Florence sat on the pavement beside his ankle. A woman with a pushchair walked past on the opposite side of the street,and a taxi turned the corner at the far end of Ebury Street, its diesel rattle carrying in the still morning air. Barnaby watched it go.
Lex picked up on the second ring. The speed of it said everything Barnaby needed to know about how long Lex had been holding his mobile, waiting for him.
“Barns.” His voice was rough and unsteady. “Barns, listen, please just let me—”
“I’m listening.”
The permission cracked Lex open. The words came fast, tumbling over each other. He’d posted the photo. He’d been a prick, he’d been showing off, and he’d looked at it ten minutes later and known it was wrong. He’d deleted it. Because he couldn’t let the lads see Barnaby like that. Because Barnaby asleep in his jacket was something that belonged to him and not to a group chat—
Barnaby closed his eyes. The sun was thin and pale through his lids.
“—and I deleted it, Barns, I swear to God I deleted it. Only the swimmer screenshot it… It was up for ten minutes, I wasn’t thinking—”
“You were thinking,” Barnaby said. His voice was level. He’d chosen this pavement, this open stretch of Belgravia, because a man standing in public didn’t collapse. A man with passers-by around him and a dog at his ankle didn’t raise his voice, or beg, or say the things that were pressing against the inside of his ribs. “You were thinking clearly enough to open a camera, frame a photograph, type a caption, and send it. That’s a sequence of decisions, Lex. Not an accident.”
“I love you, Barns.” The words came raw and wrecked, with none of the bravado that Lex used to cushion himself. “I love you. I love you. I love you. I know that doesn’t fix it. I know. But you have to know that—”
“I do know.” Barnaby opened his eyes. Florence was gnawing at a twig she’d found on the pavement, her ears soft, unbothered. “I know you love me. That isn’t the part of us that’s broken.”
He heard Lex’s breath catch, a short punched sound, bitten off.
“You’ve lost my trust, Lex. Thank you for the time we had. And I know you’ll do well in the Morozov fight.” He pulled the mobile from his ear and ended the call before his voice could betray his deep seated fear that he had just severed the best thing that had ever happened to him.
The screen went dark. He held it for a moment, the case warm in his palm, then slid it back into his coat pocket and unwound Florence’s lead from his wrist. She looked up at him, her tail moving in a slow, cautious sweep.
“Come on,” he said, and they kept on walking.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Thestudio was smaller than he’d expected. He’d done television before, but those had been in arenas and media tents, big rooms with bad lighting and the smell of liniment stinking up the place. This was a converted warehouse in King’s Cross with exposed brick walls, a single camera on a tripod, and two leather armchairs positioned at a slight angle to each other.
Sharon had chosen the outlet. A long-form interview with Channel 4 News, sit-down format, Chris Flowers asking the questions. Sharon’s logic for picking them was characteristically surgical: they had a broadsheet audience, serious editorial credibility, and enough reach that the tabloids would clip it and redistribute without Lex having to sit in front of a red-top and pretend he respected them.
“There’ll be one take,” Sharon had said in the car. “No rehearsal. You say what you told me yesterday. You take absolute accountability, and make no excuses. If he pushes, youdon’t push back. You absorb it. You’re a boxer. You know how to take a hit and stay standing.”
She was in the green room now, which was actually a corridor with a water cooler and two plastic chairs. She’d pulled his head down and kissed him on the forehead before he went in, which she’d never done before. It had nearly put him on the floor.
Chris was already seated. He stood when Lex came in, shook his hand firmly, and gestured to the opposite chair. He was shorter than Lex had imagined from seeing him on screen, but he had the same calm, watchful stillness that Lex recognised from good referees. He needed to be careful; this was a man whose job was to let you hang yourself with your own words if you were stupid enough to run your mouth freely around him.
Lex sat. A woman clipped a microphone to his collar and adjusted a light. Someone counted down from three, and then the red light on the camera went solid.
“Lex, thank you for being here.”
“Thanks for having me.”
“You’ve been the subject of a great deal of coverage in the past seventy-two hours, following the leak of what’s been called the Tokyo Tumble Tally, a spreadsheet and group chat maintained by several athletes during the 2022 Olympics, in which sexual encounters were scored on a points system. Your name appears throughout. Before we get into specifics, I want to give you the chance to say, in your own words, what this was.”
Lex looked at the camera for a beat, then back at Chris. The chair was deep and soft and wrong for his body. He wanted to lean forward, elbows on knees, the way he sat in a corner between rounds. But Sharon had told him to sit back and keep an open posture.
“It was a game,” he said. “A stupid, cruel game. A few of us, me, two mates, set up a Google Doc where we ranked athletes we’d slept with, or wanted to sleep with, on a points system. Wegave higher points for harder targets. There was a WhatsApp group alongside it that people just kept being invited into. We kept score. We bragged. We treated other people’s bodies and their trust like something we could win.”
“And the name at the top of your list, classified under ‘God Tier’, was Barnaby Fitznorman-Bicester, the Marquess of Ashworth.”
“Yeah.”
“A man who is widely understood to be your partner.”
Lex’s jaw tightened. The present tense hit wrong, but he didn’t correct it. “That’s right.”
