could really, really do with a bit of back-up here.’
He felt a pang of guilt. His sister was not a complainer. ‘I’ve told you I’ll try and get there.’
‘You said that last week. Look, you could drive there in four hours.’
‘I’m not in London.’
‘Where are you?’
He looked out of the window at the darkening sky. ‘The south coast.’
‘You’re on holiday?’
‘Not holiday. It’s complicated.’
‘It can’t be that complicated. You have zero commitments.’
‘Yeah. Thanks for reminding me.’
‘Oh, come on. It’s your company. You get to make the rules, right? Just grant yourself an extra two weeks’ holiday. Be the Kim Jong-un of your company. Dictate!’
Another long silence.
‘You’re being weird,’ she said finally.
Ed took a deep breath before he spoke. ‘I’ll sort something. I promise.’
‘Okay. And ring Mum.’
‘I will.’
There was a click as the line went dead.
Ed stared at the phone for a moment, then dialled his lawyer’s office. The phone went straight through to the answering machine.
The investigating officers had pulled out every drawer in the apartment. They hadn’t tossed it all out, like they did in the movies, but had gone through it methodically, wearing gloves, checking between the folds of T-shirts, going through every file. Both his laptops had been removed, his memory sticks and his two phones. He had had to sign for it all, as if this was being done for his own benefit. ‘Get out of town, Ed,’ his lawyer had told him. ‘Just go and try not to think too much. I’ll call you if I need you to come in.’
They had searched this place too, apparently. There was so little stuff here it had taken them less than an hour.
Ed looked around him at the bedroom of the holiday home, at the crisp Belgian linen duvet that the cleaners had put on that morning, at the drawers that held an emergency wardrobe of jeans, pants, socks and T-shirts.
‘Get out of town,’ Sidney had said. ‘If this gets out you’re seriously going to f**k with our share price.’
Ronan hadn’t spoken to him since the day the police had come to the office.
He stared at the phone. Other than Gemma, there was now not a single person he could call just to talk to without explaining what had happened. Everyone he knew was in tech and, apart from Ronan, he wasn’t sure right now how many of those would qualify as actual friends. He stared at the wall. He thought about the fact that during the last week he had driven up and down to London four times just because, without work, he hadn’t known what to do with himself. He thought back to the previous evening when he had been so angry, with Deanna Lewis, with Sidney, with what the f**k had happened to his life, that he had hurled an entire bottle of white wine at the wall and smashed it. He thought about the likelihood of that happening again if he was left to his own devices.
There was nothing else for it. He shouldered his way into his jacket, picked a fob of keys from the locked cupboard beside the back door and headed out to the car.
4.
Jess
There had always been something a bit different about Tanzie. At a year old she would line up her blocks in rows or organize them into patterns, then pull one or two away, making new shapes. By the time she was two she was obsessed with numbers. Before she even started school she would go through those books you can get full of maths problems and ask questions, like, ‘Why is a one written as “1” and not “2”?’ or tell Jess that multiplication was ‘just another way of doing addition’. At six she could explain the meaning of ‘tessellate’.
Marty didn’t like it. It made him uncomfortable. But then anything that wasn’t ‘normal’ made Marty uncomfortable. It was the thing that made Tanzie happy, just sitting there, ploughing through problems that neither of them could begin to understand. Marty’s mother, on the rare occasions that she visited, used to call her a swot. She would say it like it wasn’t a very nice thing to be.
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘There’s nothing I can do right now.’
‘Wouldn’t it feel weird, her mixing with all the private-school kids?’
‘I don’t know. Yes. But that would be our problem. Not hers.’