Part 2
Wednesday 19 March 2025
London
Meredith and Josh
“Can I bring you anything to drink while you wait for your friend?” the waiter asks. “I should bring the cocktail menu, maybe?”
Meredith Miles almost flinches. It feels like such a wildly inappropriate question under the circumstances. The idea that she might have fizzy orange drinks with pink-and-gold paper umbrellas sticking out of them on her mind, today of all days… Though it’s not the waiter’s fault; he has no idea she’s here to have possibly the most important conversation of her career so far. “A large bottle of sparkling mineral water would be great, thanks.” She smiles up at him.
She has chosen her favorite restaurant in the whole of London for the occasion: Yauatcha, Broadgate Circle—so much more atmospheric, with its curved contours and wide views, than its Soho twin. Meredith would swear this somehow makes the food taste better too. And at one o’clock on a weekday it’s always full of business types in suits, and noisy, which is what she wants; there’snothing worse than having an important conversation in one of those small, quiet London bistros with more waiters than there are tables, where every word you say is heard in the kitchen too.
“Actually, I’m ready to order food as well,” Meredith says. “I can order for both of us.” When the waiter looks doubtful, she adds, “I’m early, and my colleague is obsessively punctual. He’ll be here by the time you bring the starters.”
Hurry up, Josh.She had hoped he would be early too, as early as her.
Josh Varndall is her friend as much as he’s her colleague; he and Meredith have worked together for twenty-two years. In fact—and this is a strange thought for Meredith—if you wanted to be strictly accurate, you’d have to say that, currently, she and Josh arenotcolleagues for the first time in twenty-two years, though they both know they very soon will be again.
And, friend or colleague, or both, Meredith has had enough Chinese meals with Josh to be certain of what he will order: sesame prawn toast followed by crispy aromatic duck. If only she felt as confident in relation to his thoughts aboutLambertsas she did about his menu choices. They started referring to it asLambertsalmost immediately; its full name is too long to say every time.
For herself, Meredith orders only dim sum: wild mushroom, lobster, seafood black truffle, and spicy pork Szechuan. Two to come out with Josh’s starter and two with his main. By the time the waiter has written down and checked everything, Josh is here, shaking off his coat as he approaches the table.
“I’ve just ordered for both of us,” Meredith tells him.
“Great, thanks.” He sits, takes off his glasses, and wipes them onthe sleeve of his shirt. “Bit rainy out there. Which obviously you can see out of this massive window right next to us.” He laughs. “Sorry. I’m a bit nervous, which is silly. Shall we get the scary part out of the way first, so we can enjoy our lunch? Are you a ‘no’ or a ‘yes’?”
This makes Meredith feel instantly better. If he thinks they’re going to have an enjoyable lunch, no matter how they both vote, that means there’s nothing to worry about.
“I’m a ‘no,’” she says.
Relief lifts Josh’s features. “Me too.”
“Really? Amazing. Excellent. I was afraid you’d be a ‘yes’ and I’d have to talk you down.”
“Nope. I don’t see how we can publish it. I don’twantto publish it, actually.”
“Because?” Meredith asks. “I agree, but I’m curious to hear how you got there.” She has spent hours—unnecessarily, as it turns out—worrying that they’d disagree, that there would be a difficult discussion with a winner and a loser, that this might get their new business off to a bad start. What if some resentment crept in, no matter how hard they tried to ensure it didn’t? It all feels very high stakes, because the Champ Lambert story is world-famous. Even now, eight months later, true crime podcasts and discussion forums about who killed the Gavey family are everywhere. Was it a murder-suicide by Lesley Gavey? Or are the commenters who insist it was a man’s crime correct? Was Alastair Gavey, Lesley’s husband and Tess’s father, responsible? “Only a man,” one columnist wrote, “takes out his entire family in this particular way. It’s called family-annihilation killing and it is, sadly, a genre we’ve become accustomed to. And it is, I’m afraid, an overwhelmingly male thing to do.”
Meredith couldn’t resist replying in the comments: “Whoever set that fire, it didn’t annihilate the whole Gavey family. Tess was already dead when the fire started.” She has heard so many opinions about the Gaveys’ deaths since last summer. Some she has read online or in newspapers; others she’s picked up in snippets of gossip while walking Cinnamon in the park, or in the changing room after Pilates. Many have been ridiculously far-fetched, like the theory that Toby Lambert was the evil murderous genius who’d burned the Gaveys to death in their home and got away with it; it was bound to have been him, apparently, because he used to get into fights at school and be cheeky to teachers.
Meredith has been afraid of successfully persuading Josh that they shouldn’t publish the book. And then, each time he realized the world was still fascinated by the unexplained deaths of the Gaveys, he might think, “If only Meredith had been braver. If only we’d publishedLamberts, we could have made an absolute killing.” At their previous company, which they both now jokingly refer to as “the old country,” they disagreed often about whether a particular book was worth the risk, but none of those were books connected to famous murders—or murder-suicides, depending on your point of view.
The facts don’t change: Tess was already dead. Either Alastair or Lesley or someone else started the fire that burned down their house. Or AlastairandLesley, acting as one. So there were either two murder victims, or one, or none. Or (same point, different way of putting it) two suicides, or one, or none. Or three murders, if you believe that Tess was killed in her dream by the ghost of Furbert Lambert—which Meredith does not.
“We’re a brand-new start-up, still trying to establish its reputation,” says Josh. “Or rather we will be, once we start up. Whatever the police say, there’s no way round it:Lambertsis a novel—or a memoir or whatever—that has quite possibly been written by a murderer who’s escaped justice and seems more than a little bit chuffed and gloaty about having done so.”
“Agree,” says Meredith.
“And what is it? A novel? A memoir? Would we be putting it out as some sort of…entertainment? Because, let’s face it, there’s nothing to guarantee the truth of any of it.It doesn’t even include the fairly pertinent fact that Lesley and Alastair died, not just Tess. Then there’s the strong chance of us getting sued by the Lamberts—”
“They wouldn’t sue us,” Meredith says quietly.
“I would if I were them, given what the book strongly implies. I don’t know.” Josh sighs. “At first I thought maybe we could put it out as true crime—not claiming it’s the truth but presenting it neutrally as a document that may or may not shed some light, making no claims whatsoever of it being proof of anything.”
“I thought the same.”
“But I couldn’t convince myself,” Josh says. “The fact is, its author—who won’t tell us who she is, which doesn’t help me to trust her—clearly believes her book has a perfect, happy ending just because Champ’s no longer in danger. Whereas in reality, three people are dead. So…it just all feels wrong.”
