There’s a long silence. Pete closes his eyes, as if in pain.

I add, “And that’s why I need to ask you, before we spend a lot of time and money investigating these other possibilities: Did you have anything, anything at all, to do with the swapping of those babies?”

He looks me in the eye. Those kind, gentle brown eyes of his that I’ve stared into so many times—across the kitchen table as we eat, when we share a knowing glance at parties, when we make love—lock intently onto mine.

“I did not,” he says quietly.

But really, what can you tell from someone’s eyes? Presumably every one of those nurses I listed had gazes as clear and untroubled as his.

And I still can’t shake off the sense that there’s something he’s not telling me.

“Do you believe me?” he adds.

“Of course,” I say, although I don’t suppose either of us really thinks I mean it.

77

   PETE

   I FOUND MURDO MCALLISTER through LinkedIn. I simply set my profile to incognito and browsed Miles’s contacts. About a dozen were ex-Hardings. I chose Murdo because his dates showed he’d left the bank around the same time as Miles, and also because under INTERESTS he’d listed “Mayfair Mayflies,” the rugby team Lucy said Miles used to play for.

Contacting him was a risk, of course. Murdo might simply forward my email to Miles. But I was betting that Maddie was right, and that what Miles was doing to us was part of a consistent pattern of behavior.

And besides, Maddie was definitely right in saying we had to do something. If nothing else, I had to show her that I was just as committed as she was to clearing my name.

Murdo suggested meeting in a pub in Shepherd Market, off Piccadilly. It wasn’t an area I knew—a maze of tiny streets and alleyways where wine merchants and bookshops rubbed shoulders with embassies and pricey antiques dealers. But the traditional Victorian pub he’d chosen could have been in any market town in England. As I walked in he stood up and greeted me, a pleasant, burly man with thinning curly hair and a faint Scottish accent.

   He allowed me to buy him a beer, but only a half. “I don’t have long—I’ve got a call at one thirty. You said you wanted to talk about Miles Lambert. You’re not about to offer him a job, are you?”

I shook my head. “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”

I gave him the short version. When I’d finished, he said flatly, “What you describe doesn’t surprise me in the least.”

I pulled out my notebook. “Can you be a bit more specific?”

Just for a moment, Murdo looked anxious. “This is off the record, right?”

“If you like.”

He nodded. “I met Miles when he joined Hardings. He was headed for the top—a golden boy. A few people thought it odd he’d moved jobs every couple of years before coming to us, but since he’d always moved to more senior positions or for a bigger salary, you could read it as smart career planning. This wasn’t long after the crash, and everything was changing—the regulators were insisting on banks setting up internal compliance departments, risk assessment experts were getting seats on the board, that kind of stuff.” Murdo took a pull of his beer. “The traders all hated it, but we could see why it was necessary. Miles’s specialty was spotting gaps in the new regulations and gaming them. Nothing wrong with that, of course—it was what we were paid to do. And ultimately, if Compliance was happy, fine.”

“But Miles went further?”

Murdo nodded. “In that environment, it was all too easy to start thinking, How do I package this so Compliance approves it, even though I know it’s actually against the rules? At the end of the day, they were just another bunch of muppets you had to outsmart. And Miles was good at it. He was a bloody professional banker—focused, driven, with an unbelievable work ethic, but he never got stressed or shouted at people. And believe me, that’s unusual—trading’s a high-pressure environment. He was put in charge of a team, and although he drove them pretty hard, they all seemed to like him.”

   “So what happened?”

“Rogue trading,” Murdo said shortly. “We were both working with complex equity derivatives that most people in the bank couldn’t even spell, let alone understand. But essentially, if you made a bet on a particular asset rising, you had to hedge it by making a bet on another asset that could be counted on to move in the opposite direction. That way, you limited the bank’s risk, so you were allowed to make a bigger initial bet. It’s a bit like taking out an insurance policy against your house burning down—it means you can risk buying a bigger house than you otherwise could. Miles had found a way to make the risky trade without taking out the insurance, by making fictitious hedges. To begin with, he mostly got his bets right, which meant huge profits for his desk. He concealed the source by making more trades, and so on and so on. It was crazy, really—he was bound to get found out eventually. In the event, it was a whistleblower—someone on his team who wasn’t quite as brainwashed as the others.”

“And Miles got fired?”

“In the end, yes. But before that, there was an investigation. That was the first I knew of it—when the audit people started crawling all over him. The sensible thing to do at that point would have been to clear his position, deny everything, and keep his head down. But he didn’t.” Murdo shook his head in disbelief. “He came to me after work one day and casually asked if I’d set up a trading account he could use, now the heat was on him. As a fellow Mayfly, he said, he knew he could trust me. I told him I’d have to be mad to do that—I’d end up getting dragged into it, too. He just laughed and said, ‘Well, why not? This is the most fun I’ve had in ages.’ He was actually enjoying the whole damn thing. It was as if he thought he was invincible.”

   “So you refused to help?”

Murdo nodded. “But the bastard told the investigators I’d been part of it anyway. There was absolutely no truth to it, of course. But I knew I was under a shadow after that, so I left.”

“When was all this?”

“Just over two years ago.”

About the same time David and Theo were in hospital. “And what about the Mayflies? He left the team because of a knee injury, I heard?”

Murdo snorted. “Who told you that? He got thrown out because he took it too damn seriously.”

“In what way?”

“Look—we’re a pub team. A bunch of guys who all played at a decent level at university and aren’t quite ready to hang up our boots. Miles became captain because no one else wanted it. And to be fair, because he was the best player. But he hated losing—just hated it. Pretty soon he was giving us prematch pep talks. We even had to chant stuff out loud—‘Desire. Hurt. Dominate. Destroy,’ that kind of thing. That one was actually an England dressing room chant from the 2003 World Cup, but we played in a Sunday league, for Christ’s sake. And then, in one match, when we were losing sixteen to twelve, there was a scrum in our half near the touchline and Miles gouged out the opposing player’s eye with his thumb. The poor guy had to go straight to hospital and have the rest of it removed—he’s got a glass eye now. Miles didn’t even apologize to him. We took a vote after the game and told Miles he was out. He just shrugged. It was weird, really. He went all quiet and still, almost blank, and said, ‘You’re losers anyway. I’m bored of the lot of you.’ It was as if he’d turned into a robot.”