Jojo Moyes: The One Plus One

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t you watch the news, Jess? All the graduates are out of work. It doesn’t matter what education you get. She’s still going to have to fight. She’s still going to struggle.’ He paused. ‘No. There’s no point us going further into hock just for this. Of course these schools are going to tell you it’s all special, and she’s special, and her life chances are going to be amazing if she goes, et cetera, et cetera. That’s what they do.’

Mum didn’t say anything.

‘No, if she’s bright like they say she is, she’ll make her own way. She’ll have to go to McArthur’s like everyone else.’

‘Like the little bastards who spend all their time working out how to bash Nicky’s face in. And the girls who wear four inches of makeup and won’t do PE in case they break a nail. She won’t fit in there, Marty. She just won’t.’

‘Now you sound like a snob.’

‘No, I sound like someone who accepts that her daughter is a little bit different. And might need a school that embraces it.’

‘Can’t do it, Jess. I’m sorry.’ He sounded distracted now, as if he’d heard something in the distance. ‘Look. I’ve got to go. Get her to Skype me Sunday.’

There was a long silence.

Tanzie counted to fourteen.

She heard the door open and Nicky’s voice: ‘That went well, then.’

She leant over and finally rubbed Norman’s tummy. She closed her eyes so she didn’t see the tear that plopped onto it.

‘Have we done any lottery tickets lately?’

‘No.’

That silence lasted nine seconds. Then Mum’s voice echoed into the still air:

‘Well, I think maybe we’d better start.’

Ed was in the creatives’ room drinking coffee with Ronan when Sidney walked in. A man he vaguely recognized stood behind him; another of the Suits. In their sombre grey, with their end-of-the-world expressions, they resembled a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

‘We’ve been looking for you.’

‘Well, you found us.’

‘Not Ronan, you.’

He studied them for a minute, waiting, then threw a red foam ball at the ceiling and caught it. He glanced sideways at Ronan. Investacorp had bought half-shares in the company a full eighteen months ago but they still thought of them as the Suits. It was one of the kinder things they called them in private.

‘Do you know a woman called Deanna Lewis?’

‘Why?’

‘Did you give her any information about the launch of the new software?’

‘What?’

‘It’s a simple question.’

Ed looked from one to the other. The atmosphere was strangely charged. His stomach, a packed elevator, began a slow descent towards his feet. ‘We may have chatted about work. No specifics that I remember.’

‘Deanna Lewis?’ said Ronan.

‘You need to be clear about this, Ed. Did you give her any information about the launch of SFAX?’

‘No. Maybe. What is this?’

‘The police are downstairs searching your office, with two goons from the Financial Services Authority. Her brother has been arrested for insider trading. On the basis of information that you gave them about the launch of the software.’

‘Ha-ha-ha! Funny.’

‘Deanna Lewis? Our Deanna Lewis?’ Ronan began to wipe his spectacles, a thing he did when he was feeling anxious.

‘Your Deanna Lewis?’

‘We knew her back in college.’

‘Did you now? Well, her brother’s hedge fund made two point six million dollars on the first day of trading. She alone cleared a hundred and ninety thousand on her personal account.’ They weren’t laughing.

‘Her brother’s hedge fund?’

‘Yes, his hedge fund.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Ronan said. ‘What is this?’

‘I’ll spell it out. Deanna Lewis is on record talking to her brother about Ed telling her about the launch of SFAX. She says Ed said it was going to be enormous. And guess what? Two days later her brother’s fund is among the biggest purchasers of shares. What exactly did you tell her?’

Ronan stared at him. Ed struggled to gather his thoughts. When he swallowed it was shamefully audible. Across the office the development team were peering over the tops of their cubicles. ‘I didn’t tell her anything.’ He blinked. ‘I don’t know. I might have said something. It’s not like it was a state secret.’

‘It was a fucking state secret, Ed. It’s called insider trading. She told him you gave her dates, times. She told him the company was going to make a fortune.’

‘Then she’s lying! Shooting her mouth off. We were … having a thing.’

‘You wanted to bone the girl, so you shot your mouth off to impress her?’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘You had sex with Deanna Lewis?’ Ed could feel Ronan’s myopic gaze burning into him.

Sidney lifted his hands, turned to the man behind him. ‘You need to call your lawyer.’

‘But how can I be in trouble? It’s not like I got any benefit from it.’

‘Michael Lewis’s hedge fund was the biggest single investor in Mayfly in the week before SFAX went live.’

‘I didn’t even know her brother had a hedge fund.’

Sidney glanced behind him. The faces suddenly found something interesting to look at on their desks. And he lowered his voice. ‘You have to go now. They want to interview you at the police station.’

‘What? This is nuts. I’ve got a meeting in twenty minutes. I’m not going to any police station.’

‘And obviously we’re suspending you until we’ve got to the bottom of this.’

Ed laughed at him. ‘Are you kidding me? You can’t suspend me. It’s my company.’ He threw the foam ball up in the air and caught it, turning away from them. Nobody moved. ‘I’m not going. This is our company. Tell them, Ronan.’

He looked at Ronan, but Ronan turned away. Ed looked at Sidney, who simply shook his head. Then he looked up at the two uniformed men who had appeared behind him, at his secretary, whose hand was at her mouth, at the carpet path already opening up between him and the office door, and the foam ball dropped silently onto the floor between his feet.

Deanna Lewis. Maybe not the prettiest girl, but definitely the one who scored highest on Ed and Ronan’s campus-wide Girls You’d Give One Without Having To Drink A Fourth Pint First points system. As if she’d look at either of them. He guessed that when she walked through the computer-science centre they had worn the same expressions as a basset hound watching a passing hamburger.

He’d bet she’d never once registered him in the whole three years, apart from that time when it was raining heavily and she was at the station and asked him for a lift back to halls in his Mini. He had been so tongue-tied the whole time she was in the passenger seat he had said barely a word, except a vaguely strangled, ‘No worries,’ when he let her out at the other end. Those two words somehow managed to cover three octaves. She gave him a look that told him he was watching too many Australian soaps, then stooped to peel the empty crisps packet from the sole of her boot, dropping it delicately back into the footwell.

If Ed had it bad, Ronan had it worse. His love weighed him down like a cartoon dumbbell, his hopes for it based on evidence less substantial than dust motes. He wrote her poetry, sent anonymous flowers on Valentine’s Day, smiled hopefully at her in the dinner queue and tried not to look crushed when she failed to notice. He grew philosophical in the end. It only took three years. Ed and he had both understood that someone so pretty, so far up the campus pecking order, wouldn’t make time for either of them. And after they had graduated, set up their company, and swapped thinking about women for thinking about software until software became the thing they actually preferred thinking about, Deanna Lewis fell into that weird pocket of reminiscence you bring out when you’ve had too much to drink and want to show your co-workers you had some kind of social life at university and didn’t spend the entire three years stuck behind a screen. ‘Oh … Deanna Lewis,’ they would say to each other, their eyes distant, like they could see her floating in slo-mo above the other drinkers’ heads. Or occasionally, of some other girl standing at the bar: ‘She’s nice. But she’s no Lewis.’