Gabby looks at me. ‘From what you’ve said, he doesn’t sound that much of an ogre.’

‘Maybe not.’

‘And my advice remains what it was.’

‘Which was?’

‘Just talk to him. Idiot.’

Gabby has gone to bed. On her hotel-room balcony, I sip imported whisky and stare across the skyline, pretending to myself that I’m catching up on my work.

To speed up the due diligence, we have an open audio connection running between the office and my laptop. For my colleagues at home I exist as an oracle, ready with advice, constantly appraised of their slightest doings. At least, that is the idea.

I can just about hear one of our interns making a hash of something over the phone to an old client.

‘Hello.’

No-one hears me.

‘Hello.’

No-one’s paying any attention to the invisible man in the corner. They’re just getting on with their jobs. Talking. Laughing. I wonder what they are laughing about. I expected the sound of the office to comfort me, but it hasn’t.

‘Hello!’

I should go have a shower, get to bed, get a night’s sleep like a normal person. Instead I linger here getting steadily more drunk, listening to all the life I have engendered moving around in its nest. This thing I have made. This pattern of people and process and capital: it has its own life now. It no longer needs me.

If I bow out now, gracefully, Vaux can have Loophole and I can be in business again within eighteen months, with fresh capital and an enviable reputation. Ralf will stay where he is, Loophole’s newly-fashioned ‘creative director’. Naive as he is, he will grow into the role of Bryon Vaux’s courtier. It is not what he wants. (‘We were having fun, weren’t we?’) But it is what is best for him.

I down my whisky and stalk back inside, cursing Ralf, cursing the company, cursing myself.

Vaux is a rich man, and rich men will have their toys.

FIFTEEN

Without Mum, Dad and I fell into well-worn routines. We shared the housework. I cooked dinner. Ben washed up. We were adept. This was the life we used to lead whenever Mum was laid up in bed. In many ways life was cleaner and easier now she was gone.

Winter bit down early. From my window the hotel lawn, grey with frost, resembled fur more than grass. I closed my eyes and leant my forehead against the glass, receiving a chill fierce enough to pucker the flesh.

Dad was in the kitchen. The radio was on. Distance robbed the words of sense, though the cadences persevered. Headlines. Seven AM.

I was still wrapped in my duvet, marinating in its smelly warmth. To shed that and slip into a dressing gown and, worse, to swap dressing gown for cold, slippy, damp-feeling nylon-mix school clothes, was as painful a prospect, as traumatic, as shedding a skin. Half-naked, blue and scrunched against the cold, I was fighting with an overstuffed wardrobe drawer when Dad leaned in.

‘Up and at ’em, Connie.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘What time are you home this afternoon?’

It was a regular day – no clubs, no sports, no events. ‘Four.’

‘We have someone coming to see us.’

The day passed predictably enough. Mum’s disappearance had got fed through the school’s rumour mill, but the story had quickly lost currency, sustained neither by news nor by credible conjecture. I think my friends, knowing her politics, quietly assumed that Mum was leading some debauched existence on the margins, too loved-up to phone or write.

By the end of the school day, the track by the river was still set rock-hard – a glassy mass of rills, dents and patches of dirty ice, buried here and there under mats of black, congealed leaves. Now the bracken had died back, Michel’s ring of fridges was easy to spot among the trees.

Our hotel had more or less packed in by this point. The register recorded a few waifs and strays, clueless elderly couples and a dissatisfied family of five. Still, Dad had to work, if only to keep up the fabric of the place, so he doubled as duty manager in a motel nearer the coast. On the days I arrived home before him, I worked in the conservatory – that loamy, greenish glass monstrosity that had been tacked onto the back of the house years before, as though the hotel were not big enough already. In the burnished light of a setting sun (if I was lucky; otherwise in drizzle and spreading, glaucous grey) I worked on my portfolio, my heads and hands, my architectural projections. I wrote essays, bedding the bald facts of history, geography and the classics with comfortable, indecisive phrases. Notwithstanding. Moreover. Albeit.

This evening, as I negotiated the fence and walked up to the hotel across the lawn, I saw that Dad had come home on time for our meeting. The lights were on in our apartments and, walking into the living room, I saw that our visitor had already wedged herself uncomfortably into the smallest of our wicker bucket chairs.

She had put on a lot of weight since she had bedded me. Such generous breasts, such ungenerous nipples. While she talked, putting my father straight about the wiles of the female psyche, I imagined her great vampire breasts, sucking the lifeblood from the unwary feeder. What on earth was she thinking of, coming here in these circumstances? Well, she was the mouthpiece – this much I knew – of a local outfit which for the most part trawled the hinterland estates, persuading feckless teenagers into a termination. Here though she was purely ‘a friend of the family’ – this is what she said – someone Mum knew and whose hand she had held (all the while making eyes at Dad and, when that failed, at me). A self-appointed honest broker.

She seemed totally oblivious to me.

‘Because, painful as this is,’ she said, a dentist preparing a nervous patient, ‘I think we have to entertain the possibility that Sara felt threatened here. By you, Ben, I mean.’

Ben collected visits from missing-persons charities the way a lonely pensioner invites builders in to estimate for work he cannot afford. These endless interviews gave Dad the illusion of progress in his search for Mum. He imagined a network of intelligence radiating across the country.

I stayed out of the way of these visits as much as I could.

No one vanishes, a splash, then gone. No one. Impossible.

Mum’s rooms. Make-up and dresses and easels and unopened paints. Dad said, ‘If you’d rather I did this on my own, I’ll understand.’

In the end, after the first shock of her disappearance, Dad had settled in his own mind that Mum had absconded, fleeing the pressures of marriage and family. After so many years with her, I suppose he found it impossible to imagine a world without her in it. He packed Mum’s things up in boxes and carried them out to the garage.

Living with Dad, surfing the roll and spin of his moods, his grief, his sense of having been abandoned and his slow-building anger (he was learning, in his nervous, clumsy way, to hate the thing he had loved) I found it difficult to resist his version of events. I didn’t forget what had really happened – but it was hard for me to imagine that the episode was ever a part of my waking life. Dad’s anxious speculations were so much more believable. I would catch myself, from time to time, imagining what Mum was doing, away from us; among her Wiccan friends, perhaps, or in sheltered accommodation somewhere, free of what she had probably convinced herself by now was an abusive marriage.

I no longer spent all my free time by the river. One lazy weekend afternoon I got Dad’s walking maps down from the shelf and, spreading them out on the conservatory tiles, I found the river and I traced it with my finger, through towns and villages, round chalk hills and across reclaimed pasture, out to sea. Impossible.

How much easier to imagine that she was sitting in some B&B somewhere, extemporising her sexual and domestic oppression for the benefit of some credulous social worker.