‘Darling, this isn’t nearly as complicated as you’re making it out to be. Mulholland was my stepfather’s name. When my mother married him, she decided to change both our names to Mulholland. After she divorced my stepfather she went back to Salter, which was her maiden name, and I chose to revert to my birthname, Cullen.’ All this is true, more or less, though not entirely the point. Still, he hopes it will be sufficient to placate Veronica who only ever really wants to know that her world is safe and cosseted and free from awkward truths and responsibilities. He fully expects the petitioning for a nanny to begin soon. How else does she expect him to pay for her on an academic salary other than with a little light credit card fraud?

‘Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?’ she is saying now.

‘It’s not really relevant to anything is it?’

‘Well it might be,’ she says, petulantly. ‘And in any case, it doesn’t explain why I found a credit card bill in the name of Christopher Mulholland.’

‘I expect I had an account in that name and never got around to changing it,’ he says, hoping she will grow tired of questioning him. ‘But darling, you really shouldn’t have been going through my things.’

‘It just seems so odd and furtive somehow that you would never even tell me your name used to be Mulholland.’

‘Because it didn’t, not really, well only for a few years anyway. And if you must know,’ he begins, thinking up a smaller lie as a cover for the larger one, ‘there is a need to cover a small, temporary period of financial embarrassment. A tiny, tiny loan. Using Mulholland gives me a little wiggle room.’

‘But that’s fraud isn’t it?’

Cullen looks at the heap of shopping bags on the table and senses it would be catastrophic to bring them up right now.

‘It’ll all be fine, I promise.’

‘Well good, because I don’t think you should be stressing me out with this kind of thing in my condition. It’s simply not fair.’

‘By the time the baby comes everything will be absolutely shipshape, I promise.’

‘Well all right,’ she says, pouting. ‘But another thing…’

‘Yes?’ He smiles sweetly, doing his best to disguise his rising irritation.

‘There was a bottle of Valium in the medicine cabinet.’

‘Was there? I didn’t know.’

She presses her mouth into a moue and, in a scolding tone, says, ‘Don’t give me that, Christopher, and don’t think I haven’t noticed it’s not there any more.’

Chapter 40

Honor

‘I called Madeleine Ince,’ Honor says. ‘I know you said to wait, but…’