‘What’s yours?’

‘I think I have, maybe, a fear of boredom.’

That was when we moved towards each other, the combined velocity giving the impact an unexpected violence. Then we were kissing hard, tumbling sideways onto the bed, fingers reaching for zips and buttons. Naked, she was smooth and milk-pale, hot to the touch and in constant motion; spine arching, legs hooking, mouth searching. She was so unlike Clare it helped me keep Clare from my thoughts, which was convenient.

‘I can’t believe we’re doing this,’ she giggled afterwards, with lighthearted relish, as if we were skipping school or scrumping apples. Not that she’d have known the concept of the last: she ordered everything on her phone, even another woman’s man, and everything came to her in the delivery slot she’d selected.

‘Don’t you worry someone will walk in?’ I said.

‘No. We’re the sole agent.’

‘But yours can’t be the only set of keys. What if Richard or someone came for some impromptu viewing? You’d lose your job.’

‘Then I’d get another.’

‘Good luck with references. “I cannot in all conscience recommend Melia I-Don’t-Know-Her-Surname as a property negotiator because she was found in a high-end apartment abusing the client–agent trust by sleeping with the partner of a company director . . .”’

Melia’s lips curled. ‘Sounds bad when you put it like that.’

I was beginning to understand that she was a person with a strong sense of having nothing to lose – and she assumed no one else did either. It was easy to see why she and Kit were together.

‘It’s Quinn,’ she added.

‘What?’

‘My surname.’

‘So we can’t come here again, Ms Quinn?’

‘Probably not, it’ll be let soon, maybe by the morning. I showed a couple just now and they’re keen. But there are other places. I just need to pick ones without doormen and schedule a viewing for the end of the day. Then I take the clients down afterwards, wave goodbye, and come back up.’

‘What about security cameras?’

Her eyes widened, roguish, conspiratorial. ‘Who’s watching? And if they were, you’re just another client looking at a flat.’

To demonstrate our anonymity, or perhaps her own recklessness, she slipped from the bed and stood at the window, completely nude. When I protested, she wrapped herself in the gauzy drape, winding twice, three times, until she became an opaque Melia-shaped dummy at the edge of the window. I tried not to imagine the feeling of confinement wrapped like that.

‘Come back, Melia, come back! You’re like Cleopatra,’ I said, as she unfurled. ‘That was how she was presented to Caesar. Not in a curtain, though, in a carpet.’

Melia returned to the bed. ‘Was he pleased?’

I gripped her against me, ran my hands over her back and bottom. ‘Very, I would have thought.’

After we’d dressed and smoothed the bedding, I went to the window myself, nose almost to the glass. It was impossible not to feel a kind of holiday high. Sex with a woman twenty years younger than me in a bedroom in the sky. Lights from the planes climbing from the City as if staged for our adventurous urges and not those of the passengers within; the illuminated riverboat mapping its course silently below. It must have been the service that arrived at St Mary’s just before nine thirty.

As Melia consulted a photo on her phone to reorder the throws and cushions precisely as we’d found them, I took one last look out and knew, with total certainty, that whatever it was we’d started this evening, and no matter how strenuous the deception or debilitating the guilt (and I did feel guilt, whatever anyone might think of me), I would not be able to stop.

‘What?’ Melia said, beside me again, ready to depart.

‘I can’t believe you like me,’ I said, truthfully.

She smiled. ‘I told you. You know things. You’re funny.’

I was moderately knowledgeable and amusing, I conceded, not to mention euphoric enough to push from my mind the more obvious explanation of this miraculous pairing: she also thought I was rich.

10

27 December 2019

‘Well, you’re certainly not the first man to find himself in this position,’ Merchison says, and I assume he means tempted into infidelity generally as opposed to by Melia Roper specifically. I wonder if in his dealings with her he’ll infer that it was I who tempted her, she who was ‘not the first’ to be tricked and misled. A little police mind game to divide us, loosen our memories.

I’m saved from answering by the sight of DC Parry marching into view, a cardboard tray of Costa takeout coffees in hand. Though I’m not a Costa fan, at this stage in the game I’ll take the psychoactive boost in whatever form it comes. But at the corner of the building he pulls up to speak to someone out of sight and, to my horror, that figure reveals herself to be a uniformed officer. Is she there in support of the two detectives, poised to step forward the moment she gets the nod? On TV, they just hit a button on their phone and bark, ‘Request back up NOW!’ and two minutes later it’s there, officers fanned out, all escape routes covered.

She glances in our direction before dipping out of sight and I breathe a little easier.

Parry rejoins us. ‘I guessed black, no sugar,’ he tells me, delivering the tall cup with a thump. His ungloved hands have the greyness of cold.

‘That’s fine. Thank you.’ Coffee is expensive, should I offer to pay for mine? Then again, they’re preventing me from earning money here. Unlike Kit, I don’t get paid if I fail to turn up.

He remains standing. ‘Shall we move inside, warm up a bit? They’ve opened up.’

I appeal to Merchison, who is already on his feet and sipping at an espresso-sized cup: ‘How much longer do you think we’ll be? I really need to get to work.’ In actual fact, I can see Regan’s response to my text on the phone screen: WTF? Take as long as you need!

‘Just a little longer,’ Merchison says, ‘if that’s okay with you?’

Again, I read between the lines: It’s either here or we take you in. Charge you. Charge me with what? They clearly already knew about the affair, so that can’t be what he was hoping to extract from me in Parry’s absence, and whatever briefing Parry might have received while gone, he’s not announcing it any time soon.

‘Of course.’ I follow them into the vast public hall and across the acres of marble to a table far from the central bar and obscured by a broad supporting pillar. My cheeks are stiff with cold, aching as they thaw in the heated interior.

‘So we’ve just been getting up to speed on the current status between Jamie here and Mrs Roper.’ Merchison updates Parry, who grimaces as he listens. I sense he doesn’t care for the sex subplot, at least not the details of it.

I’m thinking, meantime, of Clare. The deceived partner. This is not just about you, Jamie. ‘Can I just ask, have you spoken to my partner, Clare Armstrong?’ It strikes me that Melia must surely have let her colleagues know her situation; she can’t possibly have gone into work this morning. I picture her sitting in pyjamas on her yellow sofa, pale and tearful, with one of those family liaison people who nod gently and know the right lines to say – ‘It’s important to stay positive. We mustn’t catastrophize.’