Twenty minutes later, the study looks like an Oxford night of yore, with one glaring absence.
“CLIVE,” Bea thunders. “I could murder him.”
“Has anyone tried Joss?” Nick asks.
“Voice mail,” Cilla says.
“Well, she can’t hide forever,” Bea spits. “Certainly not from her father. When Eleanor finds out what Joss is up to she’ll probably make him hang up his speculum.”
Our other friends had still been in the garden, and responded to my mayday text within ten minutes—except for Lacey, who hasn’t answered her phone, and Gaz, who stopped by the kitchen on the way up, making the argument that crisis management of any sort required snacks. He is now pacing in front of the fireplace, gnawing on a mushroom tart.
“I’ve been thinking about this all day,” he muses. “I can’t seem to crack it. I wonder if I could get an injunction against him. It’s the middle of the night. But it is for the Royal Family. But I don’t know what the injunction would be for.”
“Stalking?” Cilla suggests.
“Treason? Kind of?” Gemma Sands offers, sprawled out in an armchair.
“Invasion of privacy?” Nick asks.
“Unlawful scum-sucking and general psychosexual asshattery?” I offer from my perch next to him, as close as I can be without sitting in his lap. I think we’re subconsciously so relieved to be on the same side again that we’re loath to give each other any space.
“I don’t think we have to reach that hard,” says Gaz. “Blackmail itself is illegal. But we’ve not got any proof of any of it.”
A fly buzzes past and Bea swipes at it, irritated, then puts her hand on her hip and stops pacing and points at me. “You,” she says. “For God’s sake, Bex, I told you years ago that if you couldn’t hack it you bloody well ought to—”
Nick clears his throat pointedly. Bea closes her mouth and tugs on her long sleeve, trying to look composed.
“—have spoken to someone about your feelings,” she finishes, head high.
“I know,” I say. “Trust me. But I was afraid of what you’d say.”
“Me?” Bea places her hand on her chest. “I am supportive. Look how well I trained you to get in and out of a car.”
“Pet, you’d have horsewhipped her, and you know it,” Gemma says pleasantly.
“Speaking of, where is your sister?” Bea says. “I’ve a verbal horsewhipping for that girl that she’s had coming for years.”
I put up my hand and start to speak but Freddie beats me to it.
“Leave it out, Bea,” he says flatly, his voice stripped of its usual exuberance. “Trust me, Lacey could not feel any worse right now. She’ll have gutted herself enough already.”
Bea takes a look at his wretched visage, as he leans against a dark corner of the room staring moodily into a scotch, and her features soften in a way that I have never seen on her. She walks up to Freddie and takes his face in her hands.
“My darling boy,” she says simply. She stands there for a second until he reddens, and then she clears her throat. “Yes, well, if you’d asked me which of us was going to end up blackmailing another, I’d have always said Clive.” She turns on Gemma. “Bex’s judgment is obviously questionable, but I can’t believe you were ever with him.”
Gemma wrinkles her nose. “You and I were in a fight! And it was barely dating,” she says. “If it makes you feel better, he’s a terrible kisser. If that’s what you even want to call it.”
Bea frowns. “I have to tell Pudge. She’s still not answering her phone.”
“What if Pudge is in cahoots with him, too?” Gaz says.
Bea folds her arms across her chest. “Have you forgotten how brutal the Mail and The Sun and the rest of them were to her during her five-year bender? Pudge hates the gossip press. She’s only with him because she thinks he’s writing fluff, like that moronic piece about the county councillor who also sells personalized cheese wheels.”
“She told me Clive is mainly her tantric pupil,” Gemma pipes up.
Bea flicks her hand. “The point is, who knows what he’s got on her. My sister is a celebrity, too, of a sort.” She takes her phone out of her clutch. “I’m calling her again.”
“And where is Lacey?” I say, frowning at my own phone. Nick squeezes my leg.
“She’ll turn up, Bex,” Freddie says. “She’s probably with your mother.”
“Paddington Larchmont-Kent-Smythe, your tantric pupil is a bastard,” Bea is saying into her phone. “I want you to take his laptop