Dudley’s rise in that world had been as meteoric as the trajectory of his legal career. He was smart and educated but never condescending, highly articulate and persuasive, with a winning personality and a ready smile that, together with his gracefully silvering mane of hair, his ruggedly handsome features and his frequent public appearances with his glitzy wife Clarissa on his arm, made him a darling of the media. The camera adored Dudley as much as he relished posing for pictures at every available opportunity.

Behind the scenes, he was a canny and hard-nosed negotiator, trampling without mercy over any hapless person who impeded his progress or tried to cross swords with him. Yet for all the flattened careers and politically bloodied noses left in the wake of his spectacular ascendancy to the limelight, Dudley seemed to have no real enemies and appeared to be completely bulletproof and without blemish. His growing horde of supporters unanimously hailed him as a serious future contender for party leader and, very possibly, Prime Minister. His legal standing had quickly earned him a place on the Privy Council, as an official policy advisor to Her Majesty the Queen.

In short, the Right Honourable Tristan Dudley QC could do no wrong and the political world was, pretty much, his oyster.

But Dudley had a secret problem, and its name was Annie.

Annie Dudley was Tristan and Clarissa’s only child. From an early age, their daughter had exhibited signs of wayward behaviour that had only grown more concerning – and for her father, more potentially embarrassing – as she’d got older. True, the kids of top-level, high-profile professionals were often known for their inability to stay on script, but Annie seemed determined to take the art of scandalising her family’s reputation to a new level. As a schoolgirl she had been suspended multiple times for offences including smoking in the toilets, smuggling in alcohol, selling cigarettes to her fellow pupils, vandalising school property and abusing her teachers – all this before the age of eleven.

In the hope that her behaviour would benefit from the extra discipline, her parents had packed twelve-year-old Annie off to one of England’s finest all-girl boarding schools, the St Aloysius Academy in Gloucestershire. Things had seemed to go well at first, until Annie had been caught distributing pornographic material among her peers. When the St Aloysius heads attempted to punish her by confining her to her dorm, Annie set fire to a pair of velvet drapes and caused a blaze that could have destroyed half the school. It could have been every bit as damaging to her father’s newfound political career, too. Then forty-four and still in his first term as Member of Parliament for Worcester, Dudley had had to wrangle hard with the school authorities and agree to a painful settlement out of court to prevent the sordid affair from blowing up into a whole press hoo-ha.