“Oh.” Then my brain caught up with my ears. “Hang on, did you sayinvestigated? So even if it turned out we didn’t do anything, they’d still hold it against us.”
Oliver nodded.
“What about, you know, innocent until proven guilty?”
“That’s for criminal courts. The question here isn’t ‘Should you be allowed to go free,’ it’s ‘Should you be given privileged access to a vulnerable child.’ There’s a good reason it has a different standard of evidence.”
Thatprobablymade sense, although I was mostly just relying on my usual strategy of trusting that Oliver knew what he was talking about.
“It’s genuinely a formality in our case,” he added.
Only marginally reassured, I rested my cheek on his shoulder. “This is some real grown-up shit, isn’t it?”
“Despite how it may sometimes feel”—Oliver’s fingerscontinued to card soothingly through my hair—“we are, in fact, real grown-ups.”
Reflexively, I flinched. “I think I might be kind of scared.”
“So am I.” Oliver kiss-nuzzled my cheek. “But we’ll get through it. We always do.”
Chapter 16
As it turned out, getting an enhanced DBS check took less time and effort than getting a rich elderly punk wannabe to agree to a meeting to discuss your plans to save a minor environmental charity he didn’t give a shit about. In the end, the enhanced DBS took the two to four weeks the website said it would and came out basically fine. Finding a place and a time acceptable to the Earl of Spitalhamstead had taken over a month, and probably wouldn’t.
The last time I’d been to the Half Moon, I’d been seeing my arsehole dad, in the brief window when he thought he had prostate cancer and I thought he had redeeming features. So I guess it was kind of fitting that I was sitting there now, waiting to pitch a slightly different flavour of arsehole a dung beetle–themed music festival with a whimsically improbable name. To say I wasn’t in the mood was to grossly underestimate how vast the distance between me and the mood was right then. I wasn’t in the mood. I wasn’t near the mood. I couldn’t see the mood from where I was. If I typed the mood into Google Maps, it would zoom out so far you could see national borders.
Part of it was that this was always the worst stage in any project. The point where you’d done enough genuine work to prove that the thing you wanted to do was a thing you could actually do. And you now had to put that genuine work in front of some arrogant prickwith way too much money so they could spend ten seconds looking at the genuine work you’d done and decide whether the thing you could actually do was, in their judgement, worth doing.
And part of it was just that Saint was a colossal wanker.
And part of it was that, while my job involved a lot of pandering to colossal wankers, this particular colossal wanker had even more power over me than the colossal wankers I usually had to get money out of.
I sighed into my pint of Two Tribes Dream Factory, marginally relieved that I was no longer having to order Monkey’s Butthole or Zombie Squirrel Returns. Since I’d been here with my dad, the place seemed to have pivoted back towards music venue and away from hipster-focused craft ale emporium. Which was one of those take ’em where you find ’em victories and would hopefully convince Saint I was down with whatever he thought counted as the kids.
Eventually I heard the roar of Saint’s motorcycle, and a few minutes later, he swaggered in, peeling off his gloves with an air of superiority. He half nodded at me, then went straight past me to the bar and, like I remembered my dad doing years ago, justpointedat what he wanted. Then, enbeveraged, he swaggered back to the table and sat down opposite me.
“What’re you drinking?” I asked, because I thought he’d look down on something as bourgeois ashello.
He gave me a smug smile. “Lucky Saint.”
“Cute.”
Saint’s eyes narrowed and he gave me a look that was more challenging than disapproving. “That’s a funny way to talk to your patron.”
“I didn’t think you’d be into hierarchies.” Privately, I suspected he wasextremelyinto hierarchies, but he’d probably have reacted badly if I’d saidI’m gambling on you not being willing to admit what a hypocrite you are.
He laughed. “True that. True that. So what am I here for? You said you had a pitch for me.”
“That’s right.” I let it hang there for a while. I washopingI was whetting his curiosity, but I might just have been pissing him off.
“You going to tell me what it is?”
I took a sip of my beer. “Well, we discussed things in the office, and we can all see why you don’t want to carry on with your father’s legacy.”
“Even the posh arsehole?” asked the posh arsehole.
“Even him. But we got to thinking, ‘Whyshouldthis be your father’s legacy? Why shouldn’t it be yours?’”
Saint didn’t look impressed. “Because,” he said, “and I really want to make this clear, I couldn’t possibly give less of a shit about beetles.”
