‘Alright, fuck’s sake,’ he says, slamming his laptop lid shut and casting it to one side. ‘Get out of my way, then. At least let me get dressed in peace.’

I swallow — hard — then head downstairs to wait for him.

26

We drove in silence to my parents’ house, only making polite conversation with Nan’s friend after picking her up. The atmosphere could have been cut with a knife, but as far as anyone else was concerned that was entirely down to the occasion. Funerals are rarely happy events, even at the best of times.

If truth be told, I’m waiting for Tom to apologise. It won’t automatically make things better, but it’ll at least tell me he recognises what he says and regrets it. Well, at the very least it’ll mean he knows he’s upset me.

When we get to Mum and Dad’s house, the formalities kick in. There are lots of hugs, plenty of it’s-been-years-since-I’ve-seen-yous and even a few my-haven’t-you-growns. Tom works his way around, introducing himself to anyone he hasn’t already met. It always amazes me how he can put on a totally different face in front of others. I guess that’s what makes him such a people person.

‘Listen,’ he says, walking up to me while I’m in their kitchen making tea and coffee. ‘I’m sorry about earlier, alright? I’m up to here with all the work stuff, and I shouldn’t have snapped. I know it’s no excuse, but I was in an email conversation with my boss all morning about the situation over there, and when you walked in I’d just got a message from him saying the client in China had heard about the guys we’d let go and were threatening to pull the deal.’

‘Oh no,’ I say, realising the enormity of the situation. ‘Can they do that?’

‘I don’t know. That’s for the legal guys to sort out. He reckons he’s pacified them for now, but we’re skating on really thin ice. You can imagine how it looks. They’ve hired us to design a state-of-the-art computer security system to keep them safe from criminals, and find out we’ve hired three of them to build the system. It’s like hiring a bank robber to fit a new front door at NatWest. Absolute fucking shambles.’

‘But it’ll be alright? I mean, if you rumbled the guys and got rid of them, it should all be smooth enough from here, shouldn’t it?’

Tom shrugs. ‘You’d hope so, wouldn’t you? But at the end of the day, if they failed to even do basic background checks on the people they were hiring, it makes you wonder what else we’ve missed. We might have got away with that particular fuck up, but the client will be on the look out for any little mistakes now. We’ve got to tread carefully.’

‘Will they need you to go over there?’

‘I don’t know. I hope not, but who knows? I’ll do my best to make sure I don’t need to. Fingers crossed, eh?’