But there were the others too, of course. The people no one likes to talk about.

The opportunists who capitalised on the grief and chaos of the moment by inventing dead fathers and husbands and brothers to claim compensation. The liars who pretended to have crawled out of the wreckage of the towers just to get their fifteen minutes of fame. Thieves who looted Rolex watches from the dead and dying.

So don’t pat yourself on the back and tell me you’d have behaved any differently in my shoes. You’re as likely to be a villain as a hero.

I’m going to tell you a secret, but first I need you to promise to put aside your assumptions about right and wrong.

Can you do that?

Can you set aside your prejudices and your biases and be the jury I never had?

I told you right at the beginning I’m one of the good ones. One of the safe ones.

Well, that’s not strictly true.

chapter 37

tom

We have five days of relative calm after Stacey’s sudden appearance on our doorstep before the next crisis hits.

‘Fuck me,’ I exclaim, when the breaking news alert pops up on my screen.

‘Fucking hell!’ Millie cries, storming downstairs into my office.

I love my wife in all her moods. But there’s something about her volcanic fury that brings out the best in her: she’s like an avenging Valkyrie. I find myself responding to the erotic charge she brings into the small space, and my jeans are suddenly uncomfortably tight around the crotch.

‘Has something happened?’ I ask dryly.

‘You’ve seen the news,’ Millie snaps, pointing at my computer screen. ‘Still think Felix is the victim here?’

I don’t waste my breath trying to defend him. ‘I saw it,’ I say.

She leans over my shoulder as I scroll down the page, reading the story with me. Felix’s former company, Copper Beech Financial, has officially declared bankruptcy. Thousands of low-level employees are now out of work, and they’ll have neither redundancy nor pensions to fall back on: it turns out the directors have been plundering the company’s pension scheme for years.

What a fucking mess. From the sound of it, Copper Beech has been taking money from new investors and using it to deliver high returns to just enough people to keep the cash rolling in: a Ponzi scheme, in other words. It doesn’t matter how many safeguards financial regulators introduce: as soon as you close one loophole, the wolves of Wall Street – or the City – find another. People who invested through managed funds will be protected, but thousands of ordinary savers who invested directly with Copper Beech have probably lost everything.