Ed had gone about twenty miles before he became aware of quite how tired he was. The combination of three nights of broken sleep, a hangover and hundreds of miles of driving hit him like a demolition ball, and he felt his eyes drooping. He turned up the radio, opened his windows, and when that failed, he pulled into a roadside café to get some coffee.

It was half empty despite it being lunchtime. In one corner a short-order chef fried something unseen on a griddle dark with grease, his hat pushed back on his head. A couple of suited men sat at opposite ends of the room, lost in mobile phones and paperwork, the wall behind them offering sixteen different permutations of sausage, egg, bacon, chips and beans. Ed grabbed a newspaper from the stand, and made his way to a table. He ordered coffee from the waitress.

‘I’m sorry, sir, but at this time of day we reserve tables for those eating.’ Her accent was strong enough that he had to think quite hard to work out what she had said.

‘Oh. Right. Well, I –’

MAJOR UK TECHNOLOGY COMPANY IN INSIDER TRADING RIDDLE

He stared at the newspaper headline.

‘Sir?’

‘Mm?’ His skin began to prickle.

‘You have to order some food. If you want to sit down.’

‘Oh.’

The Financial Services Authority confirmed last night that it is investigating a traded UK technology company for insider trading worth millions of pounds. The investigation is understood to be taking place on both sides of the Atlantic, and involves the London and New York stock exchanges, and the SEC, the US equivalent to the FSA.

Nobody has yet been arrested, but a source within the City of London police said that this was ‘simply a matter of time’.

‘Sir?’

She’d said it twice before he heard her. He looked up. A young woman, her nose freckled, her natural hair teased and fluffed into a kind of matted arrangement. She was waiting in front of him. ‘What would you like to eat?’

‘Whatever.’ His mouth was the consistency of powder.

A pause.

‘Um. Do you want me to tell you today’s specials? Or some of our more popular dishes?’

Simply a matter of time.

‘We do an all-day Burns breakfast –’

‘Fine.’

‘And we … You want the Burns breakfast?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you want white or brown bread with that?’

‘Whatever.’

He felt her staring at him. And then she scribbled a note, tucked her pad carefully into her waistband and walked away. And he sat and stared at the newspaper on the Formica table. Over the past seventy-two hours he might have felt like the whole world had gone topsy-turvy, but that had been a mere taster for what had been about to come.

‘I’m with a client.’

‘This won’t take a minute.’ He took a breath. ‘I’m not going to be at Dad’s lunch.’

A short, ominous silence

‘Please tell me I’m hallucinating through my ears.’

‘I can’t. Something’s come up.’

‘Something.’

‘I’ll explain later.’

‘No. You wait. Hold on.’

He heard the muffled sound of a hand over a phone. Possibly a clenched fist. ‘Sandra. I need to take this outside. Back in a …’ Footsteps. And then, as if someone had turned the volume up to full blast: ‘Really? Are you f**king kidding me? Really?’

Ed stared at the booth across the restaurant. An old couple sat side by side, saying nothing, eating their fish and chips with methodical accuracy. He had thought this would be a good time to do it. How could it have been any worse?

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this. I can’t believe it. It’s tomorrow, Ed. Do you have any idea how hard Mum’s worked to pull it together? Deirdre, Simon, the Grahams, that couple from down the road they’re always going on about? They’re all coming. They’re coming because Mum and Dad want to show you off. Do you have any idea how much they’re looking forward to seeing you? Dad sat down last week and worked out how long it had been since they last saw you. December, Ed. That’s four months. Four months in which he’s got more and more sick and you have f**king well failed to do anything useful other than send him some stupid f**king magazines.’

‘He said he liked the New Yorker. I thought it gave him something to do.’

‘He can barely f**king see, Ed. As you’d know if you’d bothered to come up. He likes bloody magazines if there’s someone to read them to him. And Mum gets so bored reading those long pieces that her brain actually starts to seep through her ears.’

On and on she went. It was like having a hairdryer turned on full strength in his ear.

‘Mum is so freaking desperate to see you. She’s actually cooked your favourite food rather than Dad’s for their anniversary lunch. That’s how much she wants to see you. And now, twenty-four hours before the actual thing, you just announce that you can’t come? Just like that? No explanation? What the hell is this? I can’t believe you. I defended you to Auntie Sheila when she said that that job was making you self-important, when she said you were getting too grand for your own family. Now I’m beginning to wonder whether she was right.’

His ears actually grew warm. He sat there, closed his eyes. When he opened them, it was twenty to two. The Olympiad would now be more than three-quarters through. He thought of Tanzie in that university hall, her head bent over her papers, the floor around her littered with redundant spectacles. He hoped for her sake that, faced with a page full of figures, she would relax and do the thing she was so plainly made to do. He thought of Nicky, sloping around outside, perhaps trying to find somewhere for a sneaky smoke.