I wonder how long to make him sweat. I could tell him I need to think about it. I could walk away and go and have a nice lunch and then saunter back along the river while he stews away. But here’s the thing. If he’s guilty then a challenge to get him off awaits me. If he’s innocent though? If that whole thing about Leah being Megan turns out to actually be the truth and a truth I can prove? I’ll be able to write a book, get a deal on the after-dinner speaker circuit, maybe even challenge that smug prick for his role as “TV Judge of the People.” I look good on camera. I had once contemplated an acting career, but to be honest the law is much more secure. And a lot more lucrative if you’re good at it. Acting only works if you have a lot of luck to add to the mix. Jeremy Crumpton makes his own luck.

* * *

The last time I lost, I was eight years old. I was playing Monopoly with my brothers: Benny was the eldest, an eleven-year-old chess prodigy; Lawrence was almost ten and had just taken his grade six piano exam. I was the baby, the brunt of my brothers’ teasing and name-calling. “Loser!” Benny had screamed as he chased me round the house brandishing the dog-eared Mayfair card at me. I had woken up the next morning to find my bed full of tiny green plastic houses and red hotels. One had embedded itself into my cheek and left a bruise.

Two weeks after the Monopoly thrashing, Benny was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. He died less than two months later. Lawrence traveled back from the funeral with my maternal grandparents. A drunk driver slammed their car at a roundabout. My grandparents walked away with scratches and whiplash. Lawrence was killed instantly.

But my story isn’t a tale of hardship and death and all the terrible things that can happen. I took the anger and the frustration and I channeled it. I was ten when I became the national under-twelve chess champion. The trophy Benny should have won was finally where it belonged, in pride of place on the mantelpiece of my parents’ sitting room. “For Benny,” my father had said as he straightened it that first evening, a tear in his eye. Then I gave up chess and began to practice for hours and hours at the large piano in the drafty hallway between the kitchen and the dining room. It took me until I was twelve to be good enough to pass my grade seven and to win a commendation at the county music awards. “For Lawrence,” my father said as he hung the certificate in the downstairs loo with all the other Crumpton accolades.

I should have led a pampered and easy existence at Winslow School for Boys, safe from flushings and other mistreatment by virtue of two big brothers to protect me. Instead I retreated into academia. “Benny would have won the maths prize in third form,” my father had told my mother as she spooned roast potatoes on to my plate one exeat weekend. I became the first second-former in the school’s history to win the award. “For Benny.” I was offered the opportunity to do some of my GCSE exams a year early: “Lawrence would have done his early,” my father had said with absolute conviction. “And got an A*,” my mother had added. I, of course, got that A*. “For Lawrence.”