I shook my head, calculating how much I should tell her. How much her nerves could stand.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she asked. ‘Bernard said that people sometimes get “sent down”, whatever that means, but not someone like you. Not my son. You haven’t been sent down, have you, Adam? Tell me you haven’t.’

  ‘I haven’t, Mum,’ I said, taking a breath. ‘Something happened, at a student party, and I’ve been told to stay away for a while, until it’s all sorted.’

  ‘A party?’

  I’d already said too much.

  ‘Something happened at a party,’ I repeated quietly.

  It was a while before she spoke.

  ‘Bernard said Cambridge was in his newspaper today. Front page. I didn’t read it – his choice of papers is worse than his taste in women – but he told me what it said.’

  I closed my eyes. I did glance at the newsstand on the station in Cambridge when I left this morning, but they’d already sold out of papers. Now I knew why.

  ‘Someone died at a party I was at. I tried to revive him, but he was already dead.’

  ‘When Bernard mentioned the newspaper article,’ she continued, seemingly oblivious to what I’d just said, ‘I didn’t think anything of it, until I told him about your reading week.’

  ‘The college thinks it’s best for me to keep away while they establish exactly what happened.’ Mum’s arms began to tremble. ‘Away from the journalists.’ It was a lie, but I didn’t want Mum to worry any more than she was already.

  ‘They said it was a “Cambridge drugs orgy”,’ she continued. ‘According to Bernard, that’s how he died. I thought those days were behind you.’

  ‘I don’t take drugs any more, Mum. And being away from Cambridge is just a temporary thing.’

  She’s so nervous about drugs, has seen heroin mess up too many young people’s lives. It’s only recently that I’ve realised how much pain I caused her by going off the rails after Dad died, even if I did avoid heroin. It was the constant worry that I might succumb that upset her. And she was in enough pain as it was, grieving for Dad.

  ‘Thank goodness your father isn’t here to see this,’ she said. ‘A small mercy.’

  ‘Please, Mum.’

  ‘You did so well to get there. So well! And now you’ve thrown it all away.’

  ‘I haven’t thrown anything away.’

  ‘He would have been so proud of you – Adam Pound getting to Cambridge, to study medicine! I was so proud. The whole town was. How you managed to turn your life around. I thought Newlyn had the drugs problem, not Cambridge.’

  Bloody Bernard. At least it sounded as if it was only conjecture, just Bernard putting two and two together. My name and photo weren’t actually in the paper – at least I hope they weren’t.

  ‘I’m going upstairs,’ I said. ‘I’ll just take my bags up to my room.’

  ‘How long will you be staying?’

  ‘I don’t know. My director of studies has given me plenty of work. Lots of books.’

  ‘So I can tell people you are here to read? Tell Bernard.’

  I couldn’t care less what she tells Bernard. He was always jealous of Dad, his painting, the profiles of him in the local paper: the artist fisherman. ‘You can tell them that, yes, Mum.’

  I picked up my suitcase and was about to go upstairs when I looked at Mum again, her tiny frame in the tiny kitchen. I put the case down and went over to her. She turned, eyes red with crying, and we hugged.

  ‘It’s going to be OK, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back at Cambridge before that roast dinner is ready.’

  I nodded at the old kitchen range, with its battered enamel lids and low-down tap for hot water. It’s never had much heat at the best of times and looked more on its last legs than ever.

  ‘Don’t throw away this chance, Adam. Promise me you won’t?’

  I thought of Lecter, Louis. The compromising footage, the deal. ‘I promise.’

  48

  Adam stands outside the building in Mayfair, looking up at the impressive matrix of Portland stone and glass. A CCTV camera above the main doors eyes him back, glinting in the spring sunshine. Is Louis watching him now? Did he track him on his journey over from Maze Hill, pick him out in the Monday morning commuter crowd? Surely someone like Ji wouldn’t allow his local cameras to be hacked. Adam checks the street sign again to make sure that he’s at the right address. Ashburton Place. Ji has definitely gone up in the world.

  Adam called his old friend last night, when he got back from Wiltshire, on a cheap, pay-as-you-go phone that he’d bought in Marlborough, asking if he could meet. He’s left his iPhone at the house, won’t use it unless he has to. Tania’s doing the same.

  ‘OK, no problem,’ Ji said. ‘I’ve moved house – what’s this new number?’

  ‘I’ll explain when we meet. Where are you living these days then?’

  Ji gave him the address. ‘One of my games came good,’ he added, chuckling.

  It must have done for him to be living in this corner of London, overlooking Green Park. Adam can’t even begin to think how much the place must cost to rent. He takes a deep breath and walks into the airy reception, tracked by a bank of cameras. Glancing up at them, he explains to the concierge who he has come to see and is shown to a lift, which raises him silently up the side of the building.

  Adam has stayed in touch with Ji over the years, but he’s not seen him as much as he’d have liked. Guilt seems to be a recurring theme of their friendship. Ji went back to live in China after he completed his degree at Cambridge, via an MBA at Harvard. Adam promised to visit him in Shenzhen but never quite managed to. And then Ji returned to live as a non-dom in London six years ago, drawn like many Chinese entrepreneurs by the opportunity to invest in the capital’s booming tech start-up sector. They soon rekindled their friendship, and when Freddie was born Adam asked Ji if he would be his ‘odd father’ – Ji was not religious, as far as Adam knew. Ji was delighted, gifting Freddie something wholly inappropriate: one of his company’s new virtual reality headsets for babies.

  A couple of years later, Ji invited Adam and Tania to his London wedding. When the invite arrived by personal courier, Adam began to suspect Ji’s various tech businesses were booming. The wedding was held at Hakkasan, round the corner from Ji’s new home, and neither he nor Tania had ever been to anything so lavish in their lives. The champagne flowed all night and the food – Peking duck with Prunier caviar, Wagyu beef dim sum – was to die for. The guestlist was impressive too: an A-list of techpreneurs from mainland China, including Zhang Zhidong, co-founder of Tencent, one of the largest gaming companies in the world.

  ‘Welcome,’ Ji says, ushering Adam into his apartment on the third floor. The space is vast, all marble worktops and stone-slab flooring, inlaid kitchen cabinets and buttermilk leather sofas. But it’s the enormous TV screen in the main living area that Adam’s eyes and ears are drawn to. It dominates the entire apartment and some sort of computer game is in progress – just as Adam would have expected. The noise of bullets ricochets across hidden, surround-sound speakers.

  ‘Phang Phang’s beta-testing,’ Ji says, nodding in his wife’s direction.

  Adam hadn’t noticed the diminutive figure on the huge sofa, eyes glued to the screen. There’s a large explosion, so loud that Adam ducks, and the figure throws down the console in mock anger.

  ‘She’s my harshest critic,’ Ji says, as she comes over.

  ‘I’m sorry, so nice to see you again, Adam,’ Phang Phang says, smiling as she smooths back her hair.

  ‘You too.’ Adam shakes her hand. He’s only met her a few times and has forgotten how open she is, how enthusiastic her smile.

  ‘Tea?’ Ji asks Adam.

  ‘Thank you,’ Adam says. ‘If you’re having one.’

  ‘Where there’s tea, there’s hope.’ Ji puts an arm around Adam. ‘Come.’

  Adam didn’t go into details on the phone. He just said that he was in trouble and needed Ji’s advice. He smiles at Phang Phang and follows Ji into a side office, where he’s ushered over to a corner sofa while Ji sits down behind a big desk. On the wall behind him is a framed quotation: ‘Keep your eye on the donut, not the hole.’

  ‘Definitely not Confucius,’ Adam says.

  Ji smiles, turning to look at the quote. ‘David Lynch. Very good advice.’

  A moment of silence as the two friends look at each other. The years have definitely been kinder to Ji than to Adam.

  ‘So, Adam, how can I help?’ Ji asks. ‘Tania and the kids well, I hope?’

  ‘They’re good.’ Adam feels a pang of sadness, wishes he were back down in Wiltshire with them.

  ‘And the doctor’s life?’ Ji asks. ‘Still doing no harm?’

  ‘It’s not great, actually,’ Adam says. ‘In fact, I think someone’s trying to harm me. Destroy my life.’

  49

  Ji doesn’t react or seem surprised. He’s never been one for extravagant displays of emotion. Over the years, he’s become more measured, wiser, cultured too, feeding his unashamed Anglophilia. His passion for gaming remains undimmed, but these days he balances it with trips to West End theatres and the English National Opera, often inviting Adam and Tania to join him. They go when they can, but the arrival of children has made things trickier.

  ‘And are they succeeding?’ Ji asks. ‘Is your life being destroyed?’

  Adam glances out of the window, takes comfort from the fertile park spread out below. There are no cameras down there, not as far as he knows. He will walk back that way, stick to London’s wide-open spaces.

  ‘I’ve been accused of sending inappropriate texts – words and images – to one of my female teenage patients. It doesn’t get much worse for a paediatrician.’

  ‘Did you mean to send them to someone else?’ Ji asks, chuckling.

  ‘I didn’t send any images,’ Adam says, protesting. ‘Someone must have hacked my phone.’

  ‘Have you been through your old texts? Are they showing up in your history?’

  ‘There’s nothing.’ Adam shakes his head. It was the first thing he checked after he left Stephen Goddard at the café in Greenwich.

  ‘So someone’s spoofed your number. Easy enough to do. The question is not how but why. Why would someone do this?’

  Adam spent the train journey up from Wiltshire last night considering how much to confide in Ji. Tania’s right. Whatever’s happening to him, the threat feels more hi-tech than medical, more in Ji’s wheelhouse than his own. He needs his friend’s advice, his expertise, but he has never told him about the deal he struck with Louis. There were times at Cambridge when he came close to confiding in Ji, but the moment always passed. Months passed. And now here they are, twenty-four years later.

  ‘Do you remember Louis?’ Adam asks, as Phang Phang brings in two cups of tea. ‘The guy who made that film of me.’

  Adam had shown Ji the final, sanitised edit in his college room, once Louis had finished working on it and posted it to him. It didn’t include Lecter’s death, of course, but it had still been a tough watch, knowing how things had really ended. Ji thought it was great but joked that it would never make it onto rotten.com. ‘You need a bit of death in there,’ he’d said. ‘Some blood and guts.’ If only he’d known.

  ‘He held that party, right?’ Ji asks. ‘Where the American guy died.’

  Adam nods. He was hoping not to linger on Lecter’s death, but it was the most traumatic thing to have happened at university during their time there. Not easily forgotten.

  ‘I remember we went to Louis’ house and I waited outside while you checked for a hidden camera in his bathroom,’ Ji says, smiling.

  Ji truly does have the memory of an elephant. Whenever they meet up, he reminds Adam of some anecdote or indiscretion from uni that has long since been erased from his own brain. The time they got so drunk together at the Eagle that Ji had to carry Adam home. The night Ji tried to leap the Cam in a supermarket trolley at 2 a.m. and went headfirst into the river.

  ‘You thought the redhead who jumped off King’s College Chapel had been secretly filmed by Louis having sex and taking drugs,’ he continues.

  ‘You don’t forget much, do you?’ Adam says, smiling, but hearing the details again makes him nervous. Sad.

  ‘How could anyone forget these things? Actually, I’ve been thinking about them again only recently – we finally bought that spyware company I was telling you about.’

  ‘The rival to Pegasus.’

  Adam has read all about the Israeli spyware that’s used by governments around the world to hack into the smartphones of journalists, opposition leaders and activists. Ji once tried to explain how it worked. ‘Jailbreaking – a malicious remote exploit,’ he said. But it wasn’t the spyware’s ability to read texts and track calls that had caught Adam’s eye. It could access and operate a handset’s camera and microphone without the user knowing.

  ‘I also remember you thought there was a connection with the redhead’s death and the student who died at the party, but you didn’t want to discuss that with me.’

  Adam shifts his position on the plush sofa. How much does Ji know?

  ‘And after we left Louis’ house that day, I never asked,’ Ji continues, more serious now. ‘Except once. When I found a photo of the dead party student on rotten.com. I showed it to you, but you said it wasn’t the same person. Later I checked, when his photo appeared in the newspapers. It was the same person.’

  ‘But you didn’t challenge me,’ Adam says, sipping his tea.

  ‘I told myself that you had made a mistake. But I knew it was something else. That there had to be a good reason why you didn’t want to talk about the party.’

  Without warning, tears begin to well up in Adam’s eyes. He has never cried in front of Ji, has seldom shown any emotion at all. Theirs isn’t that kind of friendship.

  ‘But maybe you want to talk about it now?’ Ji continues, his voice softer.

  ‘I’ve only just told Tania about it,’ Adam says, getting a grip. ‘All this time I’ve never told anyone.’

  ‘“If you would wish another to keep your secret, first keep it yourself.”’

  ‘You’re right,’ Adam says. ‘I didn’t tell you everything about the party. Or Louis. Or the redhead.’ The term seems so wrong now, offensive. ‘He was called Aldous. Had a lovely girlfriend called Grace.’

  ‘Aldous and Grace,’ Ji repeats.

  It feels better to hear their names. ‘And what I’m going to tell you now has to remain between the two of us.’

  Ji nods his head solemnly.

  ‘There was a hidden camera in Louis’ bathroom,’ Adam continues. ‘He tried to blackmail Aldous, with tragic consequences. And then he secretly filmed me.’

  ‘Having gay sex and taking drugs?’ Ji asks, a familiar, mischievous smile dancing across his lips.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  Adam tells him the whole story, the film’s shocking ending. His Faustian deal with Louis. Clio’s reappearance in his life twenty-four years later, semi-naked in his kitchen. The failed abduction of Freddie in the park. The sexting allegations. The mysterious alphabet cards. And his fear that Louis’ camera has started to roll for a second time.

  ‘I didn’t push him out of the window,’ Adam adds. ‘In case you were wondering.’

  Ji holds up his hands in mock protest. ‘Please, I don’t doubt you for a second, Adam. I heard it all at the inquest, remember? But even if you did—’

  ‘No one deserves to die,’ Adam interrupts. Not even Lecter. Ji had been a good friend, went along to both days of the inquest with Adam to offer moral support.

  ‘In my world, the bad guys always die. I personally insist on it,’ Ji says, nodding at a framed poster on the wall for one of his most successful videogames.

  ‘But if Louis’ film of me in the bathroom was ever made public…’

  ‘It might be a problem.’ Ji shrugs. ‘Depending on the quality of the footage. Nobody trusts film any more. We can do too much with deepfakes these days. But the second film he is making… This could be more of a problem. A much bigger problem.’

  ‘It’s not exactly going to be a montage of my finest moments,’ Adam says, worried by Ji’s sudden shift in tone. ‘More a study of a middle-aged man’s life imploding.’

  But Ji isn’t listening. ‘Are you certain that you’re being filmed?’ he asks.

  ‘I know for sure that someone was filming me from the garden when Clio visited. And yesterday, when I was down at Tania’s parents, there was a drone flying nearby. I can’t be 100 per cent certain, of course. And Tania thinks I’m being paranoid. I’ve just got this feeling, that’s all. Tania’s dad recently had new security cameras fitted too. Could they have been hacked? Could the security cameras at work? The one on our street? You know better than me how these things work, Ji. Maybe I am just being paranoid.’

  It’s a while before his friend replies and when he does, his voice is even more serious.

  ‘You’re safe here. This place is swept regularly. But you might not be so safe out there.’ He gestures to the window. ‘These cameras you mention, it’s possible – possible but not easy – to hack into all of them. Most domestic security cameras are operated by unsecured Wi-Fi with unencrypted passwords, which makes them vulnerable to what we call “man-in-the-middle” attacks. And a search engine like Shodan allows someone to scan for vulnerabilities in the security of any domestic device connected to the internet. Throw in a packet sniffer, and they’re in. State-owned CCTV is more tricky, but it’s doable.’ He flips open his laptop and starts to type. ‘Have you ever heard of a place online called the red room?’

  Adam shakes his head. It doesn’t sound good.

  50

  May 1998

  I bent down towards the toddler, a three-year-old called Zac.

  ‘High five?’ I asked, smiling.

  Zac grinned and high-fived me back.

  ‘We’ll be in touch,’ Doctor Ruan Pender said, showing Zac and his mother to the door.