When The Devil Stays

Chapter Eleven: Seventy-Two Hours

The first twenty-four hours were almost peaceful.

Almost, because peace was a word that required the absence of something, and what was absent in the flat in Eaux-Vives was not the danger - the danger was still there, still ticking, still counting down - but the immediacy of it. Sutton had his seventy-two hours. The drive was in three places at once. Claudine's colleague, a quiet Frenchman named Rémy who communicated primarily through nods and excellent coffee, was installed in the café across the street with a clear sightline to their front door.

They were, by any measurable standard, as safe as they could be.

And so they existed, the two of them, in the suspended particular way that people exist when they are waiting for something large to resolve - making coffee, reading, sitting in the same room without speaking and finding that the silence had a quality to it now that was different from the silence of two days ago. Less charged. More settled. The silence of people who had said enough to know they wanted to say more, and were choosing the right moment.

Anna spent the first morning at the small desk by the window, working. Claudine had arranged remote access to a secure system and she was building the supplementary document - the contextual notes from the audit, the observations she had made but not formally recorded, the thread of reasoning that connected the buried figure to everything around it. It was precise work and she was good at it and it absorbed her in the way that good work always absorbed her, completely and without remainder.

Jojo read. He had found a novel in the bookshelf - something French, she didn't ask the title - and he sat on the sofa with it and was genuinely quiet, the kind of quiet that didn't require management or filling, and she found herself glancing at him periodically the way you checked on something you'd placed somewhere safe, just to confirm it was still there.

He caught her looking once. Said nothing. The corner of his mouth moved.

She went back to her document.

At noon he made lunch - eggs, bread, something with the tomatoes that Claudine's supply run had included - and set it on the table and called her name once, not loudly, and she came and they ate and talked about things that had nothing to do with Sutton or the drive or any of it. He told her about the firm - how he had built it, the two people who had been with him from the beginning, a woman named Priya who handled the legal architecture and a man called Dex who Jojo described as the most irritating person he had ever trusted with his life. She told him about Leeds, about the council flat and the scholarship and the specific and formative experience of being the only person in every room she entered for years who had arrived there by a completely different route than everyone else.

"Did it bother you?" he asked. "The difference."

"At first," she said. "Then I realised it was information. If you're the only one who came a different way, you're also the only one who knows what that way looks like. You see things the others don't."

"Like buried figures in supplementary filings," he said.

"Like buried figures," she agreed.

He looked at her across the table. "You should know," he said, "that what you did - finding that, and then not taking the money, and running instead of disappearing quietly - most people wouldn't have done it."

"Most people didn't find it."

"Most people who find things like that take the money," he said. "It's not weakness. It's rational. The rational move, given what they threatened you with, was to sign and go."

"I know," she said. "I thought about it for approximately forty seconds."

"What stopped you?"

She considered the question seriously, the way she considered things she hadn't yet put into words.

"The auditor before me," she said finally. "The one who lives in Portugal now. Changed his name. Doesn't do audit work anymore." She looked at Jojo. "That was his whole life. He was good at something and he had to stop being it because they bought him off and he knew what he'd done and couldn't go back to it clean." She paused. "I like my work. I'm not giving it up so that Richard Sutton can keep giving speeches about transparency."

Jojo looked at her for a long moment with that expression - the one that was both things at once, professional and entirely not.

"No," he said quietly. "You're absolutely not."

The second day was harder.

Not dangerous - nothing moved, nothing changed, Rémy was still in the café and Claudine checked in at eight and at four and the city was quiet outside the window. But the waiting had weight to it now, the way waiting always did when you'd been doing it long enough to feel it in your bones, and the flat that had felt like shelter began to feel, around mid-afternoon, like something more complicated.

Anna was at the desk again when she heard Jojo stop moving in the kitchen. She looked up. He was standing at the window above the courtyard with his phone in his hand and his face arranged in an expression she hadn't seen before - not the controlled stillness, not the warmth she'd been seeing more of, but something older and quieter and heavier than both.

"What is it?" she said.

He didn't answer immediately. He was reading something on the phone and she waited, having learned that he processed things at the pace he needed and pressuring it produced nothing useful.

"Sutton's office has issued a statement," he said. "Citing personal reasons and ongoing health concerns, he's announced his intention to stand down from his ministerial role pending a formal review."

Anna sat very still.

"That's - that's early," she said. "We still have twenty hours."

"He's not waiting the full seventy-two," Jojo said. "He's moving now, on his own terms, while he still can shape the language." He set the phone down on the windowsill. "It means the lawyers have told him the evidence is insurmountable. He's cutting his losses."

"Is that good?" she said. "Is that what we wanted?"

"It's the beginning of it," he said. "Claudine will need the full statement - the detailed one, not the press release - before she can move to the next stage. That's still ahead." He turned from the window. "But yes. It's good."

She looked at him across the room. He looked back. There was something in the air between them that had been building for two days and had chosen this moment - this oddly undramatic, grey-afternoon moment - to become impossible to ignore.

"So it's nearly over," she said.

"Nearly," he said. "Not yet. But nearly."

"And when it is," she said, carefully, watching his face, "you said you'd ask me something again."

A beat. Long and deliberate and weighted on both sides.

"I did," he said.

"I've been thinking," she said, "that it seems slightly inefficient to wait."

Something shifted in his face - fully, completely, the walls not just letting light through but stepping aside entirely - and he crossed the room and she stood from the desk and they met in the middle of it, in the small sitting room of the white-walled flat above the courtyard, and he looked at her the way he had been looking at her since a coffee shop at an airport when the whole world had been going wrong, like she was the most interesting thing in any room he'd ever been in.

"Anna Jones," he said. "Will you have dinner with me?"

"Yes," she said. "I will."

He lifted his hand and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear - slow, deliberate, his fingers brushing the line of her jaw - and she felt the warmth of it travel all the way down to somewhere she hadn't let anyone reach in a very long time, and she thought: I knew this was coming. I watched it come. I have no idea what to do with how much I wanted it to arrive.

"The restaurant," she said, slightly breathlessly, because she was not going to stand here and say nothing, she was never going to be someone who stood somewhere and said nothing. "You already picked one, didn't you."

"Three nights ago," he said. "Before we left London."

She stared at him. "You picked a restaurant before we'd had a full conversation."

"I'd been reading your file for six weeks," he said. "I had a reasonable sense of your taste."

"That is-" She stopped. Looked at him. "That is either extremely arrogant or extremely romantic and I genuinely cannot decide which."

"Both," he said. "I've been told I tend toward both."

"By whom?"

"Priya," he said. "Regularly and without being asked."

She laughed. It came out properly this time - not suppressed, not contained, the real thing, and it surprised both of them with its warmth and its genuineness, and he looked at her when it happened like it was something he intended to remember.

He lowered his head. She lifted hers. And the distance between them - which had been eighteen inches on a sofa, and six inches on a street, and nothing at all in a narrow hallway - closed entirely, and finally, and with the particular quiet perfection of something that had been inevitable since the moment it began.

It was not a dramatic kiss. It was not desperate or urgent or any of the things that fear and proximity might have manufactured. It was slow and certain and careful, the way he did everything - like something placed exactly where it was meant to go - and she felt it in every part of herself that had been held carefully closed for too long, and she kissed him back with the straightforward honesty that was the truest thing about her, and when they finally separated the room was very quiet and the light outside had gone from grey to the pale gold of a Geneva early evening.

"The restaurant," she said, after a moment. Her voice was steady. She was proud of that.

"Thursday," he said. "When Claudine has confirmed receipt of Sutton's formal statement."

"Thursday," she agreed. "What should I wear?"

He looked at her. Something in his expression was entirely unguarded and entirely unhurried and entirely, she thought, hers.

"Anything," he said simply. "It won't matter."

She looked back at him and thought: I walked into an airport three days ago with nothing but a drive and a one-way ticket and the specific wreckage of a life built on the wrong foundation.

She was beginning to understand that some foundations had to come down before the right thing could be built.

And that occasionally - rarely, improbably, in the middle of the worst possible timing - the right thing arrived wearing a dark jacket and carrying a lanyard and looking at you like you were the most interesting sentence he had ever read.

She was, she decided, going to be alright with that.

She was, in fact, going to be considerably more than alright.

Thursday. Dinner. Anything you wear.She had three days to stop smiling about it.She already knew she wouldn't manage it.