“He’s providing moral support,” put in Bridge loyally, “by being adorable.”

“What’s that, Baby J?” James Royce-Royce made a theatrical listening gesture. “He’s wondering, Bridget darling, if you’ve spoken to Tom’s friends? One of them is bound to have seen him.”

I think it said everything about Bridge that, even in the middle of a personal crisis, she didn’t want Baby J to feel left out of the conversation. “Well, that’s a good idea, Baby J. But I don’t quite know what I’d say to them. I can’t just ring them up and go, ‘Can you tell me where Tom is? I think he’s cheating on me.’”

“How about,” suggested Priya, “‘Can you tell me where Tom is? I’m his fucking fiancée.’”

“Maybe just a schooch”—James Royce-Royce held his thumb and forefinger together in the universal gesture for tiny—“less sweary than that? Also, not in front of the baby.”

Priya gave him a cold look. “He’s a fucking baby, James. He’s not going to be offended.”

“Yes, but if it’s all the same to you, I don’t want my beautiful son’s first words to be”—he put his hands gently over Baby J’s ears—“go fuck yourself.”

“Be honest,” Priya told him. “It’s more interesting than ‘dadda.’”

“You know”—once he’d gone full baby, it was hard to recalibrate James Royce-Royce—“I think he almost said ‘dadda’ the other day. Well, it was more sort of a…bluh, but he’s getting there.”

Mercifully, my phone buzzed with an update from James Royce-Royce. If Liz saw him in Harrow, the woman probably lives locally. Followed by: That means your best chance of catching them would be around lunchtime or rush hour, in that area. Then: If you want a more solid plan, I’ll need more information.

I looked up. “James suggests we check out Harrow around lunchtime, which is kind of now.”

Bridget winced. “But what if I find something I don’t want to find?”

“Then you’ll have all your friends around you,” I said, hoping I sounded reassuring as opposed to platitudey. “Well, a lot of your friends.”

At that moment the intercom went off and another of the bridesmaids stumbled up. Her name was Melanie, and she’d been working with Bridge for years.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, dropping her handbag onto the floor. “Couldn’t get away from work. Huge crisis. We’re just about to launch an adorable children’s book by a very promising new writer about an adventurous puppy who loses his favourite bone, but somebody on the art team has only this second realised that in the final illustration of the book, where the puppy has recovered his bone and it’s framed very nicely against the sunset so it’s sort of silhouetted—”

“It looks like he’s got an enormous erection?” asked Priya.