About this ebook
Richard McConnell didn’t know this department existed. Six weeks into the job, he still thought the worst thing that could happen to him was a bad quarter of growth figures or a backbench rebellion over some fisheries bill nobody outside Grimsby cared about. He believed, the way exhausted, decent men often believe, that if he worked hard enough and told the truth often enough, nothing could touch the parts of his life he’d built with his own hands. His marriage. His son. The version of himself that turned up to every school play and every parents’ evening despite a diary that ate other men alive.
He was wrong, and the machinery that would prove him wrong had already started moving before he even noticed it. It moved the way these things always move — quietly, through people who never raise their voices, in rooms with no windows, using words like “containment” and “asset” and “the wider picture.” It moved through a police station in Fulham, through a locked evidence store, through a swab in a plastic tube that should have meant nothing to anyone beyond confirming what a fifteen-year-old boy had done to another boy’s jaw in a school car park.
That tube meant something to someone. And once it did, nothing was ever going to be simple again — not for Richard, not for his wife, not for the son he loved without reservation and without, as it turned out, a single drop of shared blood.
This is the story of what happens when a secret buried for sixteen years is dug up by the wrong hands at the worst possible time. It is a story about power, and the men who keep it, and the much smaller number of people brave — or stupid — enough to stand in front of it and ask questions.
