Laline Paull - The Ice - A gripping thriller for our times from the Bailey’s shortlisted author of The Bees

‘Yes,’ said Mogens Hadbold. ‘I’m sorry that I did not tell you the meeting was streaming live. They wanted to be present, but discreetly.’

He turned his laptop to face Sean and Tom, and the quartered screen showed different Pedersens on Skype.

‘That was very impressive,’ a female voice said, out of the screen. ‘We will let you know. Tak , Mogens.’

He replied in a rapid burst of Norwegian, and closed the laptop.

‘Mr Harding is something of a hero to the younger generation, you know this. They are the ones making all the big noise about the right buyer. The older ones – well, you know how we are as we get old. We like security. And money! But the young have the power.’ He stood up, as did the lawyer and accountant. ‘Thank you very much for returning.’ The meeting was over. Sean stood too.

‘You don’t want to ask me anything?’ He looked from one to the other. Mogens Hadbold shook his head. ‘We have looked into your partners, Miss Martine Delaroche and Miss Radiance Young. We are satisfied of your financial commitment. And of course we know Mr Harding’s environmental work. And you know Midgardfjorden, so there is no more to say on that. Everyone is clear what is on the table.’

They were both silent in the lift going down. Only when they were out on the street did Sean explode.

‘You knew there was a camera!’

‘Yep. Want a drink?’ Tom grinned. ‘I’m gasping.’

They went into the first place that smelled of beer. It was the middle of the afternoon, a strange time to be in a pub, but everything was strange. Sean had taken Tom to the presentation as his mascot; Tom had taken control. Sean had said almost nothing. Tom put his arm round his shoulder.

‘I wasn’t so bad, was I?’

‘You were an utter, utter bastard. They loved you.’

‘Didn’t overdo it?’

‘You chewed the furniture – I wanted to throttle you.’

‘You’re very welcome.’ Tom ordered two pints without asking what Sean wanted. Sean wasn’t a pubbish sort any more, certainly not any old boozer on a midweek afternoon. Not that he was in any state to do business – he was fizzing with energy and outrage at Tom’s hijacking of his event.

‘You are the most egotistical fucker I have ever met, Tom, you know that?’

‘If I’d gone in there all mealy-mouthed, you’d be dead in the water.’ Their pints came. They clinked.

‘Bastard.’

‘Bastard.’

They drank hard and talked lightly of current affairs, excluding the one with Martine. Tom thanked Sean for the picture. They discussed the latest closure of the Suez Canal, the skinhead revival, and remembered a mutual friend from college, recently killed reporting from Ukraine.

‘We underestimated him,’ Tom agreed. ‘A hero in our midst.’

‘Like you,’ Sean said. ‘You’re a hero. I mean it. Your life counts.’

Tom drained his pint. ‘Sean, so does yours. You can move mountains. You’ve pulled yourself up by your bootstraps.’

Sean felt a glow that was more than the beer, and the afternoon sun coming in through the sand-etched windows. Putting the world to rights with Tom, boozing an afternoon away. What a rare pleasure. He was about to tell him that; he might even have been about to tell him how much he’d missed him, after ordering another pair of pints, when the door opened and a beautiful girl walked in.

She was about twenty-five, fresh-faced, casually dressed. Without realising, Sean pulled in his belly and sat up straighter. She looked across and walked over. Her smile was lovely. Perhaps she’d been in one of his clubs, and recognised him. He prepared himself. Tom put his arm round her. They kissed.

‘I’m ready,’ he said.

‘Then hello and goodbye.’ She smiled at Sean, playful and polite.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Tom, she’s the image of Ruth.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘Is that a good thing?’ The girl looked from face to face. ‘Who is Ruth?’

‘Mutual friend,’ Tom said. ‘A brilliant woman.’

The girl’s smile lit her up. ‘Then I don’t mind at all.’

Sean gazed at her until Tom punched him lightly on the shoulder.

‘Let me know how much they hated me.’

Sean watched them disappear out onto the street, and into their shared afternoon. He found himself alone, quite drunk and acutely bereft.

The lovely girl was young enough to be Tom’s daughter, if he’d had one. This brought the image of his own sharply to Sean’s mind. Rosie, the angry sad child who could not understand how her father needed to feel like a man more than a husband. How her mother had changed into a woman who saw him as he really was, instead of the hero he wanted to be.

Sean knew he was drunk, but maybe that was the best way to tell Rosie how he felt. He wanted to say sorry, for so much. There at the bar he took out his phone. The call went straight through to her voicemail. At least it didn’t ring several times, as often happened, before going dead. That meant she knew it was him, and didn’t want to talk. This time, she was just busy. Then he called Martine, and the same thing happened.

Why did they not pick up? Sean left his pint unfinished. Only sad old men drank pints on their own in daylight. Tom had done this to him.

A bright burst of laughter seemed aimed at him and he turned. Two girls sat at a corner table, they looked away when he caught their eye – but not before flashing him a quick smile. He did not know what to do with himself; it was that awkward time when the pub was just filling up with the early after-work crowd, the low earners who couldn’t wait to get away. One minute he was enjoying a liberating freedom with Tom, drinking pints in an unfashionable pub at the hour they felt like doing it – and the next he was beached on the shores of other people’s lives – like some loser.

The girls sent arcs of laughter up through the air, they were lassoing him and drawing him over, they wanted to play. He looked in the mirror behind the bar, where he could see them angling their thighs towards him, rearranging their shiny hanks of hair.

Before he left, he spoke to the barman and bought a bottle of champagne to be sent over when he’d gone. Their faces fell as he went out, and he felt a grim satisfaction that he had not fallen for it, drunk as he was. He could have gone over and within a couple of drinks – maybe not even that – adjourned to somewhere more comfortable. A hotel. An hotel. He had learned to always use that weirdness, to demonstrate his adherence to the right set of rules. Inviting people for ‘a kitchen supper’, never ‘dinner’. Repeating ‘how do you do,’ instead of ever answering the question. In English society, nobody cared – that was something he learned too – and they would be horrified if you told them. But they always cared that you were rich.

Standing outside, Sean watched the girls receive the champagne. They were suitably over-excited and he drew back as they scanned the pub for him. What a strange thing to have done. It gave him no pleasure, he was just acting out the anxiety of waiting, of being compared and judged after the presentation. He should have just said that to Tom, but he’d been too busy struggling with the feeling of inadequacy because of how brilliant Tom had been. If they’d only had longer, and more to drink, he would have blurted it all out, they could have talked again like they used to – he could have told him about how it had gone wrong with Gail. Tom was kind, he was always kind, he would have known what to say. Instead, he’d gone off with that girl, who did look like a young Ruth. Tom had fucked things up too. Sean wasn’t the only one.

He slammed into the wall of the pub, drunker than he’d thought. When he and Tom had been drinking together, he’d been happy in a way he had forgotten, relaxing into that long-lost feeling of comradeship and solidarity. Only now did he realise he’d been looking forward to talking about their Greenland trip again, to indulging in a full-blown nostalgia fest, to drinking more, to calling Martine drunkenly to say he was having dinner – supper – with Tom, that it didn’t fucking matter what happened with the Midgard deal, at least they’d reconnected.