Never mind, was the general consensus; if at first you don’t succeed, and all that jazz. Give it a few months and reapply. They just want to make you jump through a few more hoops. They want to be sure they’re making the right decision. They want to see if anything comes of the Rivelli scandal. They didn’t say it, of course, but they thought it. If Rivelli goes down and if, God forbid, he takes John Ferguson with him, then you’re next . . .

She had been taken for a ride, it was as simple as that. Rivelli believed – rightly, as it turned out – that if he distracted her with sex and romance and meals and holidays, she would take everything he said on trust. She would calm any doubts in John Ferguson’s mind, she would use her skills to persuade the judge, and he would get out of an embarrassing divorce scandal financially unscathed. And if she needed any further persuasion, there was the small matter of her daughter’s career, for which he could do so much. Oh, he’d been clever. But not clever enough – he hadn’t counted on his wife’s jealousy. She’d put up with his infidelity for years, but now her nose had been rubbed in it, and she’d seen red. Her legal team saw this as an opportunity. It was a classic strategy – get the wife angry, get the final piece of information that you need to win the case. They’d been beaten fair and square – and Christine had handed Joseph Greenbaum the weapons on a silver plate. Her career was ruined, Rivelli was ruined, and now, perhaps, Isabelle was ruined as well. What would Cissé do without a manufacturer? By one rash act, Christine had brought the whole house of cards tumbling down. She, of all people, with her high regard for personal probity. Oh, the laughs that would give them, Linda and her cronies in the wine bars.

She took a week off work, officially to visit her sister and her family, but really because she was finding it difficult to face the clerks without a tremendous desire to burst into tears.

Surrounded by life and noise and children, dragged out for country walks, constantly pestered by her nephew and niece, she had no time to dwell on bad things. At night she flopped into bed exhausted, and had at least three hours’ sleep before she awoke again with a racing heart and a mind as tight as an overwound watch.

What have I done?

What have I done?

What have I done?

Over and over again, like a tune she couldn’t get out of her head, like an itch she couldn’t scratch, lying alone in the narrow guest bed while her sister and her husband and children slept silently in the house around her . . .

Everything that Isabelle had said was right. She was a hypocrite. A fool. A liar.