‘That’s not true.’

‘Come on, Tara – isn’t that exactly what you did to Christian?’

She stared around her, as if wondering what she should take – the mouse mat with an image of her cat, her chipped NASA coffee cup, a framed photograph of the pair of us laughing taken at that magazine shoot – and with a small sigh she turned away, as if resigned to leaving it all behind. Then at the last moment she hesitated and picked up the mouse mat with the picture of her cat.

And that’s when I knew she was really going.

‘I need you, Mary!’ I told her.

It was my one last desperate shot at getting her to stay. And it was also true.

‘But Tara lives her life like Tara doesn’t really need anyone,’ Mary said. ‘And now Tara’s going to get what she deserves.’

30

Tara

When Mary was gone I sat in stunned silence until Skyla appeared in the doorway.

‘You need to turn on the TV,’ she said.

‘Not now,’ I said.

‘You really need to see this, Tara,’ she said.

The British soldier, Alfred Oakley, had been released from police custody, and now he stood behind his lawyer, as if at attention, a proud man. Breaking news, it said on the bottom of the screen. Iraq veteran homeless hero on bail charged only with theft – not murder.

His lawyer was speaking, and he told the story of a disabled war hero, suffering from wounds that would last a lifetime, physical and mental, and the press – that pack of blood-sucking hyenas – listened in respectful, almost sentimental silence as the lawyer told how Alfred Oakley, MC, had been cruelly treated by a callous world and persecuted by a stupid, vindictive police force anxious for an arrest for murder, even if it was the wrong man, when all this disabled war hero had ever done wrong was pocket a watch he found lying on a room service trolley while attempting to feed himself with half-eaten scraps that were going to be thrown away.

Then suddenly there was DCI Stoner filling the screen, the press nowhere near as respectful now, shouting their rude, unruly questions at him and shoving their cameras and phones almost under his broken nose, as DCI Stoner tried and stuttered and failed to read from a prepared statement, his tough old face flushed scarlet with humiliation, and the spring sunshine, and what might have been rage.

The police came after lunch. A small convoy drove slowly into the mews, an unmarked BMW with DCI Stoner in the front passenger seat and then a police car with its blue lights pulsing, and a large white van bringing up the rear. But no sirens, and no drama, and it wasn’t like the movies, there was just the sense that they were – finally – going to get it right this time.

The blue lights revolved in the late afternoon shadows of the mews as we stood inside the door, Skyla, Michael and I, my sense of dread rising. And I could not believe that Mary would have called them, even anonymously, to tell about the money and the second phone in the ceiling, I could not believe it even though there was no other explanation. But such is the nature of betrayal, I was learning, here was the mean heart of treachery. You can’t believe it, it dumbfounds, it flabbergasts, even when it is happening to you. You never see it coming when they stab you in the back, do you?