The company trades mainly in favors, making sure that certain people know certain things before others realize, and with a sideline in making sure to buy or short the right currencies and the right shares. We predicted Brexit and Trump and the billions lost the day that Kardashian sister said Instagram was dead. In December, my small team started to discuss the virus in Wuhan. We waited until late January and then we began to move. I recommended a position in distilleries, online supermarkets and a distributor of mid-price garden apparatus like plastic-framed swimming pools and inflatable hot tubs. By the end of March, the distilleries were making hand sanitizers, online supermarkets’ websites crashed because traffic was up two thousand percent, and orders for garden pools had trebled. But more importantly, I knew exactly when the country would go into lockdown, and exactly what kinds of chaos and confusion this would cause.

Intelligence and preparation are a powerful combination.

Knowing lockdown was coming, I had ordered a replica of Leah’s phone. I knew Megan would try to keep her relationship with Tom alive while we were trapped at home, but I couldn’t be having that. Leah’s iPhone looked like an exclusive model, but it was actually just an ordinary iPhone with a fancy case. Swapping it out without Megan realizing was easy.

My mum has an aunt who still lives in Finland, and I would spend quite a bit of time there when I was a boy. She would call me Pikku Prinssi, “Little Prince,” and she doted on me like all great-aunts should. When we went into lockdown, she sent me a case of Koskenkorva Salmiakki. It’s a salty licorice-flavored Finnish liqueur and is the perfect antidote to the smell and taste of liquid Nytol. I don’t drug Megan every night, just when I need a break from watching over her. She believes the stress of the pandemic is exhausting her.

Megan thinks she is emailing Tom, but since I switched Leah’s phone last week it has been me she’s sending lengthy love letters to. I’d debated hacking into his actual email, but in the end I just set up a free email account in his name. She didn’t notice. It’s quite fun, pretending to be him. I drop in little snippets from the times the two of them spent together, when Megan didn’t realize I was watching and listening, making notes of the smallest detail to recycle later. It’s so very easy to take control of someone’s smart TV, stream the feed from the inbuilt webcam directly to your own computer without anyone knowing. Plus, the CCTV cameras I’d installed in that fancy Belsize Park house let me see what is happening in all the other rooms.

Intelligence and preparation plus attention to detail are even more powerful.

Obviously, Tom still needs to receive emails he thinks are from Leah. This was a bit more tricky to set up, but I made it work in the end. I need to be able to control their interactions, make sure that neither party does anything that might compromise my efforts. For a while I was sweetness and light, but there has been a subtle undertone that Tom is blind to in his infatuation. Now it’s time for old Tommy boy and the games to start. I’ve been waiting for this.