The Club(49)

For now, though, there was a hushed calm in this cavernous restaurant with its rustic flagstone floors and vast ropework chandeliers, as Adam faced down an eggs Benedict and drained his second Bloody Mary and Nikki nursed a cup of green tea. A working breakfast, just the three of them, Ned and Nikki and Adam, that’s what this was meant to be – a chance to touch base, make sure everything was all set for the day ahead. Except Ned had not turned up. Which given the time he had called this meeting for, was more than a little rude, Adam felt.

‘How do you know he’s not coming?’ Adam asked, exasperated.

‘He sent me an email, at half two this morning.’ She gave a disinterested shrug, tapped her iPad two or three times and held it out across the table. He squinted at it.

‘Classic Ned email,’ he observed. ‘Terse. Cryptic. No fucking around.’

It consisted of three words: ‘Gone to London.’ Adam checked the time-stamp, read it once more, and passed Nikki the iPad back. ‘And that’s it? No other messages since?’ Nikki made a show of checking her phone, then shook her head.

‘You know he doesn’t tell me everything. I have to guess what’s going on from his inbox half the time.’ Was Adam imagining it, or was there a little bit of edge to her voice?

‘Gone to London,’ Adam said. ‘Gone to London. Well that’s fucking convenient, isn’t it, right in the middle of a launch weekend. That’s just . . . great. Well, don’t tell anyone else, will you? Especially not Annie – she’s already swanning around as if she owns the place, as per bloody usual. I doubt she’ll even notice anyway – too busy fangirling the members. If anyone needs Ned urgently, pass them on to me. I don’t want this lot’ – he gestured around the restaurant – ‘slacking off, today of all days.’

Of course, Ned fucking off was by no means out of character. In fact, it was a power play he’d been pulling since he was a teenager, agreeing to meet people and not turning up.

Everything Ned did, when he thought about it, was some kind of power play.

Two and a half hours. That was how long Adam had been down in that bunker last night, scrolling through lists of files, trying different passwords, getting absolutely nowhere. Turning the place upside down. Throat aching. Eyes red raw. Cursing himself for being an idiot.

So frequently he had watched as people who had seen up close how Ned behaved, how he fucked people over, how he let people dangle, how he messed them around – and how he loved to do all those things – how those people assumed that Ned, having let them see all this, would not do exactly the same thing to them.

That was the move, that was the classic move.

And Adam had fallen for it too, completely.

The footage from before he was married, Adam did not give a shit about, because Laura wouldn’t either. As a single man, it wasn’t hard to end up sort-of-accidentally sleeping with a couple of women a week, given that he was spending pretty much every night at Home, that any table at which he was sitting automatically had their bill waived and all he had to do to get a suite was to ask for a key. He had never abused his position – that was something he could definitely say with a clear conscience. He was still a fairly attractive man, and had used to be far more so; had certainly never been a predator, never a creep. If anything he had usually been the drunker party, sometimes the much drunker, sometimes perhaps even to the extent that this had impacted detrimentally upon his performance. There had been plenty of occasions when he would just be having a drink on his own at the bar and he would feel a girl’s eyes on him and he would know he was being appraised, and he would breathe an inward sigh and look up and his eyes would meet hers across the room.

But it turns out fucking a couple of women a week is not that easy a habit to break. He had tried. He had really, really tried. And of course he felt guilty. Every single time he felt guilty about it. Afterwards, always. During, sometimes. Before, even, on occasion. He felt guilty when he thought Laura suspected something, and he felt even worse when he knew she didn’t.

He had tried to reason himself out of it, unpack the compulsion. Certainly, a large part of the appeal was that sense of anticipation, of possibility. To be seeing someone else naked for the first time, all the surprises, all the little details. The tender imprint of a recently removed bra strap on someone’s freckled shoulder. The peculiar intimacy of finding yourself looking into a person’s eyes from that close, your faces practically touching, and it being someone whose last name you didn’t know. All those things you took for granted when you were young, that was so much part of it all, and no one who was still young could imagine how much you would end up missing it.

When you put it that way, it was obvious that it was really something to do with his own vanishing youth he was chasing, that his cheating was a doomed attempt to recapture. Some lost sense of freedom.

It was also possible that he was just really terrible at exercising any kind of impulse control when he’d had a drink or two.

There had been long stretches when he had been good. Really good. When he had been home every night or, when he was away, in his suite and watching a film by ten. Even when he’d been less good, he always called Laura, listened as she told him about her day, offered advice, sympathy. He had always been absolutely conscientious about using condoms, getting tested when he did slip up.

But now he really was fucked.