In the event, we had nothing to fear from the money. Lisa had had our respective millions paid into a series of accounts so secure and secluded that it took me three years of city law to unravel what she had done. A complex series of holding companies, all purpose-built and based in Jersey, acted as a mutual trust and paid the cash back as dividends from the shares into other overseas accounts. The money was not only untraceable, it would have been legally untaxable until the Inland Revenue busted a Premiership football club pulling a similar stunt for its players and closed the loophole.

I wanted a solid goodbye to support me through a whole summer of social hibernation, a summer away from the light of my friends. I had envisaged long, crushing hugs, meaningful eye contact and waving from the windows of receding cars until they cornered out of sight, but in the end I was denied. Francis left suddenly, and I found a note under my door saying he was not taking his phone with him as he didn’t want his father to be able to contact him. The note was written on the back of a scrap of cardboard torn from a cornflakes packet. I felt sure I would find a corresponding mauled box in the kitchen cupboard across the landing. He didn’t mention how we could reach him. I searched the note for some sign of the loss I felt at the suspension of our friendship, and I found it in the lack of emotional detail, as if any reference to the four of us might make it impossible for him to leave. I thought I detected the echo of my own sense of isolation, and perhaps even a wobble in the usually solid loops of his descenders. Lisa simply disappeared off the radar: one afternoon she was there, and the next she was not. Her exit was nothing like Francis’s puff-of-smoke showmanship, and there was no gasp from the assembled crowd – she simply slipped away, like a tired guest from a party, and it took me a while to realize she was gone. Her success at sectioning off bits of her life was such that I could not imagine her on summer holidays, could not imagine her doing anything except slinking around Cambridge or Docklands in combat pants and trainers, doing deals. When I tried to picture her jumping off a rock into clear blue water she was still wearing a singlet and tracksuit bottoms and carrying her laptop case. The previous holiday she had spent with us to keep an eye on her investment. I knew that this time I would not see her until the start of Michaelmas, when the natural currents of our lives caused us to drift past each other again, on the way to different places.