I did as she asked, touching the rim of the bottle to his lips, then lifting it as he tipped his head back. He took a swallow of the liquid and coughed. I went back to the armchair.
‘What questions do you want to ask him?’ Avril said to me. ‘Do it quick. Before I change my fucking mind.’
‘I want to know about Samir. Why he brought him here. I want to know about Lewis and Jasmine.’
‘I swear I didn’t do anything to Lewis or Jasmine,’ Zack said.
‘He’s lying.’ I was surprised to hear Miranda say it. ‘I always know when he’s lying.’
‘I didn’t kill your brother.’
‘But you did something to him.’
Zack still didn’t want to admit whatever it was, even with the gun aimed at him. I guessed he was thinking about how he was going to get out of this. Was he waiting for Charles?
Trying to buy himself time, Zack said, ‘Listen. You could be rich, Avril. I can arrange it so you get shares. How does that sound? I can personally give you money. We can make sure everyone knows that Lewis was your dad, that you get his share of the company. Ten per cent. You’ll be wealthy. You’ll never have to work.’
‘Shut up. Answer Patrick’s questions. What did you do to Lewis? To Samir? And where’s Jasmine?’
She took a step towards him, the tip of the gun just a foot away from his face. His hands shook as he held them up. Oh my God. Was he going to start crying? Beside him, on either side, both Holly– who had been silent since we’d come into the house– and Miranda shrank away from the gun.
‘Let’s start with Samir,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you tell us why you were here with him?’
‘It’s complicated,’ he said.
‘Of course it is. Just tell us, or I’m pretty certain Avril is going to run out of patience.’
Zack glanced at his wife, and I saw it. Despite everything he’d already done, including his admission that he’d murdered Morag, he was ashamed. He looked like a man who had got himself into a terrible mess and hadn’t been able to find a way out of it.
‘Okay. I’ll tell you.’ He sighed. ‘I’ll tell you what happened with the boy.’ Like he couldn’t bear to say his name. ‘It wasn’t all my fault. It was Lewis. He started it.’
39
December 2024
Zack
If Zack hadn’t been doing so many late shifts at the office lately, if he’d spent more time at home working on his failing marriage, he might never have found out what Lewis was up to. Zack should have been at home helping to plan for Christmas but was here because, as usual, he was avoiding going home. Not wanting yet another argument, another drama. On top of that, Charles was putting a lot of pressure on him. Profits were down, the competition was marching ahead, the big tech companies were eating up everything in their path and, if things didn’t improve soon at Gravitas, they would have no choice but to sell up. Some big conglomerate would come in, strip them for assets and fire the management team. Zack could, of course, go and find himself another job. But he considered himself to be part of this family. Charles was the father he’d never had, and he considered himself to be the son Charles had always wanted.
He still wanted to impress him. To show him that he could turn things around, and not only because it would make him more secure if he and Miranda got divorced, which was looking increasingly likely.
The frustrating thing was that Charles still refused to embrace apps and software as the future. Zack had been telling him they needed to get into AI for a long time, but Charles was convinced they should stick to what they knew. Drones. Equipment for hospitals. Plus their bread and butter: cheap consumables for the home market. But Zack knew that if they lost one big contract, they would be screwed.
They needed to find young blood, new ideas. Embrace the future.
So here he was, going through CVs from kids, most of them young men, applying for internships at the company. Bedroom coders. Amateur app developers. Funnily enough, the idea had originally been given to him by Lewis, before he was fired. Lewis was convinced this was the way forward: to find a way to harness all the talent out there for the benefit of the company. He had spent most of his time searching for that unicorn; a genius who would have a brilliant idea and the ability to make it real. After Lewis had been sent packing by his dad, for wasting time and money and achieving nothing, Zack had secretly continued the practice, dedicating a couple of hours a week to it. So far, despite a few promising leads, he hadn’t managed to find any unicorns. Just a lot of lame ponies.
These CVs– or résumés, as their American head of PR insisted on calling them– arrived daily and were swept automatically into a shared folder. They were mostly from school leavers and graduates. This was the pool from which, Zack hoped, he would find someone who would help save the company. Could one of them be sitting on a magical idea that would turn Gravitas’s fortunes around?
Half asleep, Zack clicked through the CVs, marking the ones that seemed more interesting– the ones who seemedcapable of writing something without using Chat GPT– then went to the jobs inbox to hunt down the covering emails, because these would be more likely to tell him if this person had the spark he was searching for.
He had been searching for almost an hour and was thinking about dragging himself home when he came across the CV of a kid from Coventry called Samir Anand. His covering letter stated that he had dozens of ideas for apps that could become huge, break-out tech hits ‘but I need someone to give me a chance to prove it’. He’d aced his GCSEs but didn’t want to go to university and rack up a huge debt. ‘I want to start work now, and I’m willing to work hard.’
Zack had said something similar in his application to work for Gravitas, and Samir’s CV was the only one in this whole bunch that was interesting.
But then he noticed Samir’s email had already been forwarded to another email account. Did that mean one of the managers here had already spoken to him? He clicked through to see who it had been forwarded to, and couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
The email had been sent to Lewis.
