Gordon’s knees went weak as he heard his father’s declaration. As a young engineer, Ron had had professional dealings with the Bluebird town clerk, Conal Abottemey, a man to be feared and respected, or at the very least complied with. Ron’s engineering projects routinely passed over Conal’s desk. The town clerk’s power was absolute, and Ron had learnt, from his profession—its first law, the law of preservation of mass!—that such force could only be leveraged, never eliminated. ‘In my day,’ he said, ‘we didn’t call it corruption. We called it business.’

Conal Abottemey’s favourite functionaries were distributed across the beaches. He had his accountant and his turf accountant; he had his solicitor and his barrister; he had his builders and his certifiers and his surveyors and his agents and his developers. He had his politicians. And Ron Grimes was Conal’s Justice of the Peace. When documents needed to be altered, they required a JP to authenticate them. If you controlled the facts at their documentary source, you controlled outcomes.

‘I needed to feed my family,’ Ron said by way of mitigation, showing sufficient mercy, or discrimination, to fix his accusing eye on Frontal rather than Gordon.

Ron, discreet and trustworthy, had certified the altered documents the town clerk brought him. ‘That’s what was required of you, and that’s what you did’: the two dimensions to the little box, at the bottom of his mind, where he consigned these acts.

‘You … you wouldn’t dare bring this up now,’ Frontal said, but his expression betrayed his shrinking hope. Why wouldn’t Ron bring it up now? What did he have to lose?

‘You learnt your filthy trade at your father’s knee,’ Ron said. ‘You took over what was to all intents and purposes a hereditary position, and you continued its practices.’ He turned to Gordon. ‘The soul of rectitude, the picture of integrity. Along with his father’s processes, he inherited his father’s trusted functionaries. I kept on verifying documents for this one as I did for his father. When he came back from Greece, ready to take over the kingdom, he brought me that boy’s birth certificate. And the deed was done,’ Ron concluded, reverting at the last moment to the passive voice.

More than anger or surprise, Gordon felt acute embarrassment. To have this level of criminality—personal, family, inherited corruption—exposed, to see Frontal caught out, was secondary to the shock that his father had participated in it and the Grimes family had profited from it. You could never put your finger on it, but you saw the residue—the misanthropy, the anxiety, the fear, the intolerance, the nest egg. Gordon felt that he had finally solved the mystery of who his father was. And he wished he hadn’t.

‘Does Daniel know?’ Gordon asked.

Ron gave Gordon a look of alarming directness. ‘Some things, between fathers and sons, are best left unsaid.’