‘How do you feel? I didn’t know you were going to town today.’
‘I’m not,’ Darcy said vaguely, turning away from the door. ‘I forgot, when I got dressed.’
He went back into his office, and sat down at the desk.
Hannah put her head round the door to say goodbye before she left for the shop. He heard Mandy leaving to drive the two children to nursery and school, and then Cathy scrambling downstairs and running out to the Renault. It was another sunny morning, he noticed, as the light warmed and brightened the silent room.
Darcy sat at his desk, and waited. Somewhere in the house either Lucy or Hannah’s cleaner was playing loud music. The cheerful sound intensified his sense of isolation. He gazed at the black file drawers ranged against the opposite wall, but he did not move to look into them.
The fingers of sunlight crept across the wall. Darcy drank the cup of coffee that the au pair brought him at lunchtime, but he ate nothing. Once his hand reached out to the telephone, but he did not pick up the handset. He thought of how Vicky had held him the night before, and her assurance that everything was all right. He would have liked to speak to her, but he remembered that she was at her clinic. His business line rang only two or three times and he sat motionless in his chair, letting the answering machine click and hum in response.
In the afternoon the house came to life again. Laura and Freddie were at home; he saw Laura run past his window and across the striped breadth of lawn. The sun had moved round the house; his desk was in shadow. Hannah came back too, although she did not look in to see him.
Then, at gone six o’clock, when he was stiff and chilled from sitting for so long in the same position, he heard another car coming up from the lane. The front doorbell rang again. Darcy waited, his senses strained to anticipate what would come next.
He heard the sound of voices, and the swift click of Hannah’s high heels. And then she knocked at his door.
‘Darcy? There are some people here to see you.’
There were three of them. They wore dark blazers, unemphatic striped ties and cheap watches. When the door had closed on Hannah one of the men introduced himself and his colleagues. They were from the Fraud Squad.
The senior policeman explained that they came with a search warrant, under the special procedure provisions of section 9, Police and Criminal Evidence Act. Still Darcy sat at his desk, where he had been waiting all day for this. He turned his head and saw Laura running back over the mown grass to Mandy.
And then, because there was nothing else he could do, he gave the three policemen access to his safe and file cabinets. They stayed in his office for three-quarters of an hour. When they left, they took with them most of the books and ledgers and files relating to Darcy’s business.
When they had gone, with their evidence, in the grey Ford Scorpio that had brought them, Darcy walked into the sunlit drawing room. There were bowls of fat blood-red peonies on the tables on either side of the chimneypiece. Hannah and the twins were standing in the middle of the room, watching.
‘Who were they?’ Hannah said. She came to him and put her hands on his arms, but the twins stood together, defending each other. ‘Darcy, what’s happening?’
‘They were policemen,’ Darcy said.
He saw the identical stiffening of shock and fear in his daughters’ beautiful faces and the way that the colour changed in his wife’s, leaving two dull blotches of crimson high on her cheekbones.
Darcy said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s all right. There’s nothing to worry about.’ His voice sounded brittle, with the bass resonance gone. He turned away from the eyes of the three of them.
‘I have to go and ring my solicitor,’ he said, in his different voice.
‘Mrs Clegg for you,’ the medical secretary’s nasal voice announced to Michael in his poky office at the hospital on Tuesday morning.
‘Put her through,’ Michael said. The long day ahead with its cargo of patients was like some sentence that must be served before the evening, and Hannah, could be delivered to him.
‘Michael?’
He smiled into the receiver. ‘You only just caught me. I’m about to do rounds.’
‘Something’s happened. To Darcy.’
‘His heart?’
The complex of possibilities that he had already imagined delivered themselves to him again. Even as he envisaged them, Michael realized that his own heart leapt with a momentary wild hope.
‘No. He’s all right. Nothing like that.’
‘Then what?’
‘Michael, it’s very weird. The police came yesterday evening. They had a special warrant. They took away Darcy’s files and books, everything to do with the business.’
‘What does Darcy say? Is he there?’
‘Yes. He says it’s a mistake. He was on to his solicitor for an hour last night after the police left, and the man has just arrived. They’re shut in Darcy’s office. It means I can’t see you tonight, although I want to so much. I have to be here if Darcy needs me, don’t I?’
‘Of course you do. Don’t worry. It must be some kind of mistake, if Darcy says it is.’
But even as he reassured her Michael was already sifting the grains of likelihood in his mind, weighing the possibility that Darcy might in truth be guilty of something. There had often seemed to be too much money at Wilton, an over-heated largesse spilling out of Darcy in a way that Michael suddenly and perfectly clearly recognized to be ominous.
‘I hope you are right,’ Hannah whispered.
A vibration of doubt and anxiety in her voice was plainly to be heard, the rich confidence faltering. Michael understood that she was not convinced by Darcy’s protests either.
‘Listen,’ he said. He had to grasp at a thread of hope because the promise of their evening had been snatched away.
‘Next week I had planned to go to a medical conference. Two nights away, Wednesday and Thursday. Marcelle knows I’m going. I’m supposed to be presenting a paper, but David Keene, who is one of my colleagues and the co-author, came to ask me this morning if he could read it instead. There isn’t the funding for us both to go. If you could manage to be away too, we could go somewhere together instead. Could we?’
Since Darcy had further hemmed them in with uncertainties it seemed vital to have this much to hold on to.
‘I don’t know.’ Hannah was distracted. He couldn’t blame her, but it was imperative that she should agree to what a minute ago had only been the vaguest possibility.
‘Please,’ Michael said.
‘I … I could do it, if I said I was going on a buying trip for the shop. If this is resolved by then …’
‘It will be. That’s what we’ll do.’ Michael could see a posse of white coats in the corridor outside. He was already late for rounds. ‘I have to go. Hannah, I love you.’
He had said it before, in the cushiony sanctuary of her shop. He wasn’t even certain that he meant it, but in the shabby and pressured reality of the hospital morning it seemed better, even nobler, to feel this threatening and disorientating love rather than to feel nothing.
‘Do you?’ Hannah doubted him too, but he could not stay to tell her any more.
‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ Michael promised.
On the evening of the same day, Cathy and Lucy Clegg sat in the upstairs room at