‘No. Listen. That’s not it. I need to speak to the guy, whoever it is, who fired James Chiltern.’ Her eyes changed; yes, it looked like the name had had an effect. When she spoke again it was in the tone of someone pressing home an advantage, someone on a TV quiz who knew they had the right answer.

‘I need to get in touch with him, because James Chiltern is about to commit suicide.’

14

BERLIN, 03:32
M1 NEAR LEICESTER, 02:32

Michaela’s contacts had always been a bit of a mess. Even though her family name was Adler and so her mum and brothers should be right at the top of the list, they were instead saved as (for example) Jerome Brother, or Mum Mum, and lived in different parts of the alphabetical list. The top name on the list – a name she saw, without processing it, every day of her life – was therefore someone she and James had once purchased a piece of equipment from, who was saved as Exercise Ball Adnan. She called this stranger accidentally from her pocket three or four times a year; once he’d been at the Rio Carnival, once in a hot-air balloon. It had always amused and incensed Michaela that she was in James’s phone as ‘Michaela Adler’, rather than as just Michaela or Michaela Girlfriend or, as she had once suggested, Michaela, Queen of My Heart and of Universe. ‘First name, surname is just how I have everyone,’ James had said, laughing. ‘But I’m not everyone, am I,’ she’d protested, tweaking his nose, grabbing his lovely puppy-fat.

Karl was saved as Karl James Mate; Michaela had been drunk when she put the number in her phone. It was a number that, for a while, she had used multiple times every day. Around the time of that European train adventure, and in fact for a couple of years afterwards, she and Karl James Mate messaged each other more frequently than James and Karl themselves did. In-jokes, observations on James’s latest anti-sweat tactic, on his mania for keeping his new phone out of the rain. They were his entourage, his left and right hands. Their opinions on James were the only ones which held any validity; everyone else was on the outside. They’d do it at 2 a.m., sometimes. Her in a cab home from a health and fitness event which free booze had turned into a health and fitness hazard; Karl out in the car. There’d been something so rare about it, about such a keenly felt friendship with a bloke which was nonetheless completely innocent, had no prospect of turning into anything else. James had never felt insecure, she knew that; he didn’t flinch if her phone pinged at an odd time. He, after all, was what they really had in common.