He immediately wants to take the jacket off and set fire to it underneath the itsu table.
The edges of Martin’s mouth curl.
‘No, no, don’t worry. It was a joke.’
‘Oh, hahahahaha. Yes. Very good. Ha.’
Richard shifts on his stool. He scans Martin’s face, which has reassumed its usual blankness.
‘But you’re right that we have to be careful what we say,’ Martin says. ‘I know that only too well.’
Richard has read about Martin’s skirmish with Jacob Malik-Edwards and the university authorities – it’s one of the first things that comes up when you google him. But surely he didn’t arrange this meeting to talk about cultural semantics?
‘How can I help, Martin?’
‘Well, it’s not so much how you can help me. It’s more a question of how I believe I might be able to help you.’
‘Me?’
Richard pushes the empty duck salad box aside, mopping up spilled dots of soy sauce from the table with a thin paper napkin. He scrunches up the napkin and puts it in the box. His fingers feel sticky so hefishes out the miniature bottle of sanitiser he carries with him (politicians never know where the hands they’re shaking have been) and squeezes a globule into his palms, rubbing them together until the stickiness has gone. Martin stares at him.
‘Sorry, bit of a hygiene freak,’ Richard says, gabbling again. ‘Bit OCD. Like David Beckham. Have you seen the Beckham documentary …? It’s very good.’
Martin doesn’t answer. Instead, he pushes the brown folder across the table.
‘What’s this?’
‘Everything you need to bring Ben Fitzmaurice down.’
Against the noisy backdrop of the afternoon itsu rush, Richard isn’t quite sure he …
‘You heard,’ Martin says.
Richard takes the folder and starts leafing through it. The first page is a police report, stamped with the insignia of the Gloucestershire Constabulary. ‘Statement of …’ is typed at the top and he has to hold the sheet of paper at an angle to make out the handwritten name: Felicity Fitzmaurice. It is signed and dated from a year ago. Under paragraph A, ‘Details of the Incident’, the word ‘RAPE’ is written in the capital letters of officialese.
Richard looks at Martin.
‘Rape?’ he asks, voice hoarse.
Martin nods.
‘Carry on.’
Richard turns the page. He skims through the witness statement. Rape. Spiked mug of tea. A flat with the doors closed. Pain. Confusion. Fear. He imagines the police officer who would have listened to this story. Was he attentive? Kind? Bored? Dismissive? Then he imagines Felicity Fitzmaurice sitting in an anonymous interview room having to explain what she’d been through and he wants to run away. It is unlike Richard to suffer from a surfeit of empathy, but Hannah once told him about her own experience of sexual aggression at the hands of a lecherous male partner at a leading law firm and it shockedhim that his wife – his strong, assertive, no-nonsense wife – had been made to feel so worthless. It knocked Richard’s sense of how the world operated, and he had never entirely recovered his equilibrium when it came to matters of sexual assault. It was partly why he watched so much porn. He hated the idea that his own predilections for sexual fantasies involving figures of male dominance – doctors, businessmen, gym instructors, the usual – would make Hannah uncomfortable or make her think less of him. So he repressed these urges in real life, preferring to indulge them on his own, in front of the flickering blue light of a computer screen.
Richard keeps scanning the police report. Another name leaps out from the page. He blinks to make sure he’s read it correctly. But there it is, in black and white: Andrew Jarvis.
‘What the …?’
Martin raises his eyebrows, as if to say, ‘Well, are you really surprised?’
But he is. Richard is aghast.
‘Jarvis?’
‘One and the same,’ Martin says.
‘I don’t know what you expect me to do with this.’
