Just then, my mobile rang. It was Helen herself.

‘Grace…Oh dear. I don’t know what to say…’

I took a deep breath and waited. She’d know exactly what to say, and I knew it. She was twenty four – barely a year younger than me – and already married with two loud toddlers, and opinions to match.

‘I told you… I did… don’t get mixed up with a footballer. They’re bad news, the lot of them. Can’t keep their pieces in their pants for love nor money.’

I didn’t reply. I didn’t need to. She carried on for a good five minutes, railing against the immorality of the world at large, and footballers in particular, until I put the phone down on the kitchen table and left her, talking to herself.

I went and lay down on the bed, but I couldn’t settle. It was our bed, Leo’s and mine, and now there was no more us. I couldn’t believe he’d done it to me. My head was aching from the wine and all the crying I’d done in the staff restaurant. I knew Liv meant well, but I really didn’t think the drink had helped. It just made me feel even more maudlin and bereft.

I thought back to what I’d read in the City Herald. Leo and some of the others – I couldn’t even remember who – had taken some girl back to their hotel room and taken turns on her. In fact, they hadn’t even taken turns. She’d taken them three at a time, several times over.

‘How can they possibly know that?’ I’d asked Liv. I hadn’t been able to take in what I was reading, and was still convinced, at that point, that it was all some kind of mistake.

‘You’re not going to want to hear this, hon,’ she said, reluctantly. ‘But it was a sting.’

‘A what?’ My mind was simply not computing. I couldn’t take it in.

‘A set-up, hon.’ Liv poured me another glass of wine, and I knocked half back in one go. ‘They got it on video. It’s doing the rounds online. Pixellated her face, of course. Not theirs, though.’ She winced visibly.

It was then that the tears started, pricking at my eyes, then coursing, silently, down my cheeks. It was true, then. He couldn’t persuade me it was a stalker, or an ex out for revenge. None of the things he’d tried in the past. What a fool I’d been to trust him.

Liv didn’t try to say anything – just passed me some tissues out of her Mary Poppins bag. It always seemed to contain whatever was needed. At that moment, I wished she’d pull out something to deaden the pain that was clawing at my heart. Something other than wine. Pills or something… preferably lots.

Was it my fault? I’d had that fantasy again. I’d flirted with Mr Arrogant in Max’s office. I was hardly whiter than white. Had I brought it upon myself? In some ways, it would’ve made it easier to deal with, but I couldn’t really believe it. This had been Leo, on his own, carving out our path to destruction while I was stuck at home, feeling rough. If only he’d come home on the Sunday, straight after the match, it would never have happened. God, who was I kidding? It was probably the whole reason he’d stayed.

I paced around the flat for an hour or more. I think I was trying to get away from the pain, stupid as it sounds. In the end, I perched on the edge of an armchair, and simply sat there, shaking. My chest felt swollen inside, as if the anguish had expanded it, filling it to bursting. I couldn’t stop trembling. My whole body shook, and I sobbed until I was too exhausted to sob any more, and simply sat there, shaking, and sniffing, and staring at nothing, with tears still flooding my face and neck.

When he finally came in, later that evening, I didn’t even hear him.

Six

That night, I undertook one of our paid contracts myself. I didn’t like doing them at the best of times and that night, after the whole Charlottegate fiasco, it was the last thing I needed. Alex had sworn he’d used the same guys as usual, and they still maintained her story checked out at the time.

The whole business had put me on the back foot. I’d never been caught out like this. I’d tried to help her, and she’d laughed in my face. Alex had been right all along. She was pure poison. Arsenic with an angel’s face. I’d have to deal with her, but I had to find her first, and that wasn’t going to be straightforward. I’d had men contact the Herald and…surprise, surprise…there was no such journalist working for them. They’d got hold of employee photos, too, and we’d gone through them together. Still nothing.

In the end, I’d gone round to her flat – or the address she’d given me, at least – and it was empty. It was a seedy little hovel in the East End, and it’d been empty for over a year – at least, according to the girl in the flat below. That’d been an experience in itself.

She was a mouthy little thing, full of giggles and inexplicable smiles, and had been really pleased to see me at first, as if she knew me. I guess she’d realised her mistake, because when I’d asked about the flat above, she’d got sniffy and more or less slammed the door in my face. I sighed. The whole search so far had been an exercise in frustration, and now I was going to have to start all over again.

With all this running through my mind, the last thing I needed was to be the referee in some kind of depraved sex match, but I’d been personally requested. As a daughter of the Home Office, they expected me to oversee proceedings in person.

That just made it worse. That it was her own father who’d arranged the whole rendez-vous practically made me retch, but his interest in it was a distant one, designed purely to protect interests of his own. Or, in other words, his career.

My own people – not the ones Alex had hired to dig into Charlotte’s affairs – backed up the story I’d got first-hand. Felicity Mary Flint was twenty one, freshly kicked out of some second-rate university, and ‘hit with the ugly stick’, as one of them had so tactfully put it. She didn’t have a lot going for her, it seemed. The name alone was practically a punishment, and it looked like she was out for vengeance.

Long story short, she’d found sex, if she hadn’t found a lover, online. Talking dirty at night, she’d been seduced into the idea of being gangbanged – preferably somewhere public. She’d loved the idea… Daddy hadn’t. Well, the government didn’t keep intelligence like that to themselves. I don’t suppose it was exactly music to his ears, but he’d been faced with the situation and, like anything else in politics, he’d had to deal with it. She’d obviously had no idea her online shenanigans were being scrutinised in such sordid detail, or maybe she’d have backed off…

…Or so I thought, when I was first made aware of events, but I was wrong. It made Daddy sit up and take notice for once. Up to this point, she’d been packed off to boarding school, then university, and hadn’t really registered on his radar. For the first time, she’d had a glimpse of two things she’d never experienced - power and recognition. He could no longer ignore her. If her antics became public knowledge, he’d be ruined and she knew it… Probably took pleasure in it, and I can’t say I blamed her. I felt her pain enough to want to take it from her. It was one of the reasons I’d agreed to take her on. Not to save him the humiliation, but her.

He’d confronted her, in the end, and forbidden her to even go online – an order to which she’d given the bird, forging ahead with her relentless mission to degrade herself, and him along with her. I guess I admired that in her, too. Anyway, she’d carried on seeking out trysts, and that was where we stepped in.

Hacking PCs was second nature to a certain element within my entourage. It was what they were paid to do. Within days, she was corresponding solely with us – unbeknownst to her - and it was clear by then that she was intent on realising her fantasies. After a further flurry of emails, the date and time were set.