‘No.’
‘Dinner?’
‘No.’
It was so tempting to say yes. She didn’t fancy clubbing or dinner, but right now all she wanted to do was sit by this pool and watch the ripples and feel the warmth of someone besides her who knew exactly what she was going through, and who cared enough to drop whatever he was doing to come and see her.
‘In which case, do you mind?’ he said, already straightening his tie and smoothing out the creases in his trousers.
‘It’s been good to see you, Adam.’
He kissed her cheek and she noticed how good he smelt.
‘We’ll do it again, all right?’
‘I’d like that very much indeed.’
16
Rachel sat on the train and smiled to herself. A twenty-something couple sitting opposite her started kissing, then pulled apart and giggled, their eyes locked, oblivious to the people around them: happy and in love. She caught the expression of a City gent standing peering down at them: the curl of the lip and the roll of the eye. A few years ago, Rachel knew she would have thought the same, but things had changed since then. A lot of things. She closed her eyes and thought about that night in Thailand, her lips on Liam’s, the smell of him, his hot breath on her skin.
Yeah, a lot of things have changed, she thought, opening her eyes. And not all for the better.
She was glad the day was almost over. Meetings with both her mother and Greg Willets had left her feeling raw. She wanted to see a friendly face. Not that she was guaranteed that at the other end of her journey. Rachel hadn’t seen Ross McKiney in three years, and they hadn’t parted in the best circumstances; she wasn’t at all sure what sort of reception she would get.
She got off at Clapton station, squinting in the early evening sun. Across the road was a fried chicken outlet, a minimart and a booth proclaiming ‘We unlock all phones’. This was not the fashionable part of the East End, made hip by art and music or gentrified by the presence of the Olympic Park, and given that it would be getting dark soon, it was a little scary.
Come on, Rach, she scolded herself, stealing a look at her A to Z. She’d walked around the back streets of Bangkok; this was Beverly Hills by comparison. Following her map, she came to an estate, a mixture of sixties terraces and tower blocks that made her quicken her pace, and within a few minutes she was outside an end-of-row house with a wonky gate and a rusty motorbike in the tiny front yard.
She knocked, and as the door creaked open, a ball of fluff slid out of the house, brushing past her leg. Ross McKiney stood in the door frame in jeans and an old jumper.
‘You have a cat.’ Rachel smiled at her old friend.
‘Things change. You know that, look at you. Hair, short?’
‘Men don’t usually notice that sort of thing.’
‘I’m just your typical metrosexual,’ he said as his face slowly creased into a smile. He reached out and pulled her into a hug. ‘Come on into the palace,’ he said, ruffling the top of her hair.
She followed him inside, blinking in the gloom.
‘You’ll have to excuse the mess, maid’s day off and all that.’
It was a small living room, dominated by an overlarge Dralon sofa. It had the air of having been recently – and hurriedly – tidied, but no amount of hoovering could disguise the peeling wallpaper and the faint smell of cat pee. Rachel felt awkward standing here in his private space. No, not just awkward, guilty. Over the last three years, she had barely spoken to Ross McKiney, despite the fact that they had once been such good friends. She had written to him several times in jail, and had begun emailing him when he was released. Both types of communication were rarely answered. For months there would be nothing, then long, unpunctuated, rambling replies talking about things and people she had never heard of. She looked at her old friend; his hairline had receded since they had last met, his mouth scored with heavy smoker’s lines. Six months in prison had aged him by ten years at least. She wondered how she might have looked now if she hadn’t had such a good lawyer.
‘Sit down,’ said Ross, and Rachel perched on the edge of an armchair. ‘Nice tan, by the way. What on earth possessed you to leave Paradise?’
Rachel laughed, and felt herself relax a little. She and Ross had been close once – as her favoured investigator and fix-it man, he had worked side by side with her on dozens of stories. He was ex-forces, off-the-book intelligence; he could extract computer files, obtain criminal records within the hour and had a hotline to the most ruthless paparazzi. He was like a cut-price James Bond, but you’d never know to look at him. Broad nose, broader Midlands accent and a bit flabby around the middle, he looked like someone’s dad at the school gates.
‘All will be revealed if you want to put the kettle on,’ she said, relaxing back in the chair. ‘Got any Kit Kats?’
As Ross disappeared into the kitchen, Rachel got out her notebook and pen. She would have been happy to spend time laughing and joking – you didn’t sit for hours in a car staking out some politician’s house, fuelled by Lucozade and packets of prawn cocktail crisps, without developing an honest and easy friendship – but she knew that Ross would want to get straight down to business. He had always been no-nonsense; that was why he had been good at his job. In fact, when Rachel had seen him that day in court, before he was sentenced for phone-hacking – her newspaper’s phone-hacking – he had just shrugged. ‘Well, at least I’ll be able to catch up on my knitting,’ he had said.
Ross was a pragmatist; he knew someone had to go to jail for the scandal, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t hard for him. Rachel had spent the last three years wishing she could have done something more to help him. Wishing he hadn’t been a scapegoat, not just for her, but for many others in the industry who hadn’t merely known what he did, but had condoned and encouraged it. He was simply a contractor, someone the newspapers paid to do the leg-work on stories: surveillance, covert photography and, yes, phone-tapping. He was there to incubate the investigations, flesh them out; without private investigators, many stories would just remain as rumours.
Ross came back into the room and handed her a steaming mug.
‘Listen,’ said Rachel, ‘I just wanted to say—’