catches me by surprise.
‘What do you mean?’ I say, letting out a small, odd-sounding laugh. ‘What’s Dad done? Has he upset you about something? I know he goes a bit crazy with the pressure and all his talk about Oxford, but that’s only because he wants the—’
‘The best for me, I know.’ He cuts me off. His eyes are staring somewhere above my shoulder, still not meeting my gaze. ‘I told you, it isn’t anything about exams.’
‘Then I don’t see what he’s done to upset you.’
‘It … it isn’t like that. Forget it. I’m sorry, it was stupid to bring it up now. Especially when you’re doing all this for tonight and have your dinner party on Monday …’
‘It’s only Grandma coming to dinner, not a CIA operation,’ I say, playing down my own stresses. ‘And “dinner party” might be a bit of an overstatement – it’s just Ally and Louise and Ernest.’ The mere thought of the three of them descending upon us for our usual Christmas gathering makes me feel instantly tired, but I don’t let it show. ‘Just tell me. I’m sure it’s nothing we can’t fix. Has he said something about me? Something I’ve done wrong? Have I upset him? God knows it can be easy to, sometimes.’
‘No, nothing like that.’
I feel myself getting exasperated. ‘Darling, you keep saying that but don’t actually say what it is about. How can I help if I don’t know what it is? Are you in trouble with the law? I’m going to keep guessing until you tell me.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m being stupid, it’s really nothing. Do you need any help with the plates and stuff?’ He gestures at the kitchen table.
‘No, it’s all under control,’ I say distractedly, wishing it were true and trying not to think how many more things need to be done before my mother arrives. Now he looks me in the eye and I see fear. It’s cold and stark and horrible, the look a mother hates to see in the eyes of her child. I move a few steps forward and take his shoulders in my hands, feel his warmth and the firm muscles beneath his Abercrombie sweater. ‘Tell me.’ I say it calmly but firmly and he opens his mouth to speak.
‘Could you … could you quickly come upstairs for a minute?’
My concerns about the unprepared food fall away quickly. ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Lead the way.’
As soon as we are upstairs, he leads me into his room and gestures at me to close the door. ‘Tell me now, what’s wrong.’ I walk to the other side of the room and sit down on his desk chair, facing him.
‘I shouldn’t have said anything,’ he mutters. He keeps glancing at the door as if it’s going to burst open at any moment.
The sentence frustrates me. How can he expect me to accept that as an answer?
‘Honey, Dad can’t hear us. I’m fairly sure he’s downstairs in the library, avoiding me in case I give him a job to do. We’re alone. And I’m not leaving until you tell me.’ I’m talking firmly now. Firm, but kind.
He finally looks me in the eye, takes a deep breath, apparently trying to choose his words carefully, and says: ‘I found something. Something a bit strange.’
‘Found what?’ My mind starts diving wildly to various different things he could have found. What does his father keep secret? Does he have a gun? That possibility is so unlikely it almost makes me laugh. Maybe evidence of an affair. That one sends a cold chill crawling across my skin.
‘It’s … it’s a bit hard to explain. They’re files. Files I found on Dropbox. In his folder.’
This takes me by surprise. ‘What? What do you mean? Why were you looking through his Dropbox folder?’
He sighs and rubs his eyes. This is clearly torture for him. I just want to hug him, but I’m scared of interrupting his explanation, so I sit still.
‘It’s … I think it’s something bad. Like, really bad.’
That cold chill is back. I really don’t like where this is going. A dark, menacing mass is forming in my head, as if it’s been let out of a deep, sickening recess of my mind.
‘What kind of thing are we talking about here?’
He stares at me and, for the first time this evening, I see resolve in his eyes. He’s going to tell me everything.
‘I think I’d better just show you.’
I nod, preparing for the worst.
‘Okay. Let me see.’
Julianne
Knightsbridge, London, 2019
I can feel myself getting colder, an ice cube making its way down my neck, across my back, burning its icy stain into my blood.
‘I really don’t want to rush you, but I don’t think we have much time.’ I try to sound kind, rather than impatient, but waiting for Stephen to snap into action is making me tenser by the second.
His eyes are starting to overspill and I reach out to put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Please, Stephen, I need you to show me. Right now. It may not be what you think it is. You may have got the wrong idea.’
He just shakes his head.
‘Is that a ‘no’ as in you won’t explain, or ‘no’ as in you won’t show me, or ‘no’ as in you haven’t got the wrong idea?’ My smooth tone is breaking at the seams, my impatience to discover if the worst is true tearing me apart inside.
‘No, as in I don’t know. I’m not sure. I just know it’s been eating me up for two days now and I need to talk to you about it.’ After a pause, he goes to a bag by his bed and takes the device out of its leather case. I sit down on his desk chair while he perches on the bed and starts tapping away on the tablet, his face bathed in the blue-white glow of the screen.
‘And you don’t think this could be anything to do with his work?’ I say, partly to fill the silence.
‘I don’t know, that’s why I wanted to show you.’
I nod and wait. Overall, James keeps his work to himself, a lot of it bound up in such rigorous confidentiality it’s hard for him sometimes to even vaguely explain what project he’s working on. My mother once joked that he was like a spy – a bit of a James Bond – but I assured her the job of a head analyst and coordinator at a data services company is one full of spreadsheets, desk work and boardroom meetings rather than anything very exciting.
Stephen is offering me the iPad. I take hold of it and glance at the screen, a mass of files in front of me. From the ends of the file names, I can see they’re PDF documents. There’s something in this that comforts me. At the back of my mind, I think there was a part of me that expected to see .mov or .mp4. But these aren’t videos. That’s a good thing, surely? I scan down
