‘Really? That’s nice. But it’s not that kind of trip.’

‘You’re so lucky. I love travelling. If I wasn’t so broke I’d be back on a plane in an instant.’

‘You would?’

‘It’s my passion. I loved being a free spirit, going where the whim takes me.’ She leant over, extracted a cigarette from the packet on the bedside table and lit it.

‘So you’d like to travel again?’

‘I’d be off like a shot.’

He had lain there for a bit, thinking. ‘Do you own any stocks and shares?’

She rolled off him and lay back against her pillow. ‘A few. I think my grandma left them to me. A hundred shares in some building society and another two hundred in Woolworths. Hah.’ She half laughed. ‘And don’t suggest I bet on the stock market, Ed. I haven’t got enough left to gamble with.’

It was out before he really knew what he was saying. ‘It’s not a gamble.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘We’ve got a thing coming out. In a couple of weeks. It’s going to be a game changer.’

‘A thing?’

‘I can’t really tell you too much. But we’ve been working on it for a while. It’s going to push our stock way up. Our business guys are all over it.’

She was silent beside him.

‘I mean, I know we haven’t talked a lot about work but this is going to make a serious amount of money.’

She didn’t sound convinced. ‘You’re asking me to bet my last few pounds on something I don’t even know the name of?’

‘You don’t need to know the name of it. You just need to buy some shares in my company.’ He shifted onto his side. ‘Look, you raise a few thousand pounds, and I guarantee you’ll have enough to pay off your ex-boyfriend within two weeks. And then you’ll be free! And you can do whatever you want! Go wherever you like!’

There was a long silence.

‘Is this how you make money, Ed Nicholls? You take women to bed and then get them to buy thousands of pounds’ worth of your shares?’

‘No, it’s –’

She turned over and he saw she was joking. She traced the side of his face. ‘You’re so sweet to me. And it’s a lovely thought. But I don’t have thousands of pounds lying around right now.’

The words came out of his mouth even before he knew what he was saying. ‘I’ll lend it to you. If it makes you money, you pay me back. If it doesn’t, then it’s my own fault for giving you dud advice.’

She started laughing and stopped when she realized he wasn’t joking.

‘You’d do that for me?’

Ed shrugged. ‘Honestly? Five grand doesn’t really make a big difference to me right now.’ And I’d pay ten times that if it meant you would leave.

Her eyes widened. ‘Whoa. That is the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.’

‘Oh … I doubt that.’

Before she left the next morning he wrote her a cheque. She had been tying her hair up in a clip, making faces at herself in his hall mirror. She smelt vaguely of apples. ‘Leave it blank,’ she said, when she realized what he was doing. ‘I’ll get my brother to do it for me. He’s good at all this stocks and shares stuff. What am I buying again?’

‘Seriously?’

‘I can’t help it. I can’t think straight when I’m near you.’ She slid her hand down his boxers. ‘I’ll pay you back as soon as possible. I promise.’

‘Here.’ Ed reached over for a business card, and took a step backwards. ‘That’s the name of the company. And do this. I promise it’ll help. Can’t have you feeling hemmed in!’

He smothered the warning voice in his head. His faux cheer bounced off the apartment walls.

Ed answered almost all of her emails afterwards. He was cheerful, non-committal. He said how good it was to have spent time with someone who understood how weird it was just to have got out of a serious relationship, how important it was to spend time by yourself. She didn’t answer that one. Oddly, she said nothing specific about the product launch or that the stock had gone through the roof. She would have made more than £100,000. Perhaps she was busy sticking pins into a picture of him. Perhaps she had lost the cheque. Perhaps she was in Guadeloupe. Every time he thought about what he had done his stomach lurched. He tried not to think about it.

He changed his mobile-phone number, telling himself it was an accident that he forgot to let her know. Eventually her emails tailed off. Two months passed. He took Ronan on a couple of nights out and they moaned about the Suits; Ed listened to Ronan as he weighed up the pros and cons of the not-for-profit soup girl and felt he’d learned a valuable lesson. Or dodged a bullet. He wasn’t sure which.

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 fuck 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 fuck 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.