“Sometimes I can’t really remember him?” Oscar goes on, once again turning a statement into a question. “I can smell him, though. That’s weird, right? Stale cigar smoke. And that gross aftershave he always wore?” He picks at a raised mole on his left arm. If they were a couple, Tyler thinks, he would tell him to get that looked at.

“I know the papers made him out to be some sort of deviant, but, well, I’m not saying he was perfect or anything, but he was my dad, you know? Even if he wasn’t around much?” He stops picking and starts rubbing at the arm with his thumb, as though the blemish is a smudge of dirt he can wipe off.

“Did he go away a lot?”

Oscar nods. “London, mostly. Europe and the U.S. None of us even knew he was missing at first. The media said he’d done a bunk. There was money missing or something?”

It’s a highly sanitized version of events, but he can allow Oscar this; he knows what it is to spend years in denial about a father. But in Gerald Cartwright’s case, it wasn’t just a bit of missing money. Banking irregularities, mis-sold insurance policies and pensions, speculative and reckless trading. And then, later, they discovered the tax evasion, and there were suggestions of money laundering. After that the rumors began about the wild parties, the weekend-long orgies involving a host of famous names, some more believable than others. Prostitutes came forward, again some more believable than others, to tell stories of being bussed up from London in order to satisfy the needs of particularly important clients.

But it was when links were made between a haulage company Cartwright owned and a factory in Eastern Europe that had ties to the Russian Mafia that the rumor mill really went into overdrive. By the time the papers finally got bored, no one believed Gerald Cartwright was anything short of the devil himself.

Oscar sits hugging himself. “At first, they said he killed himself because he couldn’t live with the shame.”

The words strike a little too close to home for Tyler, and he shivers.

“Then they started with the conspiracy theories. They said he was on the bottom of the Thames in concrete boots, or the Black Sea. Or that he got taken out by MI5 or the CIA; that his bones were scattered across some private game reserve in South Africa.” He stops abruptly.

“What do you think?”

Oscar traces the thorny end of one branch of his tattoo with a forefinger. “I think it’s all bullshit!” he says. “All right, the company was involved in some dodgy deals, but no more so than any other multinational.”