The camera zoomed in on Richard’s eyes, which darted this way and that, then swung back to Harriet Seeker, glossy and sleek as a racehorse. She thanked him for being there and then asked an easy question to kick things off and in the chatter that ensued, Cosima wondered if he was going to wimp out.
‘Stop waffling,’ she muttered.
Behind her, Martin’s breathing became more rapid. They were both on edge.
‘He’ll get there,’ Martin said. ‘Just wait.’
She chewed her lip and pulled the cuffs of her jumper up over her hands. She could barely watch. Maurice, sensing her tension, stopped purring and looked at her, blinking his yellow eyes.
‘… owing to some information that has recently come into my possession …’ Richard Take was saying. Martin put his mug on the floor.
‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘Here we bloody well go.’
Cosima thought of her father, sitting behind the desk in his study at Tipworth, a lazy smile on his face as she walked through the door. She thought of him at last year’s school prize day, when she had been awarded the English cup and he had seemed to clap more loudly than everyone else. She thought back to being four years old, standing in a field and feeling scared of the cows with their menacing black eyes, and how he had reached down and taken her hand and she hadn’t felt frightened anymore. She thought of the framed black and white photo on the kitchen shelves of their old home in Notting Hill; the one of her parents on their wedding day. Her dad in a morning suit dotted with confetti petals and her mother, regal in bias-cut silk. Both of them grinning, arm in arm, surrounded by a crowd of people – one of whom, Cosima realised now, would have been Martin Gilmour.
A happy picture, then. At what moment had it all started to go wrong?
On the TV screen, Richard Take was now saying that events had been weighing heavily on him. Unease splintered through her. Her father’s career was about to blow up and with sickening clarity, she knew she had handed his enemies the dynamite. But I didn’t mean to, she wanted to say, I didn’t think, I just wanted him to notice me …
‘I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that Ben Fitzmaurice cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead,’ Richard said.
Too late.
There was a split second in the studio when no one spoke. Dead air, her media studies teacher called it. Then, the sound of laughter. But it wasn’t coming from the television. It was coming from behind her. From Martin.
She turned. His face was gleeful.
‘He’s done it,’ Martin said. ‘At last. He’s done it.’
Cosima had no joy. She experienced a shrinking, as if the horizon had contracted and there was no way of connecting to what else was happening around her. She had thought she and Martin wanted the same thing – namely, to take her father and Jarvis down – but she realised now her feelings had been lying to her. He was her dad, after all, and perhaps it was possible to love and hate the same person when they were part of you.
‘He’s saying he’s passed the files to the Metropolitan Police!’ Martin said, with a single clap of his hands. ‘Yes, very good, Harriet – press home the point that it’s a criminal matter. Ha! This is working out better than we ever could have imagined …’
He squeezed her shoulder. It was the first time Martin had ever touched her. She tried to be happy. She wanted to celebrate the execution of their joint plan, this moment of triumph. But when she searched for joy, she found nothing.
The following forty-eight hours passed like scenery through a rushing train window: brushstrokes of melding colour, painted at warp speed by unknown hands. Her phone exploded. Her mother called and sent increasingly frantic texts. Her father emailed several times, trying to explain himself, trying to say sorry. She didn’t reply to any of them. She was too scared and too ashamed. TikTok was awash with videos of her father and Jarvis walking into New Scotland Yard. Not arrested, apparently, like some of the reporters stated, but interviewed under caution with a lawyer present. Martin brought home the papers and her parents were splashed across all the front covers. They’d used a recent picture of her father from the British Museum reception and reprinted the old photo of him and Jarvis as students, in white tie at a Pitt Club dinner inCambridge. Her mother was shown looking harassed at the wheel of their Range Rover, driving out of the Tipworth gates, hair in a loose ponytail, the flash of cameras reverberating off the glass of the car window. At least she’d be happy she looked thin, Cosima thought.
Soon, Cosima was getting calls from journalists who had uncovered her connection with Oblivion Oil and when she didn’t answer, they somehow traced her to Martin’s cottage and turned up on the doorstep. Martin had to keep the curtains closed to avoid the cameras. He made her cups of tea and brought them to her bedroom.
‘They’ll lose interest soon enough,’ he said. ‘Trust me. I used to be one of them.’
‘You were an art critic.’
He looked offended.
‘True. But I saw how the newsroom operated. Give them nothing, starve the story of oxygen and they’ll leave. Besides, you’re off to Bali tomorrow – they won’t be able to find you there as easily.’
‘Are you sure they won’t be able to trace this back to us?’
‘Positive. Richard Take won’t want to say where the files came from and the police definitely won’t want to admit the source was one of their own undercover officers. We’re safe. You especially. I haven’t mentioned your name once.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, meek with gratitude. Funny, really, how much she trusted him.
Cosima was counting the hours until she could leave. She had booked a car to drive her all the way to Heathrow the next morning. She wasn’t going to risk public transport. Suddenly, saving the planet didn’t seem as pressing as saving herself.
‘I still don’t know how they worked out I was here,’ she said, peering through a gap in the curtains. There was a television camera van parked illegally on the opposite pavement.
‘I would imagine your mother told them.’
