The 404 error message has been replaced with ‘Coming soon’. She tries ‘Mackenzie Whittaker’. Harri is familiar with the first few results—‘publishing maven’, with years of experience in something called ‘luxury outdoor pursuits’, who has recently moved to the UK for a new challenge.

Scrolling down the page, she sees results for a Mackenzie Whittaker-Chambers, an heiress worth forty-eight million dollars. Ah! Mackenzie isn’t good with money. She just has lots of it. And if Harri thinks she’s a financial genius for weaseling a few grand here and there out of the ad men, the Whittaker-Chambers family is a brains trust. Mr Whittaker-Chambers Senior is the head of a luxury property empire. Mr Whittaker-Chambers Senior has been accused, according to the Wall Street Journal (a site where Harri is surprised to find herself using up her free article limit) of pledging to build affordable housing, taking government money to buy land, then selling the land back to himself for buttons and building compounds with swimming pools for fellow billionaires. Mr Whittaker-Chambers Senior ‘gifted’ Mackenzie Whittaker-Chambers ‘an undisclosed sum’ before her move to the UK, to ‘set up a charitable foundation’. Court proceedings are ongoing.

Only now does Harri realise she had been nursing a secret hope that she was wrong. She wanted her instincts to be off. She wanted Mackenzie’s villainous carapace to melt away, revealing a silly misunderstanding, a person she could grudgingly respect, a secret nice girl underneath. She had been holding her breath, waiting for the plot twist. She believed Mackenzie must have hidden depths—and that they would become unlikely friends at the eleventh hour. She knew Mackenzie was ruthless. She had pushed away the most alarming thought, and now it has been proven incorrigibly true. Mackenzie is corrupt.

Snakes, all the way down. I have got to get out.