“This was after all the business about him nicking the credit cards had died down. I think that’s how it started with Alice. Everyone was sick of him. I certainly was. He was on remand awaiting trial. No one else was going to step in, and he knew it—so he went to Alice. She’d have been what? Sixteen? But Alice knew a thing or two, even then, and she worked on my parents and some of the other students’ parents and a teacher here and there. You know, the right whisper in the right ear? Can’t see a promising young man go to prison for a foolish mistake. Golden boy had got himself off the hook again. I don’t know what happened to him after he was released. But I’m certain they were seeing one another on the quiet. When he reappeared, Alice said they’d just bumped into each other at Portobello Market. But they’d been biding their time. I’m sure of it.”

“You never liked him. Did you all bully him?”

Rob looked genuinely hurt. “He was my best friend! Yet in Italy, he dumped me and went off on his adventures without a word. Honestly, if you think that, you never knew him at all. Far too cunning for that. Good at making friends. So amenable, so subtle. No deep, dark, painful secrets in David’s past, not one. Admittedly, not entirely easy being a scholarship boy, but hardly a Dickensian struggle. Nice parents by the look of it—saw them quite a few times. Mild mannered, mousey. They seemed to be a bit in awe of him. Like they’d have preferred something from Argos. And in the beginning never really standing out, just another little boy. But who gets to be nature-table monitor? Who gets whisked away to a private Serengeti hunting lodge at Easter with Rafe Fithern’s family?” He paused for a moment. “My turn to ask a question now.”

I waited expectantly. We were having salmon to start. Rob looked to the heavens, swallowed, and pointed at me with his knife.

“Tell me about your transformation. No, that’s not really a question, is it? Okay, tell me this. How does a hard-faced scrubber like yourself end up at Oliver March’s outfit? Last time we met, you weren’t exactly full of social graces.”

So I sketched out for him my career trajectory, skipping over the first few years, of course. When I finished, he smiled.

“Pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. Maggie would be proud.”