Page 8 of Love and Loathing

“Oh my God, you’re…”

“Awful? I know. Get in the taxi, Evie. I told your brother I would take you home, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

“You can’t order me around.”

He fixed her with a look, some of the bluntness easing from his expression. “Do you really want to get the tube home? With all the drunks? Walk alone down dark streets? Because you ought to be able to, shouldn’t you? If the world was wonderful, women would be able to walk at night without any fear. But the world isn’t like that, no matter how much your inner feminist wants to reclaim the streets. It isn’t a problem that can be fixed here, now, by you putting yourself at risk just to prove a point. I don’t personally think it can be fixed at all. Some things about the world are irrevocably awful. So please get in the bloody car.”

She might have protested further, but too many news stories haunted her mind. She got in, the silky lining of Aubrey’s jacket warm around her shoulders.

“Where did you get that?” asked Fi when Evie let herself into the flat, everything seeming so much smaller and drabber afterRoscoe’s, the place, as usual, smelling inexplicably of baked beans.

Evie glanced down, colouring in surprise as she realised she was still wearing Aubrey’s jacket.

The cab ride had been thirty-five minutes of frosty silence, Aubrey doing nothing but look mildly surprised when she’d given an insalubrious postcode in north London to the driver rather than her parents' Mayfair house or any of the places you might normally find a Blackton. Then he’d spent the journey looking at his phone. Trying to catch glimpses of what he was doing—oil, or arms, or some other dastardly thing—she’d instead got nothing but impressions of his shape and size in the darkness, and the repeating gold of the passing street lamps glinting off his dark eyes or the screen on his phone. Catching her looking, he’d silently turned his phone towards her, smiling ironically. It was some fiendishly complicated-looking word game.

“Good luck with that,” she’d said, pretending she didn’t care about being caught spying, then she’d gone back to brooding on all the things she should have said to him that evening. She knew all the arguments, the facts, the figures. She’d made speeches at protest marches in front of thousands. But his unflappable smugness had thrown her, made her feel like the woman her mother told her she was.“Ridiculous, to be crying over mangy donkeys at your age. You could get away with it at twelve, Evelyn. Maybe even fourteen. But at twenty-four, it’s just embarrassing.”

She simply hadn’t been able to stand there in front of a man like Aubrey Ford and explain about the Spanish sanctuary, all the ribby, skinny animals, every terrified, beaten dog, every mangy bloody cat, not without knowing he would just laugh. The words had died in her throat. There wasn’t any point. As Fi oftensaid, you had to choose your audience. You couldn’t change the opinion of a man like that.

“You’d never believe me,” she answered Fi now, pulling the jacket off and putting it down over the back of a chair before collapsing, exhausted, onto the sofa. She would have loved to go to bed. But she was currently sitting on it. So was Fi, at the other end of the sofa, scanning her phone, but pausing now, intrigued. The pink was nearly washed out of her pale brown hair. It was loosely tied back, except for a chunky fringe that hid half her tiny, elfin face.

“Tell me.”

Evie paused for a beat, looking at Zig who was sitting sideways in an armchair, scowling at the laptop on his knee. Sensing the expectant silence, he looked up. “What? And hi.”

“Hi. That jacket…” She nodded to where it lay folded on the chair back, catching the faint scent of Aubrey on her skin as she did so. “Belongs to a friend of my brother. Who just so happens to be Domnall White’s tax adviser.”

Fi’s eyes opened wide. Zig sat forward. “Really?”

“At my dad’s company.”

The admission left its usual slimy mark on her soul. Guilt by association.

“But this is brilliant,” Zig said eagerly, setting the laptop down on the floor and shifting position, his whole body angled towards her.

“Is it?”

“I just told you FTP have made Domnall White their chief target. They’re making noise. Trying to get all those old stories back in the news—that fire in the sweat shop, the underage workers, all of it. But they’re also digging up all the dirt on him that they can, making a legal case. Trying to find something that will finally stick in court.”

“He always gets off. He has insanely expensive lawyers.”

“He’s been evading tax for years. If your friend has some evidence—”

“Notmy friend. And I don’t think anything they do at BlacktonGold would be illegal. Unethical, maybe. But that’s not quite the same thing.”

“There’s bound to be something.” Zig stared at her, avid, expectant. “You might be our way in.”

“I don’t see how,” said Evie.

“This friend of yours,” began Fi.

“Again: my brother’s friend. Definitely not mine.”

Fi waved away the distinction as though unimportant. “This guy—”

“Aubrey.”

“Aubrey. If he’s sorting the guy’s taxes, he must have access to everything. All his finances. All the off-shore tax havens, the shell companies, every rotten part of the network.”

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