It was the first time I’d been out of the house in nearly a year. Cutting myself off hadn’t been an instant thing. Over a period of weeks I found it easier to work from the study, to spend my evenings in the cinema. Sitting watching other people have their happy endings made it easier to deal with the fact I didn’t get one.

I started living vicariously through the movies, switching off from the outside world. I dealt with business via email and phone, I didn’t bother going out. There didn’t seem much point. Not without her.

She never got in touch. I could have rung her but I knew the truth, she had taken the money and run. That was what the deal always was. I had no right to expect anything more. Didn’t stop it cutting me deep though.

Leaving the house for this meeting had been made easier by Tomlinson. He had filled me in on exactly why I needed to attend in person. One final meeting to hopefully resolve everything about the land deal. I knew most of it.

Tomlinson had sold the land to me. My lawyer, Richard Senior, had fiddled the contract in his favor, wanting to drill for oil and keep the profit for himself, despoil the pristine environment that we wanted to protect.

Tomlinson had managed to stall him all this time with one legal wrangle after another and finally we had the trump card we needed to play.

Tomlinson and his lawyer, Alec Hillaby, had pulled out all the stops, no expenses spared to get to this point. Tomlinson was on the far side of the table when I entered his boardroom. To his left was Hillaby, papers laid out in a neat line in front of him. “Nick,” Tomlinson said as I entered, getting to his feet. “Good to see you. How are you? You look pale.”

“I’ve been worse. Did you mean what you said on the phone. Is it really sorted?”

“We shall see, I suppose. What do you think, Alec?”

“I think with this piece of paper in front of me, we have a fighting chance to end this once and for all.”

“What is that?”

“Come and read it for yourself.”

I sat down in the empty seat and read through the papers while we waited for Senior to arrive. He came swaggering in ten minutes later, looking blissfully unaware of what we had.

For the last couple of months, he’d been chipping away at each obstacle in front of him and he knew that sooner or later we’d run out of ways to stop him drilling. All he had to do was bide his time.

“I hope this isn’t another attempt to appeal to my good side,” he said as he sat down. “I haven’t got one.”

“We’ll keep this short,” Hillaby said. “We want you to rescind all rights to the land that you claim were granted you by Mr Stempel here. We want you to crawl away and hide under whatever rock you came out from and never come back.”

“That’s all you’ve got? Why did I waste my time coming here?” He was already getting to his feet.

“If you don’t,” Hillaby continued, “we have sworn testimony here that you have illegally altered not just the contract provided in this case but more than a dozen other contracts for work dating back more than a decade.”

“Bullshit,” Senior replied. “You’re bluffing.”

“Do you know a Gwyneth Bonner?”

“Never heard of her.”

“That’s funny. She’s listed as being an employee of yours up until three months ago.”

“I have a lot of employees. I don’t know the names of all of them.”

“This one you should. She was Mr Stempel’s secretary.”

“Not ringing any bells.”

“Maybe this will. She didn’t take too kindly to you stringing her along with offers of sharing in the profit you planned to make. When she’d finished being useful by passing you information about Mr Stempel, you fired her. Remember that?”

Senior shook his head but the smug smile on his face was fading.

“She had access to your files while she was in your office and she saw all kinds of proof of the type of deals you were making. Changing Nick’s contract so you got the oil rights to the land wasn’t the first time you’ve done this, was it?”

“You’ve no proof of any of this and if you breathe so much of a word about this in public, I will sue you for slander.”

“You might want to check your files before you tell us we’ve no proof. You might find a few things went missing around the time you fired Miss Bonner.”

“She stole from me?” he asked, sounding on the back foot for the first time.

“I use your words in response. You have no proof. We have a woman who is willing to swear in court about what you were up to. If, on the other hand, you agree to leave the land alone, we will leave you alone. Deal?”

Senior was up and out the door without another word. I turned to the other two. “Did Gwyneth mention anything about Jodie?”

“Jodie? No, why?” Tomlinson replied.

“I thought Jodie was in league with Senior.”

“She never mentioned anything about that to me.”

“How did you get her to confess though? Are you sure she told you the truth?”

“You remember when she quit working for you?”

“It was a couple of months after Jodie left. She went straight to Senior then? I had no idea.”

“She had arranged a deal with him to take half the profits from the oil drilling but when he screwed her over, she took it badly. She came to me in the end, said she wanted to make it right.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

“Because I didn’t want to worry you. You’ve not been well.”

“I’m fine.”

“Hiding away in your house for over a year is not fine, Nick. What happened to you?”

“What do we do now?” I asked, changing the subject quickly.

“Now we give Senior a day or two to back down or we take him back to court and see what the judge thinks. Of course, that’ll cost more.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll have all the money you need.”

“You sure you can afford to keep funding this?”

“If it takes every penny I have.”

“One thing I don’t get,” Hillaby interrupted. “Why are you so quiet about paying for this? If I was fighting to keep land from being drilled on, I’d tell the world I was doing it. Why let everyone think Mr Tomlinson is paying?”

“Simple. He gets to spend his money on the foundation, donating it where it’s needed.”

“But why keep it a secret?”

“Because Charlie is used to good press. I’m used to everyone thinking I’m a cold hearted bastard. Why change that?”

“Don’t you want the world to know you’re doing good things?”

“No.”

I left the conversation there. There was no need to tell them the truth. There was only one person who I wanted to know that I did good things and she hadn’t been in touch for over a year.

I’d got it wrong about her. That was the part that stung as I was driven home afterwards. I had been so sure she was working with Senior. Tomlinson had never been able to prove she wasn’t and obviously with Gwyneth gone, I couldn’t even interrogate her about it.

She hadn’t been part of the scam. It had been Gwyneth all along. I should have known and I kicked myself for not seeing it earlier. I should have been suspicious when she’d upped and quit out of nowhere but I was too withdrawn to notice.

I trusted Gwyneth and she was in cahoots with Senior. I trusted him and he’d shafted me. I trusted Jodie and although she hadn’t been working with them, she had taken the money and run, never getting in touch again.

I sat in my study when I got back to the house. Tomlinson had told me I looked pale. That was what months inside did to a man. Maybe it was time to catch some sun. I owned a house on a little tropical island off the coast of the Seychelles. I hadn’t been there in a fair few years but maybe it was time to top up my tan.

I had a private jet ready in a couple of days. In that time Senior grudgingly accepted the deal. He rescinded oil drilling rights back to me and I put them away in my desk drawer. The land would stay how it was. Pristine. Two billion down the drain but the value of the place was a lot more than that, it was a gift to Jodie, not that she’d ever know.

Jodie. I wanted to reach out to her but how could I do it? Pick up the phone and ring her? I shook my head at the idea. I couldn’t handle the thought of her hanging up on me or worse, telling me exactly what she thought of me, laughing as she said she’d only ever done it for the money. She was a good actress, that was all.

I still loved her though. I wouldn’t ever stop loving her. I decided to send her a final gift. I packaged it up in a neat box and added the rights to the land that Senior had sent back.

I called Terrance. “Mail this for me would you?”

“Of course, Sir.”

With the parcel on its way, I went to go pack. It wouldn’t take long. Tomorrow I’d be on my way to my island. Would I come back? I doubted it. There was nothing for me here anymore.