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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 talk about the best way to solve a glitch in the payment software, when Sidney, the finance director, had walked in and Ed 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, 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 earlier. 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.
    “He’s asking for you. He’s been asking for you for ages.”
    “I will come, Gem. Just . . . I’m . . . I have some stuff to sort out.”
    “We all have stuff to sort out. 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.”
    “Two cars. But 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 backup here.”
    He felt a pang of guilt. His sister was not a complainer. “I’ve told you I’ll try to 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.”
    Another long silence.
    “You’re being weird.”
    Ed took a deep breath before he spoke. “I’ll sort something out. I promise.”
    “And ring Mum.”
    “I will.”
    There was a click as the line went dead.
    Ed stared at the phone for a moment, then dialed 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 were 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.
    Sidney had also told him to leave. “If this gets out, you’re seriously going to fuck with our share price.”
    Ronan