One Plus One

  "Thank you for clarifying that." He took another, more confident, bite of toast. "Yeah. Give me another twenty minutes, though. I want to make sure I'm--"

  "Safe in cars."

  "Ha." He grinned, and it was pleasing to see him smile. "Yes. Quite. Oh, man, I do feel better." He ran a hand across the plastic-covered table and took a swig of coffee, sighing with apparent satisfaction. He finished the first round of toast, asked if there was any more going, then looked around the table. "Although, you know, I might feel even better if you weren't all staring at me while I eat. I'm worried some other part of me is poking out."

  "You'll know," said Nicky, "because we'll all run screaming."

  "Mum said you nearly brought up an organ," said Tanzie. "I was wondering what it felt like."

  He glanced up at Jess and stirred his coffee. He didn't shift his gaze until she had blushed. "Truthfully? Not so different from most of my Saturday nights, these days."

  Tanzie studied her exam sheet before folding it up carefully. "The thing about numbers," she said, as if they had been having a different conversation altogether, "is they're not always numbers. I mean, i is imaginary. Pi is transcendent. And so is e. But if you stick them together, e to the power of i times pi is minus one. So they make a number that isn't there. Because minus one isn't a number; it's a place where a number should be."

  "Well, that makes perfect sense," said Nicky.

  "Does to me," said Mr. Nicholls. "I feel pretty much like a space where a body should be." He drank the rest of his coffee and put down his cup. "Okay. I'm good. Let's hit the road."

  --

  The landscape altered by the mile as they drove through the afternoon, the hills growing steeper and less bucolic, the walls that banked them morphing from hedgerows into flinty gray stone. The skies opened, the light around them grew brighter, and they passed the distant symbols of an industrial landscape: redbrick factories, huge power stations that belched mustard-colored clouds. Jess watched surreptitiously as Mr. Nicholls drove, at first wary that he would suddenly clutch his stomach, and then later with a vague satisfaction at the sight of normal color returning to his face.

  "I don't think we're going to make Aberdeen today," he said, and there was a hint of apology in his voice.

  "Let's just get as far as we can and do the last stretch early tomorrow morning."

  "That's exactly what I was going to suggest."

  "Still loads of time."

  "Loads."

  She let the miles roll by, dozed intermittently, and tried not to worry about all the things she needed to worry about. She positioned her mirror surreptitiously so that she could watch Nicky in the backseat. His bruises had faded, even in the short time they had been away. He seemed to be talking more than he had been. But he was still closed to her. Sometimes Jess worried he would be like that for the rest of his life. It didn't seem to make any difference how often she told him she loved him, or that they were his family. "You're too late," her mother had said when Jess told her he was coming to live with them. "With a child that age, the damage has been done. I should know."

  As a schoolteacher, her mother could keep a class of thirty eight-year-olds in a narcoleptic silence, could steer them through tests like a shepherd streaming sheep through a pen. But Jess couldn't remember her ever smiling at her with pleasure, the kind of pleasure you're meant to get just from looking at someone you gave birth to.

  She had been right about many things. She had told Jess on the day she started secondary school: "The choices you make now will determine the rest of your life." All Jess heard was someone telling her she should pin down her whole self, like a butterfly. That was the thing: when you put someone down all the time, eventually they stopped listening to the sensible stuff.

  When Jess had Tanzie, young and daft as she had been, she'd had enough wisdom to know she was going to tell her how much she loved her every day. She would hug her and wipe her tears and flop with her on the sofa with their legs entwined like spaghetti. She would cocoon her in love. When Tanzie was tiny, Jess slept with her in their bed, her arms wrapped around her--Marty would haul himself grumpily into the spare room, moaning that there wasn't any room for him. She barely even heard him.

  And when Nicky had turned up two years later, and everyone had told her she was mad to take on someone else's child, a child who was already eight years old and from a troubled background--you know how boys like that turn out--she'd ignored them. Because she could see instantly in the wary little shadow who had stood a minimum twelve inches away from anyone, a little of what she had felt. Because she knew that something happened to you when your mother didn't hold you close, or tell you all the time that you were the best thing ever, or even notice when you were home: a little part of you sealed over. You didn't need her. You didn't need anyone. And without even knowing you were doing it, you waited. You waited for anyone who got close to you to see something they didn't like in you, something they hadn't seen initially, and to grow cold and disappear, too, like so much sea mist. Because there had to be something wrong, didn't there, if even your own mother didn't really love you?

  It was why she hadn't been devastated when Marty left. Why would she be? He couldn't hurt her. The only things Jess really cared about were those two children and letting them know they were okay. Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you had your mother at your back, you'd be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved. Jess hadn't done much to be proud of in her life, but the thing she was most proud of was that Tanzie knew it. Strange little bean that she was, Jess knew she knew it.

  She was still working on Nicky.

  --

  "Are you hungry?" Mr. Nicholls's voice woke her from a half doze.

  She pushed herself upright. Her neck had calcified, as bent and stiff as a wire coat hanger. "Starving," she said, turning awkwardly toward him. "You want to stop somewhere for lunch?"

  The sun had emerged. It shone in actual rays off to their left, strobing a vast, open field of green. God's fingers, Tanzie used to call them. Jess reached for the map in the glove compartment, ready to look up the location of the next services.

  Mr. Nicholls glanced at her. He seemed almost embarrassed. "Actually, you know what? I could really go for one of your sandwiches."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Ed

  The Stag and Hounds B and B wasn't listed in any accommodations guides. It had no Web site, no brochures. It wasn't hard to work out why. The pub sat alone on the side of a bleak, windswept moor, and the mossy plastic garden furniture that stood outside its gray frontage suggested an absence of casual visitors or, perhaps, the triumph of hope over experience. The bedrooms, apparently, were last decorated several decades previously--they bore shiny pink wallpaper, lace curtains, and a smattering of china figurines in place of anything useful, like, say, shampoo or tissues. There was a communal bathroom at the end of the upstairs corridor, where the fixtures were an ancient green and ringed with lime scale. A small box-shaped television in the twin room deigned to pick up three channels, each of those with a faint static buzz. When Nicky discovered the plastic doll in a crocheted wool ball dress that squatted over the loo roll, he was awestruck. "I actually love this," he said, holding her up to the light to inspect her glittery synthetic hem. "It's so bad it's actually cool."

  Ed couldn't believe places like this still existed. But he had been driving for a little more than eight hours at forty m.p.h., the Stag and Hounds was twenty-five pounds per night per room--a rate even Jess was pleased with--and they were happy to let Norman in.

  "Oh, we love dogs." Mrs. Deakins waded through a small flock of excitable Pomeranians. She patted her head, on which a carefully pinned structure sat. "We love dogs more than humans, don't we, Jack?" There was a grunt from somewhere downstairs. "They're certainly easier to please. You can bring your lovely big fella into the snug tonight, if you like. My girls love to meet a new man." She gave Ed a f
aintly saucy nod as she said this.

  She opened the two doors and waved a hand inside.

  "So, Mr. and Mrs. Nicholls, you'll be right next door to your children. You're the only guests tonight, so it should be nice and quiet. We have a selection of cereals for breakfast or Jack will do you egg on toast. He does a lovely egg on toast."

  "Thank you."

  She handed him the keys, held his gaze a millisecond longer than was strictly necessary. "I'm going to guess you like yours . . . gently poached. Am I right?"

  Ed glanced behind him, checking that she was addressing him.

  "I am, aren't I?"

  "Um . . . however they come."

  "However . . . they . . . come," she repeated slowly, her eyes not leaving his. She raised one eyebrow, smiled at him again, then headed downstairs, her pack of small dogs a moving hairy sea around her feet. From the corner of his eye he could see Jess smirking.

  "Don't." He dropped their bags onto the bed.

  "I bags first bath." Nicky rubbed at the small of his back.

  "I need to study," said Tanzie. "I have exactly seventeen and a half hours until the Olympiad." She gathered her books under her arm and disappeared into the next room.

  "Come and give Norman a walk first, sweetheart," Jess said. "Get some fresh air. It'll help you sleep later."

  Jess unzipped a holdall, and pulled a hoodie over her head. When she lifted her arms, a crescent of bare stomach was briefly visible, pale and oddly startling. Her face emerged through the neck opening. "We'll be gone for at least half an hour. Or we . . . could make it longer." As she adjusted her ponytail, she glanced toward the stairs and lifted an eyebrow at him. "Just . . . saying."

  "Funny."

  He could hear her laughing as they disappeared. Ed lay down on the nylon bedspread, feeling his hair lift slightly with static electricity, and pulled his phone from his pocket.

  --

  "So here's the good news," said Paul Wilkes. "The police have completed their initial investigations. The preliminary results show no obvious motive on your side. There is no evidence that you extracted a profit from Deanna Lewis or her brother's trading activities. More pertinent, there is no sign that you made any money at all from the launch of SFAX other than the same share gains that would be made by any employee. Obviously, there would be a higher proportion of profit, given your overall shareholding, but they can find no links to offshore accounts or any attempt to conceal on your side."

  "That's because there were none."

  "Also, the investigating team says that they have uncovered a number of accounts in Michael Lewis's family's names, which suggests a clear attempt to conceal his actions. They have obtained trading records that show he was trading a large volume immediately prior to the announcement--another red flag for them."

  Paul was still talking but the signal was patchy, and Ed struggled to hear him. He stood and walked over to the window. Tanzie was running round and round the pub garden, shrieking happily. The small yappy dogs were following her. Jess was standing, her arms folded, laughing. Norman was in the middle of the space, gazing at them all, a bemused, immovable object in a sea of madness. He put his hand over his other ear. "Does that mean I can come back now? Is it sorted out?" He had a sudden vision of his office: a mirage in a desert.

  "Hold your horses. Here's the less-good news. Michael Lewis wasn't just trading stocks; he was trading options on the stock."

  "Trading what?" He blinked. "Okay. You're now speaking Polish."

  "Seriously?" There was a short silence. Ed pictured Paul in his wood-paneled office, rolling his eyes. "Options allow a trader to leverage his or, in this case, her investment, and generate substantially more in profits."

  "But what does that have to do with me?"

  "Well, the level of profits he generated from the options is significant, so the whole case moves up a gear. Which brings me to the bad news."

  "That wasn't the bad news?"

  Paul sighed. "Ed, why didn't you tell me you'd written Deanna Lewis a damn check?"

  Ed blinked. The check.

  "She cashed a check written by you for five thousand pounds to her bank account."

  "So?"

  "So," and here, from the elaborately slow and careful tenor of his voice, it was possible to picture the eyes roll again, "it links you financially to what Deanna Lewis was doing. You enabled some of that trade."

  "But it was just a few grand to help her out! She had no money!"

  "Whether or not you extracted a profit from it, you had a clear financial interest in Lewis, and it came just before SFAX went live. The e-mails we could argue were inconclusive, but this means it's not just her word against yours, Ed."

  He stared out at the moorland. Tanzie was jumping up and down and waving a stick at the slobbering dog. Her glasses had gone askew on her nose and she was laughing. Jess scooped her up from behind and hugged her.

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning, Ed, defending you just got a whole lot tougher."

  --

  Ed had only utterly disappointed his father once in his whole life. That's not to say he wasn't a general disappointment--he knew his father would have preferred a son who was more obviously in his own mold: upright, determined, driven. A sort of filial marine. But he managed to override whatever private dismay he felt at this quiet, geeky boy, and decided instead that as he so clearly couldn't sort him out, an expensive education would.

  The fact that the meager funds their parents saved over their working years sent Ed to private school and not his sister was the great Unacknowledged Resentment of their family. He often wondered whether, if they had known then what a huge emotional hurdle they were planting in front of Gemma, they still would have done it. Ed never could convince her that it was purely because she was so good at everything that they never felt the need to send her. He was the one who spent every waking hour in his room or glued to a screen. He was the one who was hopeless at sports.

  But no, against all available evidence, Bob Nicholls, former military policeman and later head of security for a small northern building society, was convinced that an expensive minor private school, with the motto "Sports maketh the man," would maketh his son. "This is a great opportunity we're giving you, Edward. Better than your mother or I ever had," he said repeatedly. "Don't waste it." So at the end of Ed's first year, when he opened the report, which used the words disengaged and lackluster performance and, worst of all, not really a team player, he stared at the letter as Ed watched uncomfortably while the color drained from his face.

  Ed couldn't tell him he didn't really like the school, with its braying packs of mocking, overentitled posh boys. He couldn't tell him that no matter how many times they made him run round the rugby field he was never going to like rugby. He couldn't explain that it was the possibilities of the pixelated screen, and what you could create from it, that really interested him. And that he felt he could make a life out of it. His father's face actually sagged with disappointment, with the sheer bloody waste of it all, and Ed realized he had no choice.

  "I'll do better next year, Dad," he said.

  Now Ed Nicholls was due to report to the City of London police in a matter of days.

  He tried to imagine the expression his father would wear when he heard that his son--the son he now boasted about to his ex-army colleagues ("Of course I don't understand what it is he actually does, but apparently all this software stuff is the future")--was quite possibly about to be prosecuted for insider trading. He tried to picture his father's head turning on that frail neck, the shock pulling his weary features down even as he tried to disguise it, and his gently pursed lips as he grasped there was nothing he could say or do.

  So Ed made a decision. He would ask his lawyer to prolong the proceedings as long as possible. He would throw every penny of his own money at the case to delay the announcement of his supposed crime. But he could not go to that family lunch, no matter how ill his father was. He would be doing his father a favor.
By staying away he would actually be protecting him.

  Ed Nicholls stood in the little pink hotel bedroom that smelled of air freshener and disappointment and stared out at the bleak moors, at the little girl who had flopped onto the damp grass and was pulling the ears of the dog as he sat, tongue lolling, an expression of idiotic ecstasy on his great features, and he wondered why--given that he was so evidently doing the right thing--he felt like a complete shit.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Jess

  Tanzie was nervous. She refused supper and declined to come downstairs even for a break, preferring to curl up on the pink nylon coverlet and plow through her maths papers while nibbling on what remained of the breakfast picnic. Jess was surprised: her daughter rarely suffered from nerves when it came to anything maths related. She did her best to reassure her, but it was hard when she had no idea what she was talking about.

  "We're nearly there! It's all good, Tanze. Nothing to worry about."

  "Do you think I'll sleep tonight?"

  "Of course you'll sleep tonight."

  "But if I don't, I might do really badly."

  "Even if you don't sleep, you'll do fine. And I've never known you to not sleep."

  "I'm worried that I'll worry too much to sleep."

  "I'm not worried that you'll worry. Just relax. You'll be fine. It will all be fine."

  When Jess kissed her, she saw that Tanzie had chewed her nails right down to the quick.

  Mr. Nicholls was in the garden. He walked up and down where she and Tanzie had been half an hour earlier, talking avidly into his phone. He stopped and stared at it a couple of times, then stepped up onto a white plastic garden chair, presumably to get better reception. He stood there, wobbling, utterly oblivious to the curious glances of those inside as he gesticulated and swore.

  Jess gazed through the window of the bar, unsure whether to go and interrupt him. There were a few old men gathered around the landlady as she chatted from the other side of the counter. They looked at Jess incuriously over their pints.

  "Work, is it?" The landlady followed her gaze through the window.

  "Oh. Yes. Never stops." Jess raised a smile. "I'll take him a drink."