THREE
Evie, coming back from the bathroom, couldn’t help but overhear some of Roscoe and Aubrey’s conversation. She paused in the hall, just before the kitchen door, then nearly collided with Aubrey’s tall figure when he emerged, walking briskly, holding a large cheesecake.
Poppy had already told her it was vegan, and Evie felt a flash of satisfaction knowing the man would hate every mouthful. But he merely nodded briefly as he stepped around her, not meeting her eyes. She watched him reach the living room, then she dived into the kitchen where Roscoe was rinsing a handful of cutlery.
“Who’s Liv?”
Her brother gave her a disbelieving look. “Surely you’ve grown out of listening at doorways?”
“I wasn’t listening. You men have very loud voices. I was merely an innocent passerby, caught in the auditory splashback.”
Roscoe pulled a face. “What a mental image. Thank you for that.”
“Is she an ex?” Evie persisted, coming to stand against the counter right by his elbow. “Did she crush his non-existent heart?”
The look Roscoe gave her now was genuinely annoyed, and she felt a moment’s guilt. It was easily cured, though, remembering Aubrey’s smug smile, his obvious delight in revealing the unethical nature of his work. They didn’t realise, these men in their offices, how their actions affected the world. Or they did, and they didn’t care. But there were schools and hospitals and children’s centres closing due to lack of funds, a million sorrows created every day, and all of it could be fixed if men like Domnall White would just pay their share. It drove her mad! It was so obvious , such old news, so boring to be the one harping on about it and waving words like society and responsibility and fairness around. Everyone hated her for it. “You make yourself unlikeable,” her mother had once told her. “You put people’s backs up and make life hard for yourself, and it’s all your own doing.” But she was past caring, resigned to being shrewish and nagging and unfeminine in her dogged refusal to comply, acquiesce, sit still and smile. No, she wouldn’t shut up. No, she wouldn’t just let it rest. Yes, she would ruin the mood at dinner parties because a street or two away people were starving and it was unbearable . She wanted to scream.
“It’s none of your business,” Roscoe said. “I’m not sharing Aubrey’s private life with you.”
“How can you be friends with him?”
“He’s a good man.”
She scoffed. “Good? When he almost literally steals money from—”
“Libraries and hospitals and yes, yes, I know.”
“You turned your back on that work, Roscoe. You don’t believe it’s right.”
“Evie.” He turned the tap off, looked her in the eye, giving her the wise big brother look as though she was still eight and crying over roadkill squirrels. “You need to learn to separate the person from the job. Separate the sin from the sinner, or whatever that quote is.”
“That would be convenient, wouldn’t it?” she said acidly. “If none of us had to answer for our actions. Is that how they excuse it to themselves?”
Roscoe gave a tired sigh. “You used to be so sweet, Eve. You’d love everything and everyone. When did you get so bitter?”
“When I realised that playing nice gets you nowhere.”
It was more or less what Zig had said. She recognised it with a sense of bleak inevitability, something deep inside her getting crushed. If she was bitter, it was only what the world had made her. The hopeful earth of the community garden turning hard and flat under the bulldozer’s wheels.
She spent the rest of the evening talking determinedly to Poppy, trying to make amends for the shadow she’d thrown over dinner. It was a familiar feeling, this guilt. Because despite all her internal protestations about being the unflinching, shrewish one sacrificing herself for the greater good, she didn’t like hurting people’s feelings. Not people like Poppy, whom she already loved. She was almost as besotted with her as her brother was.
“Marry her,” she whispered to Roscoe as she stood up to leave. He followed her to the hallway, smiling, his earlier irritation already forgotten.
“That’s the plan.”
She abandoned putting her shoe on and stared at him, face split with glee. “Really?”
“I’ll let Hugo go first. Don’t want to steal his thunder.”
“Hm,” she said noncommittally, returning to the business of her shoes. The fact her very best friend was with her eldest brother had taken some getting used to. She was happy for them. She was also intensely lonely, the few areas of Amelia’s life that weren’t taken up with the all-consuming job of managing an entire estate now occupied by her annoying big brother.
“You next?” suggested Roscoe with a hint of apology at touching on a raw subject.
“God, no.” Then, a sudden suspicion occurring to her, she gave Roscoe a sharp look. “That’s not why you invited him , is it? Tell me you’re not playing matchmaker?”
He grimaced. “For my little sister? No. Definitely not. And I wouldn’t anyway. Not with Aubrey.”
“Because he’s too old? Too evil?”
Roscoe rolled his eyes and gave her shoulder a brotherly shove. “No. Because he’s too…Aubrey.”
She frowned. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” Roscoe shook his head, looking as though he wished he hadn’t said anything. “He’s…complicated. Doesn’t do relationships. And he’s definitely not right for you, Eve. Any idiot can see that. You’d terrify the poor man.”
“Me?” she protested.
But then there was a shadow at the end of the hallway. Aubrey approaching, making the generous hallway seem much smaller than it was. Evie finished putting on her shoes and picked up her bag, ignoring the two men’s conversation.
“I’m calling it a night, Roscoe. Early start. You know.”
“I do. Thanks for making it, though. It was good to see you.”
“You’re missed. At BG. It’s not the same. I’ll say hello to your father, shall I?”
Evie glanced up in time to see the mixture of expressions that crossed Roscoe’s face. He settled on a lopsided smile, a little strained. “I suppose so.”
Aubrey just nodded, understanding, and squeezed his shoulder. Then he looked at Evie.
“How are you getting home?”
“Tube,” she said, at the same time as Roscoe said, “Taxi.”
She exchanged a look with her brother. “The tube is fine.”
“A taxi is safer.”
“It’s central London.”
“I’ve ordered a taxi,” said Aubrey. “Share mine.”
She gave him a disbelieving look. He met it with a bland expression.
Dementedly, disloyally, her brother chimed in with, “That’s a good idea.”
“Don’t worry,” said Aubrey, reaching past Evie to open the front door and somehow managing to shepherd her out before she could think of a semi-polite way to protest this absurd plan. “I’ll see she gets home safe.”
“Thanks, man,” said Roscoe. “Appreciate it.” He winked at Evie. “Night, sis. Have a good trip.”
She stared at the closed door, jaw clenched, then shot a look at Aubrey who was standing complacently at the top of the stairs, one hand on the banister rail, the other gesturing down. “Shall we?”
“I’m getting the tube,” she said, following him sullenly down the stairs.
“The taxi is already here.”
She stared at the dark back of his head, hating it.
He said nothing more until they were out in the street, the night sky stretching to infinity, offering no comfort, just an implacable, careless sort of judgement. Silly humans, it seemed to say. Silly problems.
Street lamps glinted on dew-wet cobbles. The black cab sat idling by the kerb, the sound of the electric engine still strange to Evie’s ears. It had turned cold. She had no coat, the day having been so hot. But Aubrey was already shrugging out of his jacket, eyeing the betraying goosebumps on her bare arms.
“No,” she said, appalled and embarrassed at being offered the jacket.
He just sighed and put it around her shoulders, then opened the taxi door.
“Don’t worry, you don’t have to talk to me. I’ll entertain myself.” He pulled his phone from his pocket with a jaunty wave. “Spend the journey buying oil shares. Investing in weapons manufacturers.”
“Oh my God, you’re…”
“Awful? I know. Get in the taxi, Evie. I told your brother I would take you home, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
“You can’t order me around.”
He fixed her with a look, some of the bluntness easing from his expression. “Do you really want to get the tube home? With all the drunks? Walk alone down dark streets? Because you ought to be able to, shouldn’t you? If the world was wonderful, women would be able to walk at night without any fear. But the world isn’t like that, no matter how much your inner feminist wants to reclaim the streets. It isn’t a problem that can be fixed here, now, by you putting yourself at risk just to prove a point. I don’t personally think it can be fixed at all. Some things about the world are irrevocably awful. So please get in the bloody car.”
She might have protested further, but too many news stories haunted her mind. She got in, the silky lining of Aubrey’s jacket warm around her shoulders.
“Where did you get that?” asked Fi when Evie let herself into the flat, everything seeming so much smaller and drabber after Roscoe’s, the place, as usual, smelling inexplicably of baked beans.
Evie glanced down, colouring in surprise as she realised she was still wearing Aubrey’s jacket.
The cab ride had been thirty-five minutes of frosty silence, Aubrey doing nothing but look mildly surprised when she’d given an insalubrious postcode in north London to the driver rather than her parents' Mayfair house or any of the places you might normally find a Blackton. Then he’d spent the journey looking at his phone. Trying to catch glimpses of what he was doing—oil, or arms, or some other dastardly thing—she’d instead got nothing but impressions of his shape and size in the darkness, and the repeating gold of the passing street lamps glinting off his dark eyes or the screen on his phone. Catching her looking, he’d silently turned his phone towards her, smiling ironically. It was some fiendishly complicated-looking word game.
“Good luck with that,” she’d said, pretending she didn’t care about being caught spying, then she’d gone back to brooding on all the things she should have said to him that evening. She knew all the arguments, the facts, the figures. She’d made speeches at protest marches in front of thousands. But his unflappable smugness had thrown her, made her feel like the woman her mother told her she was. “Ridiculous, to be crying over mangy donkeys at your age. You could get away with it at twelve, Evelyn. Maybe even fourteen. But at twenty-four, it’s just embarrassing.”
She simply hadn’t been able to stand there in front of a man like Aubrey Ford and explain about the Spanish sanctuary, all the ribby, skinny animals, every terrified, beaten dog, every mangy bloody cat, not without knowing he would just laugh. The words had died in her throat. There wasn’t any point. As Fi often said, you had to choose your audience. You couldn’t change the opinion of a man like that.
“You’d never believe me,” she answered Fi now, pulling the jacket off and putting it down over the back of a chair before collapsing, exhausted, onto the sofa. She would have loved to go to bed. But she was currently sitting on it. So was Fi, at the other end of the sofa, scanning her phone, but pausing now, intrigued. The pink was nearly washed out of her pale brown hair. It was loosely tied back, except for a chunky fringe that hid half her tiny, elfin face.
“Tell me.”
Evie paused for a beat, looking at Zig who was sitting sideways in an armchair, scowling at the laptop on his knee. Sensing the expectant silence, he looked up. “What? And hi.”
“Hi. That jacket…” She nodded to where it lay folded on the chair back, catching the faint scent of Aubrey on her skin as she did so. “Belongs to a friend of my brother. Who just so happens to be Domnall White’s tax adviser.”
Fi’s eyes opened wide. Zig sat forward. “Really?”
“At my dad’s company.”
The admission left its usual slimy mark on her soul. Guilt by association.
“But this is brilliant,” Zig said eagerly, setting the laptop down on the floor and shifting position, his whole body angled towards her.
“Is it?”
“I just told you FTP have made Domnall White their chief target. They’re making noise. Trying to get all those old stories back in the news—that fire in the sweat shop, the underage workers, all of it. But they’re also digging up all the dirt on him that they can, making a legal case. Trying to find something that will finally stick in court.”
“He always gets off. He has insanely expensive lawyers.”
“He’s been evading tax for years. If your friend has some evidence—”
“ Not my friend. And I don’t think anything they do at BlacktonGold would be illegal. Unethical, maybe. But that’s not quite the same thing.”
“There’s bound to be something.” Zig stared at her, avid, expectant. “You might be our way in.”
“I don’t see how,” said Evie.
“This friend of yours,” began Fi.
“Again: my brother’s friend. Definitely not mine.”
Fi waved away the distinction as though unimportant. “This guy—”
“Aubrey.”
“Aubrey. If he’s sorting the guy’s taxes, he must have access to everything. All his finances. All the off-shore tax havens, the shell companies, every rotten part of the network.”
Zig nodded, eyes glowing with a fanatical sort of light Evie knew well. It was discomforting having it trained on herself. “If we could get access to that…” he breathed as though praying.
Fi nodded rapidly. “If she gets close to Aubrey, and Aubrey’s close to Domnall…” Then, catching Evie’s frown, “You said he’s not your friend, yes? And if he could help bring down Domnall White…?”
Zig picked up his laptop again. “Look, Eve, do I need to show you these pictures again? The burns on these kids? The conditions they were working in? These are the UK retail workers who lost their pensions. And look, here, this is the woodland he’s just bought. It’s got nightjars in it—”
“No.” Evie winced back from the laptop Zig had thrust at her and the horrible photos. It was currently showing Domnall topless and orange on his super yacht. Urgh. “I don’t need reminding.”
“Then you’ll do it?”
“I don’t see what I can do.” She looked dubiously at the jacket lying folded and innocuous. “Aubrey doesn’t like me.”
“Don’t worry,” said Zig. “We’ll figure it out. Tell us everything you know.”