‘Why do you and Mom keep doing this, Dad?’ asked Jack.

‘Because we love each other.’ Filthy’s face, all plumped-up lips and weird facial topiary, went soft. ‘When you find the one you love, none of the screwing around means anything. She knows that, and I know that. Sometimes we just like a fight. It means the sex—’

‘No, no, no …!’ Jack put his hands over his ears. ‘I’ve heard it all before and – Dad, way too much information, even the first time.’

‘I’ve found the woman I love,’ said Ben. The dope and the hammock were giving him a curious sensation of weightlessness, floating on a cloud as the A-list party glittered and twinkled across the way.

‘That’s awesome, man,’ said Filth, with a tear in his eye. ‘That’s the most important thing you can do in your life. Where is she, then? The one you love should always be by your side. EVEN IF SHE IS SCREWING THE POOL BOY,’ he shouted over his shoulder. Then, as if surprised at his momentary lack of nonchalance, he resumed his habitual slouch.

Jack sighed theatrically as he heard his mother screaming a string of Spanish expletives from the kitchen.

‘I don’t know, Filth,’ said Ben sadly. ‘I just don’t know.’

Chapter 14

‘Full house!’ Natalia slapped her cards down and smiled round at her new friends on Bottle Beach, which was on the Thai island of Koh Phangan. Having thought about it carefully, she had decided that the best way for her to disappear was to mingle with backpackers on beaches. Nobody would think of looking for her in such unsophisticated surroundings, and she could wander freely with the constant stream of travellers: gap-year kids, elderly hippies, drifters, party people, earnest, well-meaning couples – and the rest of the hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to take advantage of cheap food and beer on beautiful beaches, while managing to kid themselves that they were having some kind of spiritual awakening.

She was still paying Georgiou through the nose, enough to keep him happy, she hoped. There was no way he’d go to the press when she was such a lucrative source of income, and noncontactable. Every week, she transferred the money from a new Android, on which she had disabled the GPS and downloaded a banking app. The most important thing was that they didn’t implicate Ben in her sordid past.

She couldn’t believe how much she missed him, and still cried herself to sleep every night. But Natalia was used to pain. And, bizarrely, in this little backpacker haven, she had found a certain degree of comfort. Her beach hut was basic, but it had an electric fan, mosquito net and its own shower and lavatory. It opened directly onto the white sandy beach, and there was a little wooden deck where she could dry her wet towels and lie in a hammock, reading or just gazing out to sea; hardly purgatory when she remembered the dark chill of her Ukrainian upbringing.