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“Ed Tewkesbury?”

Flint and Lol both looked at each other and then turned back to Ana and shook their heads. “Never heard of him,” said Lol.

“Me neither,” said Flint.

“Well,” sighed Ana, “we will have by this time tomorrow.”

chapter twenty-one

At eleven o’clock the following morning, Flint and Ana dropped Lol off at her flat. Her flight to Nice was at three that afternoon and she wanted to shower and pack. They pulled up outside her house on Bevington Road.

“Now,” she said to Ana, “I’ll have my mobile with me so just phone me, right. I want all the developments. I want to know what’s going on. I cannot believe that I have to go away. Now. Just when you’re about to find out what’s happening. And you, Lennard”—she leaned in toward the partition—“you look after this girl, OK? Don’t let anything bad happen to her and behave yourself.” She gave him a big smacker on the cheek and then smiled at Ana. “I’ll be back on Thursday, right, and I’ll phone you the minute I get in. And promise me, Ana, promise me, that whatever you do, you don’t go home. OK?” She gripped her hands and stared deep in her eyes.

“Promise,” Ana said.

“Good,” said Lol, grabbing Ana’s shoulders and giving her a huge bear hug. And then she picked up her handbag and got out of the car. Ana felt her gut suddenly clench up with anxiety. Lol was going. Lol, who’d looked after her and taken her out and made sure that she didn’t feel scared and alone in a big, strange city—her new friend, Lol.

Ana sat in the back of Flint’s car sadly watching her new friend climbing the steps up to her bright green house. She stuck her head through the window as Lol put her key in the door. “Have a good time,” she said sadly. “I’ll phone you.”

Lol pushed the front door open and blew her a kiss. And then she disappeared. And Ana was all alone in the world again. She suddenly felt like crying.

She breathed in when she saw Flint turning around in the front. “Can I interest you in a seat up front?” he said, eyeing up the passenger seat and smiling kindly.

Ana nodded. “Thanks,” she said. She picked up her rucksack and slid into the front seat. Flint looked at her with concern. “You all right?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, “I’m fine. I’m just—I think I might miss Lol.”

“Don’t you worry about a thing, Ana,” he said, grinning at her, “I’ll look after you, I promise.”

Ed Tewkesbury’s office was housed in a wide, five-story Deco office block squeezed, like War and Peace between two novellas, between a sandwich bar and an Italian restaurant. Flint held the door open for Ana as the intercom buzzed to let them in. A uniformed security guard at the front desk directed them to the fifth floor, which they reached by a tiny mirror-lined elevator.

“He might not know that Bee’s dead, you know?” Flint said. “We might be the bearers of bad news.”

The elevator pinged and slid open and they stepped out into a plush reception area. A girl with platinum-white hair with black streaks in it looked up at them brightly from behind a glass-brick desk. She was wearing one of those headsets like Britney Spears wears in her videos.

“Hi!” she beamed, “can I help you?” As they approached Flint noticed that she smelled overpoweringly of strawberries.

“Yes,” said Ana, “we’re here to see Ed Tewkesbury.”

“And do you have an appointment?”

“Uh-huh. He said to meet him here at twelve. At noon. Midday.”

All three of them turned their eyes toward a large chrome clock on the wall to the left. It was dead-on twelve. And noon. And midday.

“I’ll just try him for you. Who shall I say is here?”

“Ana Wills and Flint Lennard. Thank you.”

Flint and Ana both stood smiling at her as she tapped numbers into her switchboard. “Hi, Shona, it’s Amber here, I’ve got an Ana Flint and a Leonard Wills here to see Ed. Cool. Cool. Cool. Uh-huh. Cool. OK.”

“Hi,” she beamed again, “Ed’s just finishing off in a meeting. He’ll only be five minutes. Would you like to take a seat?” She pointed behind them at a denim-covered sofa with contrast stitching and rivets and huge pockets on the arms. Trade magazines were spread in a fan on a glass-brick table. Flint picked up a copy of Broadcast and started flicking briskly through it. He didn’t like offices. They made him feel uncomfortable. He’d never had to work in an office in his life, apart from one week—well, three and a half days, actually—on a youth training scheme when he was sixteen, working at a firm of accountants in Palmers Green. He’d had to wear a suit that belonged to his cousin Paul. Paul was a slight boy at least four inches shorter than Flint and with a habit of letting his cuffs trail in his food judging by the encrustations that Flint had had to scrape off with a knife before he could even contemplate putting on the jacket. Unable to stomach the prospect of wearing Paul’s stinky nylon shirt, too, Flint had worn one of his own frayed-cuff school shirts, and his mother had tried to tame his tufty, Glen Hoddle–esque coif with some of his dad’s old Brylcreem from a tin that had been rusting in the bathroom for ten years. He’d looked a complete clown and had been treated accordingly, particularly by the snobbish secretaries with the frilly-collared blouses and stiff hair. They’d made him stick stamps on envelopes and clean the fridge and take things to the post office every five minutes and make them tea in their prissy little cups and saucers, and he’d hated every second of it. He’d thrown a box of PG Tips—leaf, not bags—all over the desk of one of the secretaries, called her a “fucking balloon-faced old trout,” and stormed out when she’d chastised him for taking a personal phone call, and as he’d walked out of the musty-smelling building and into the fresh crisp air of a January afternoon, he’d felt like the guy in Midnight Express. He’d joined the army the same day.

“Hi.” A skinny woman in turquoise pedal pushers and a black knitted halter top was standing in front of them, with one skeletal little bird hand clutching a folder and a big cold sore on her lip. “I’m Shona, Ed’s PA. He’s ready to see you now—would you like to follow me?”

Flint and Ana both stood up and smiled at Shona and then at each other. This was it. They didn’t talk as they made their way behind the unsettlingly thin figure of Shona, down a muted corridor. She knocked on a pair of double doors at the furthest end and a brusque male voice said “Come.”

It was a huge office with windows on both sides, one set overlooking the street below and the other a fire-escaped courtyard. They looked around them, absorbing the heavy limestone linen curtains, the biscuity calfskin sofas, the custom-made galvanized steel chandelier, the five-foot pewter candlesticks, and the screen-printed canvases. It looked more like the bachelor penthouse of an over-bonused city boy than an office.