“But,” he protested, “I haven’t said anything funny yet.”

“That’s what you think. Do go on.”

“You’re making me self-conscious.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just happy to hear from you.”

“Oh.” A long silence. Then Oliver cleared his throat. “Anyway, my client was asked why he had previously said he was with Barry when he was now claiming to have been alone. And my client said he got confused. And so the council for the prosecution asked why he got confused. To which my client explained that he got confused because, and I quote, ‘Me and Barry get arrested together all the time.’”

“Did you shout objection?”

“We’ve been over this. And even if that were a feature of the British judicial system, what would I have said? Objection, my client is an idiot?”

“Okay then. Did you do that thing where you rub your temples and look really sad and disappointed?”

“I don’t recall doing so. But I couldn’t swear that I did not.”

“So what did you do?”

“I lost. Although I flatter myself that I made the best of a bad situation by attempting to characterise my client as, and once more I quote, ‘a man so honest that he voluntarily introduces prior arrests not in evidence.’”

At this point, I just gave up and burst out laughing. “You’re such a trier.”

“I’m glad I could amuse you at least. It means I’ve done somebody some good today.”

“Oh, come on. It wasn’t your fault. You defended the guy as well as you could.”

“Yes, but if one must lose, one prefers to lose honourably rather than ignominiously.”

“Y’know, I was going to be sympathetic, right until you started referring to yourself as one.”

He gave a little chuckle. “One is sorry.”

“One fucking well better be. One isn’t the fucking queen.”

“Will you come for a drink with me after work?” he said. It wasn’t exactly a blurt, but it had definite blurty qualities. “That is, I think we should be seen together more often. For the sake of the project.”

“The project? This isn’t an episode of Doctor Who. But if you’re that keen to preserve the integrity of Operation Cantaloupe, we’ve had an invitation to an expensive private members’ club from the biggest nitwit in the Home Counties.”

“Does this sort of thing happen often in your line of work?”

“Not so much,” I admitted. “My get-a-respectable-boyfriend plan isn’t doing what it’s supposed to because none of our donors have noticed. And my very lovely, very posh, but very, very silly coworker has suggested we go out with him and his partner in order to generate a little bit of society buzz. But we absolutely don’t have to do it. To be honest, it’s probably a bad idea anyway.”

“We should go.” I was beginning to recognise Oliver’s decisive voice. “The entire purpose of this exercise is to improve your public image. If we started turning down opportunities to do that, I’d be remiss in my fake boyfriend duties.”

“Are you sure? There’ll be other opportunities to score fake boyfriend points.”

“I’m sure. Besides, meeting your coworkers is what a real boyfriend would do.”

“You’re going to regret that. But it’s too late. I’ll text you the… Will you fake dump me if I say ‘deets’?”

“Without hesitation.”

I hung up a few minutes later and delivered the news to Alex, who, once he remembered that he’d invited us, seemed genuinely delighted.

Next on my list of personal things to do on company time was—and I could not believe I was even thinking about this—get in touch with my father. I’d been putting it off since Sunday, but Oliver was the kind of thoughtful bastard who’d probably ask how it was going and I didn’t want to have to tell him I’d wussed it.

Of course, now I came to it, I realised that I didn’t have any way to contact Jon Fleming, and the thing about famous people is they’re actually pretty hard to reach. Probably the quickest and most effective strategy I could have tried was asking Mum, but quick and effective wasn’t really what I was aiming for. Basically, what I needed was a way of trying to get in touch with my dad that left me with as little chance as possible of having to be in touch with my dad.

So I got his manager’s name off his website and his manager’s number off his manager’s website. The manager in question turned out to be a guy named Reggie Mangold, who by the looks of things had been a hotshot in the ’80s, though now Jon Fleming was by far his biggest client. Very, very slowly I poked the number into my office phone and hoped for an answering machine.

“Mangold Talent,” said a gruff Cockney voice that definitely wasn’t an answering machine. “Mangold speaking.”

“Um. Hi. I need to talk to Jon Fleming.”

“Oh, well. In that case, I’ll put you through directly. Please hold.”

The absence of hold music and the sarcasm dripping from his tone suggested that I was not, in fact, about to be put through directly. “No, really. He asked to speak to me.”

“Unless you’ve got way nicer tits than you sound like you’ve got, I very much doubt that.”

“I’m his son.”

“Pull the other one, mate, it’s got bells on.”

“My name is Luc O’Donnell. My mother is Odile O’Donnell. Jon Fleming actually is my father and does actually want to speak to me.”

Reggie Mangold wheezed a smoker’s laugh. “If I had a quid for every little shit who’s tried that on me, I’d have eight pound forty-seven.”

“Okay, so you don’t believe me. That’s fine. But if you could just tell him I called, that would be peachy.”

“I will certainly do that. I’m writing your message down right now in my imaginary notebook. Are we spelling O’Donnell with two l’s or three?”

“Two n’s. Two l’s. And it’s about the cancer thing.”

And then I hung up, which gave me a sense of satisfaction that briefly counteracted the nausea. Key word being briefly. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what was worse: having to reach out to my waste of a father in the first place, or trying to reach out to him and discovering he’d made no effort to actually let me. And, yes, I’d gone about it in a slightly half-arsed way, but you’d think telling your manager that he might get a call from your son at some point fell somewhere between “bare” and “minimum” on the trying-to-connect-with-your-long-lost-family scale.