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eighteen-year-old son, Robert, and Margery, his wife, were still in bed, either asleep or avoiding him. He couldn’t let them see him crying. He wouldn’t be able to explain why he was so upset. He was afraid that if they found him and asked him he might blurt something about the clients’ missing funds: the disaster looming on his own horizon.
    Diana, betrayed and alone, always pictured alone. Betrayed but hopeful, still looking for love. She still cared about other people, about landmines and Aids patients. She loved all the people. She had boyfriends, was still looking for love. But no one thought about how she felt. No one cared how alone and overwhelmed she felt. No one knew how frightened she was sometimes. Diana must have had staff who loved her – they couldn’t know her and not love her – but Julius had no one. He was in a bind, needed money and Dawood McMann was circling, hinting that he knew about his situation, offering a way out. Help me to help you.
    What Dawood wanted would be illegal. He was a strange character – Julius couldn’t see his endgame at all. He floated from one set to the other – lawyers, city councillors, union leaders – never settling, never belonging. But he was half Scottish, half Pakistani, maybe he was used to straddling and that’s just what he did.
    Julius knew one thing though: Dawood was picking him because he knew he was desperate. The investment firm looking for their money back must have told Dawood about it, that they were one week away from starting a legal action against him. I want you because you know people. Julius knew everyone. This will need a number of people. He kept saying it – a number of dedicated, loyal people. It is a long-term thing, a good thing. Help me to help you, Julius.
    But Julius couldn’t. Anton Atholl worked for Julius, he knew McMann wanted a deal. If there was a whiff of a deal between them, Anton Atholl would tell the police. Atholl had a thing about Dawood McMann. He told Julius not even to talk to the man. He had heard things about him, wouldn’t go into detail. Atholl hated McMann so much that Julius felt he’d do time himself, just to fuck McMann over. Julius explained it to Dawood: Atholl won’t go along with it, he just won’t. Let me help, said Dawood. A week later he gave Julius the photograph. A polaroid. Atholl drunk. Very drunk. It was revolting but not illegal. It didn’t help Julius at all.
    The phone rang, jagged and loud. Julius jumped up to get it, afraid they’d hear it upstairs, come downstairs and catch him crying.
    A murder case at Stewart Street station. Juvenile, a girl, care-home case, found in a car with a dead man, saying she did it. Could he come in?
    Twenty-five minutes, he said and hung up, glad of something to think about other than Diana dying in Paris, alone.
    He went to his downstairs bathroom. No one else used it and he kept his shaving things and his toothbrush in there, so that he didn’t have to disturb his son or his wife. They all kept out of one another’s way as much as possible. The bathroom was in an awkward part of the house, through the cold-floored utility room. Black spots of mould flourished on the silicone seals around the never-used bath. One of the bulbs over the mirror had gone ages ago. He had to shave in virtual silhouette.
    He ran the water until it was warm and put the plug into the sink before looking up at himself. Red eyes, a weak, twitching mouth and he saw what Diana had seen the night they met.
    It was years before, at a charity ball, a dreary affair in the Royal Academy in Edinburgh. She sat at a distant table, a blond smudge next to other smudges. Julius didn’t care much. After dinner they gave the loyal toast. Julius crossed his fingers as he drank it and then lit a longed-for cigarette. Diana stood and read a faltering speech while Julius smoked and calculated his journey back to Glasgow.
    Somehow they all came to be standing as she left the room. She came past