She felt Tanzie’s hand on her shoulder, her fist grabbing a handful of her T-shirt and pulling at it again and again. ‘Mum, make it all right. Mum, make him all right.’ Tanzie dropped to her knees and buried her face in his coat. ‘Norman. Norman.’ And then she began to howl.

Beneath her shrieking, Nicky’s words emerged garbled and confused. ‘They were trying to get Tanzie into the car. I was trying to get you but I couldn’t open the window. I just couldn’t open it and I was shouting and he just went through the garden fence. Before I could get there. He knew. He went straight through. He was trying to help her.’

Nathalie came running down the road, her shirt fastened with the wrong buttons, hair half done in rollers. She wrapped her arms around Tanzie and held her close, rocking her, trying to stop the noise.

Norman’s eyes had stilled. Perhaps focused on some distant piece of food. Jess lowered her head to his and felt her heart break.

‘I’ve called the emergency vet,’ someone said.

She stroked his big soft ear. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.

‘We’ve got to do something, Jess.’ He said it again, more urgently. ‘Now.’

She put a trembling hand on Nicky’s shoulder. ‘I think he’s gone, sweetheart.’

‘No. You don’t say that. You’re the one who said we don’t say that. We don’t give in. You’re the one who says it’s all going to be okay. You don’t say that.’

And as Tanzie began to wail again, Nicky’s face crumpled. And he began to sob, one elbow bent across his face, huge, gasping sobs, as if a dam had finally broken.

Jess sat in the middle of the road, as the cars crawled around her, and the curious neighbours hovered on the front steps of their houses, and she held her old dog’s enormous bloodied head on her lap and she lifted her face to the heavens and said silently, What now? WHAT THE HELL NOW?

She didn’t see Jason Fisher climb into the car and drive away.

But the CCTV did.

Her mother brought her indoors. Tanzie didn’t want to leave him. She didn’t want him to die out there on the Tarmac, alone, strangers staring at him with open mouths and murmured whispers, but Mum wouldn’t listen. Nigel from next door came running out and said he would take over and the next thing Mum was pulling her indoors, her arms tight around Tanzie, and as she kicked and screamed for him, her voice was close in Tanzie’s ear, arms clasped around her middle, ‘Sweetheart, it’s all all right, sweetheart, come on inside, don’t look, it’s all going to be okay.’ But even as she closed the front door, head against hers, pulling Tanzie to her, and her eyes were blind with tears, Tanzie could hear Nicky sobbing behind them in the hallway, weird jagged sobs like it wasn’t even something he knew how to do, and Mum was finally lying to her because it wasn’t going to be okay, it never could be, because it was actually the end of everything.

‘Sometimes,’ Gemma said, glancing behind her at the puce, screaming child, arching its back at the next table, ‘I think the worst sort of parenting is not actually witnessed by social workers but by baristas.’ She stirred her coffee briskly, as if biting back a natural urge to say something.

The mother, her blonde corkscrew curls cascading stylishly over her back, continued to ask the child in soothing tones to stop and drink its ‘babycino’. It ignored her, possibly unable to hear her over the self-created noise levels.

‘I don’t see why we couldn’t go to the pub.’

‘At eleven fifteen in the morning? Jesus, why doesn’t she just tell him to stop? Or take him out? Does nobody know how to distract a child any more?’

The child screamed louder. Ed’s head had begun to hurt.

‘We could go.’

‘Go where?’

‘The pub. It would be quieter.’

She stared at him, and then she ran a speculative finger across his chin. ‘Ed, how much did you drink last night?’

He had emerged from the police station spent. They had met his barrister afterwards – Ed had already forgotten his name – with Paul Wilkes and two other solicitors, one of whom specialized in insider-trading cases. They sat around the mahogany table and spoke as if choreographed, laying out the prosecution case baldly, so that Ed was in no doubt about what lay ahead. Against him: the email trail, Deanna Lewis’s testimony, her brother’s phone calls, the FSA’s new determination to stamp down on perpetrators of insider trading. His own cheque, complete with signature.

Deanna had sworn that she had not known what she was doing was wrong. She stated Ed had pressed the money on her. She said that had she known what he was suggesting was illegal she would never have done it. Nor would she have told her brother.

The evidence for him: that he had plainly not gained a cent from the transaction. His legal team said – in his opinion, a little too cheerfully – that they would stress his ignorance, his ineptitude, that he was new to money, the ramifications and responsibilities of directorship. They would claim that Deanna Lewis knew very well what she was doing; that his and Deanna’s short relationship was actually evidence of her and her brother’s entrapment. The investigating team had been all over Ed’s accounts and found them gratifyingly unrewarding. He paid the full whack of tax every year. He had no investments. He had always liked things simple.

And the cheque was not addressed to her. It was in her possession, but her name was in her own writing. They would assert that she had taken a blank cheque from his home at some point during the relationship, they said.

‘But she didn’t,’ he said.

Nobody seemed to hear.

It could go either way with the prison sentence, they told him, but whatever happened Ed was undoubtedly looking at a hefty fine. And obviously the end of his time with Mayfly. He would be banned from holding a directorship, possibly for some considerable time. Ed needed to be prepared for all these things. They began to confer among themselves.

And then he had said it: ‘I want to plead guilty.’

‘What?’

The room fell silent.

‘I did tell her to do it. I didn’t think about it being illegal. I just wanted her to go away so I told her how she could make some money.’

They stared at each other.

‘Ed –’ his sister began.

‘I want to tell the truth.’

One of the solicitors leant forward. ‘We actually have quite a strong defence, Mr Nicholls. I think that given the lack of your handwriting on the cheque – their only substantive piece of evidence – we can successfully claim that Ms Lewis used your account for her own ends.’

‘But I did give her the cheque.’

Paul Wilkes leant forward. ‘Ed, you need to be clear about this. If you plead guilty, you substantially increase your chance of a custodial sentence.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘You will care, when you’re doing twenty-three hours in solitary in Winchester for your own safety.’

He barely heard her. ‘I just want to tell the truth. That’s how it was.’

‘Ed,’ his sister grabbed at his arm, ‘the truth has no place in a courtroom. You’re going to make things worse.’

But he shook his head and sat back in his chair. And then he didn’t say anything more.

He knew they thought he was odd, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t bring himself to look exercised by any of it. He sat there, numb. His sister asked most of the questions. He heard Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 blah blah blah. He heard open prison and punitive fines and Criminal Justice Act 1993 blah blah blah and he sat there and he honestly couldn’t make himself care less about any of it. So he was going to prison for a bit? So what? He had lost everything anyway, twice over.

‘Ed? Did you hear what I said?’