What I said to Esta Nkemelu, on a speakerphone, in a function room at Brandt Harbour, with champagne in my shoe, was eleven words long.
“Esta. Preserve everything in the Verrin division from the first of January.”
And she said: “Understood. From tonight?”
And I said: from tonight.
And then I hung up, and I picked up my bag, and I walked out past my husband, who was laughing, and past the chairman, who was not.
Nobody escorted me anywhere. There is no security at a hotel gala. There is a man called Pavel on the door who had been letting me in and out of that building for eleven months and who said goodnight to me by name, which I think was the first moment Dash understood that something in the evening had gone wrong.
Why I rang about the division.
Because of a file I had been not thinking about for eleven months.
