‘Well, I wouldn’t mind if he tried harder to please people, actually. In fact, he could try a fuckload harder.’

  ‘Shane and I always said that both of us have a veto to say no… because we always agree. Eventually.’

  ‘That’s boyfriend/girlfriend stuff. It’s not the real world.’

  ‘It’s our world,’ she muttered.

  ‘Then it’s a case of “Welcome to the world of Adulting.” Come on in! It’s been expecting you for about twenty years. Now – your money went ka-ching! into my account today. I’ll lodge it into the fund tomorrow. Congratulations. You now own very much less than one per cent of an office block that will arise from its huge footprint next year. Feel good?’

  Jenny had no fear that the investment would fail. It wasn’t just her faith in Otto, it was also due to an obsessive childish belief that if she wanted it enough then it should, could and would happen. Oh God, the look that will be on Mum and Joan’s faces when they discover that we’ve anonymously bought the house. The dismay they’ll feel when they realise that they’re powerless; that I’m free of them; that I win. She was beginning to see how far she’d go to get what she wanted – and it was exhilarating; beyond anything she’d experienced.

  ‘I feel confident,’ Jenny answered. ‘And I do appreciate you doing this for me. For us. Shane and me. It’s very… kind.’

  Otto adjusted his glasses; he was a man used to accepting praise.

  She added, ‘And yet, I still can’t believe I’m going ahead with this.’

  ‘Don’t make excuses for what you want. It’s weak.’ His knees spread, as if the girth of his testicles required the width of a motorway.

  Jenny thought of all the ways she was betraying her husband: lying, scheming, taking their savings – most of which were Shane’s – and handing them over to the man he disdained. You have to do this to win. This is what winners do. They make sacrifices. In this world you must pick the strong and the clever, not the strong and the kind, to come out on top.

  Now that they were in their forties, how many doors did Shane think were still ajar for them? Especially given how few they’d managed to squeeze through so far. Shane liked to take out his boat over the weekend, but it was Otto who owned an acre of lakeshore land with fantastic fishing, privacy and clean air. It was Otto who had a wonderful A-frame three-storey country house where he screwed the models and actresses he brought up with him from Dublin. Fine, Shane was super-accomplished in his area of expertise; but on the real-life scoreboard, he’d never registered anything near serious money. There were a lot of men like Shane in neighbourhoods near Clareville, except twenty or thirty years older. She’d seen them in their shabby clothes, browsing the antique shops or in the newsagents to pick up their highbrow journal. They’d all swept by some critical juncture in their lives a while back – a poor career choice, a risk never taken. Now, they were out of options, their potential wasted, their boat well and truly sunk.

  Otto was staring at the other side of the bar, where a window overlooked the street. Did he recognise someone passing outside? Jenny followed his gaze. There was no one out there.

  Turning his attention back to her, he said, ‘OK. Well, it’s good that we now know where all our pieces are on the board. And again – sorry about that… incident, a few minutes ago.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Jenny replied, trying to make it sound as if she’d just remembered. Then she quickly added, ‘I probably over-reacted. Oh wait – no, I didn’t. You were just being a dick.’

  He held her gaze and she saw that his face was empty. For a moment, she searched it for regret; regret at kissing her; regret at giving her the opportunity to make this investment; regret at what he’d done all those years ago; regret at ever having reconnected with her. But there was nothing there. Absolutely zilch.

  She downed her pint and said, ‘Right, I have to go.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  21

  Now

  4.23 pm: Daylight fell on Shane’s skin, dazzling him like a bright tunnel leading from this life to the next. Things were beginning to feel out of his control and that had always made him nervous – the fact that you can’t control the things you can’t control. Surely this day couldn’t get any worse?

  After bumming his first cigarette in ten years from a teenager outside the local Spar, Shane pushed on through the afternoon shoppers, dragging on the smoke as if his whole existence depended on it. She ignored everything you’d said, and she betrayed you. She betrayed you in a way you couldn’t have imagined possible…

  Flagging down a taxi, he sat in the back and tried to streamline his thoughts.

  The way she spoke to you. The things she said. This was not a spur of the moment decision. Jenny’s a ditherer. She’s always needed time to make a serious decision. Therefore, she’d thought long and hard about it… and then went ahead and did it.

  Opening his phone, Shane clicked on his wife’s social media accounts. Her feeds were ticking along, but he knew that she often scheduled that stuff in advance. Jenny’s Instagram account had been updated twice that day. The first was a picture of her hugging a nurse before a backdrop of flowers and cards. Shane wasn’t in the shot and didn’t know it had been taken. The second picture was a selfie taken in the lobby of the hospital – looking as if she was checking out of a five-star hotel. Beneath it, she had written:

  First off, hubby is 100% fine. And now he’s coming home! Secondly there’s the small matter of #LaLucia – today is the opening of the incredible new store. I designed and outfitted the kitchenware department, so I’ll be there. Lots of updates coming this week from the hottest #launch in town! #IrishInteriors #womanboss #DesignerKitchenWare #InteriorLiving

  Sitting on top of the flood of comments congratulating Jenny on her first corporate gig, were the most recent ones that happened to condemn Jenny’s blasé attitude in the wake of an ‘incident’ that had nearly killed her husband and did kill a young woman. No doubt there had been plenty of other similar comments earlier; but those would’ve quickly disappeared, deleted by Jenny on the go. She was a tenacious censor of her own streams.

  Since the interior design magazines and supplements had started to run articles about her, Jenny was spending more and more time facing the glow of her social media platforms. Each paltry like was a titillating touch, every gushing comment a deep welcoming kiss and every private message from a consequential luminary, a shivering orgasm. Sometimes, it was as if Jenny’s life had become one big boast.

  On Saturday morning, a radio show had wanted to interview Shane from his hospital bed, but he had, of course, turned them down. Shane would never allow his life to become their movie of the week. Instead, they took Jenny for an interview about her ‘hellish experience’ and she’d managed to mostly talk about how her domestic assignments had inspired LaLucia’s project manager to hire her – and, as usual, she came across as intimidatingly smart. Since then, a cluster of front-line, blue-chip architects had left emails wanting to set up meetings to nail her on as a style-ambassador for their projects.

  Is Jenny the type of person who would gladly use her front row seat at Deirdre’s extinction to advance her own career and get a hashtag by association? The fact was, Jenny’s guilt at being a benefactor of Deirdre’s death had already been smothered by the raw excitement of her career having a late flourish of supernova proportions.

  There was a feeling in Shane’s stomach. Disenchantment? Deirdre was one of the world’s forgotten. She’d never had a chance. No expectations weighing. No great future awaiting. Soon, no one would know her name except the person who mowed the lawn near her headstone. She deserved better than this.

  Shane thought of the subject of his investigative work-in-progress – Samantha: a YouTube beauty vlogger who, before she was murdered, had been making six figures from her bedroom in a Midlands backwater by getting half a million hits a week on her make-up tutorials, all of which were eagerly watched by a galaxy of young girls.

  Am I finally seeing Jenny for what she is? Is my own book trying to tell me something? Is the dead Samantha very much like the alive Jenny? Samantha was a standard-issue influencer, who only wanted two things from life – to be liked and to be envied. Jenny, too, only wants two things from life – the Clareville house and her mother’s recognition as to just why she was her father’s favourite.

  Shane exited the taxi directly outside the Speed of Light Building – a twenty-storey modern office block, with rows of square windows climbing to the sky like blank eyes staring down. It was home to several merchant banks, a stock brokerage, insurance firms and a few floors of independent offices, one of which belonged to Otto Lubber.

  The revolving door spun him into the marble-floored lobby. Two- and three-seater sofas were sprinkled about, all occupied by people with mouths full of Bluetoothed urgency. The concierge, in a smart three-piece suit, stood still and silent behind his desk like a tailor’s dummy.

  Shane was stunned to realise that he didn’t have a plan. Otto was on the top floor – Jenny had told him enough times. But how to access him? If he asked the concierge to phone up, he’d sacrifice the surprise factor.

  Just then, the doors to an elevator slid open and a woman stepped out. Shane swung away from the desk and entered the lift, which was already occupied by three other businessmen arising from the underground car park.

  He jabbed the highest number – 18. As the elevator dinged its floor-by-floor beat, Shane backed into the corner and kept his head down. Just act like these guys. As Sun Tzu put it, ‘To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.’ The three men got out on floor 15 and the lift continued its ascent.

  As he stepped out onto the eighteenth floor, the doors of the elevator next to his slid shut. Trying to look as if he knew where he was going, Shane strolled down the corridor and noticed that, on this side of the building, people worked behind closed glass doors in offices that became progressively larger. At the end of the passageway, the space opened up into another lobby. There, behind a desk, was a young woman in her mid-twenties with a perfectly straight fringe and high ponytail – hair that one had to live up to. Clearly adept at multi-tasking, she issued instructions via a Bluetooth headset while editing a document on her laptop.

  As Shane approached, he slowly turned his head to one side, as far as it would go, until his neck joints crackled and sent jolts of satisfying pain down his spine. The receptionist’s tapping fingers slowed up. When Shane reached the desk, she raised her right hand to her ear.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Otto,’ he said.

  Her head perked up like that of a dog who’d just heard its master’s distant voice. ‘You are?’

  Ignoring the secretary as if she might want something from him and he was too busy, too important to indulge her, Shane checked his watch – 4.40 pm – before stepping around the desk and approaching the only door left on the floor. As Sun Tzu said, ‘It is the unemotional, calm, detached warrior who wins.’

  ‘Stop!’ She rose from the chair. ‘You can’t go in there.’

  Shane kept going, feeling that, finally, after all these years, a full stop was going to dot his relationship with Otto; that what was going to happen was an exorcism, banishing from his psyche, once and for all, that appalling moment from twenty-four years ago.

  22

  Twenty-Four Years Ago

  With his eyes on a first-class honours degree, Shane, at nineteen, was sitting his first-year exams in business and arts. In the packed examination hall, life felt special, the future was electrifying, and he was about to make his life’s first real mistake.

  Shane looked up from the answer booklet and carefully peeled back the wrapper of his tissue packet. Pulling free the first tissue, it revealed the one beneath, which was scribbled on with black biro, outlining in tiny bullet points the tricky third question that he’d just completed unaided. Shane smirked down on the unused cheat notes. For the past two hours he’d been ‘in the zone’; his head a clinically efficient reference library of everything he’d studied. Dotted around the exam hall, his colleagues and peers were still frantically writing away, trying to get every iota of information down from the overstuffed compendium of their brains.

  ‘Ten minutes. Ten minutes to finish up,’ the lanky, bespectacled invigilator announced.

  With the final exam in the can and the prospect of another night with Jenny only hours away, Shane sat back in the plastic chair and enjoyed a long, deep yawn.

  A hand landed on his shoulder and a smooth voice whispered, ‘It’s over for you, Shane.’

  Black spots floated across his vision. All the while, soft noise seeped into Shane’s well of dark, cold despair as around him a low, frantic, Morse-like communication occurred between nibs and paper. Pages turned and students murmured madly to themselves as they scribbled.

  The invigilator squinted through thick, round glasses; his tall gangly body bent almost painfully over the small desk. He whispered, ‘What were you thinking? You know this stuff. You’re an excellent student.’

  At the bottom of the last page of the answer booklet, Shane watched the marbled red barrel of an Aurora Fuoco fountain pen scribble VOID AT THIS POINT; the scratching of the nib the sound of his life collapsing. Shane looked up into the face of the invigilator, who was also his Economics lecturer. He was only eight years older than Shane but, being dressed in a pinstripe suit, white shirt and blue tie, seemed to be from an entirely different era. That Easter Island face had a natural authority, and, for a moment, Shane mistook its look of disbelief for pity. The name badge pinned over the chest of his jacket read: Otto Lubber, Invigilator.

  Otto whispered, ‘Shane, you shall remain seated here. After I’ve collected the booklets, I’ll be back for you. Then we’ll go to the dean’s office.’ The voice was almost friendly, as if Otto was not the man who was about to annihilate Shane’s future. He picked up the tissue packet and dropped it into his pocket.

  Shane tried to think of some way out. Life couldn’t falter like that, surely? It wasn’t even like facing a firing squad, where there would be an end, a very final full stop fired through his skull. This way, there was only an eternity of disgrace and infamy.

  As Shane remained in his seat, stuck in his clotted silence, memories came at him like bee stings. He remembered the huge obligation he owed his parents for putting him through this first year at college. As the others exited the hall to their bright prospects, their sparkling chatter sounded like radio static. His own worthless future had already begun; a long path to a long old age without respect and an end that would be welcome because it would be the end.

  About twenty feet away, Jenny smiled and waved at him to join her. Shane just shook his head and gestured for her to go on. For a moment they gazed at each other with blank interest before Jenny walked away, chatting to another of the many handsome young men that orbited her throughout any given day.

  During his brief journey to the dean’s office, for the first step of his inevitable expulsion, Shane, hands in pockets, walked with head bowed like a snared thieving slave. Next to him Otto offered Shane advice his own father had given him. ‘The rule of life is that you’re either always on the way up or always on the way down; the trick is making sure that you’re always on the way up.’

  As the door to the dean’s office approached, the bright sunlight shone through the corridor window and fell on Shane like a mallet.

  23

  Now

  4.41 pm: ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ the secretary shouted.

  As Shane opened the door, Otto’s office finally revealed itself to him, like the sight of land after being lost for weeks at sea. It was a spacious, somewhat vintage, wood-panelled suite; the sort of place where the very wealthy might go to buy a yacht. Welcome to the one per cent. There was a huge desk with a green banker’s lamp. Despite the fact that Otto didn’t drink, there was a drinks cabinet with a Waterford crystal whiskey decanter and a fully loaded rotary spirits dispenser. There were leather couches and a spectacular corner city view – you could actually see the weather in the next county. Finally, there was an ornate Asian cabinet with huge drawers – large enough to tidily store the plans for an office tower that would soon be going up to help those Russian, Chinese and American tycoons launder their money.

  But there was no Otto. The suite was empty.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He just left. You should’ve passed him. And now I’m getting security.’

  Shane remembered the other elevator door closing as he’d stepped out onto the eighteenth floor. That must’ve been him. ‘Believe me, he’d prefer it if you didn’t get security.’

  ‘I seriously doubt that,’ she said.

  Shane retraced his steps to the lifts. I can still catch him on the road home. Otto lived near the Speed of Light Building and often walked to work from his house by the bay. Stepping into the elevator, he watched the illuminated numbers decrease. Again, he thought of Sun Tzu: ‘In Chinese text, the word “crisis” consists of two simple brush strokes. One represents danger. The other, opportunity.’

  The doors slid open, and Shane immediately saw him. He was sitting on a sofa against the wall; a location that gave him a panoramic view from the elevators to the exit.

  It’s actually him.

  Black beard. Shaved head. Mid-thirties. Shades. White earbuds. The man who had been standing at the bottom of his driveway earlier that day. He was wearing the uniform of a world citizen – jeans, T-shirt, trainers – but worn by him it had an air of decadence, as though he was really a cowboy, shrouded in gritty history. Bunched up on the seat next to him was the black leather jacket.

  It was as if the reappearance of that man was telling Shane something that he couldn’t yet hear. Or see. Or decipher. What game is being played out? A very singular dark thought hardened, and the weed started to curl across his exhausted brain.