Page 101 of Friend of the Family

‘But how can I let her get away with this, Pog?’

‘Let it go, Amy. She’s not worth it. And if you keep banging the drum, blaming it all on her, you’re in danger of looking like you’re having a childish fit of pique. What do you want? Revenge? How is that going to help? There’s no way this Douglas Proctor is going to backtrack and reinstate you: too much loss of face. And I suspect there’s some office politics going on that you don’t know about. Otherwise why resort to such questionable methods?’

Amy allowed herself a smile. ‘Like you know about office politics.’

Pog grin

ned back. ‘It’s been a while since I had a boss, but you’d be surprised what goes on behind the grass huts in the jungle: people wanting to be in charge, people wanting more than the next guy, whether it’s status or wives or chickens.’

He speared a prawn and waved it at Amy.

‘You always have to ask yourself in these situations: who profits? What’s the motivation for someone to push you out of the nest? Usually it comes down to someone wanting what you have.’

‘Josie,’ whispered Amy. It all came back to her.

‘Who is she?’ said Pog after a moment.

‘She’s the daughter of my friend Karen from Bristol. You remember Karen: she stayed at the house and went to the Commem Ball with Max. I don’t think Josie had it easy growing up. Her father Lee was a violent bully. He and Karen never married and I don’t think he was part of Josie’s life when she was growing up. It must have been tough for Karen, a single parent on a low income, but she’s a good, decent person. It’s hard to believe she’d have such a psycho for a daughter.’

Pog had gone quiet.

‘What is it?’ asked Amy, but he just grimaced and shook his head. He looked troubled, like he’d had a piece of bad news. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’

‘It’s about that night,’ he said finally. His face had lost some of its usual ruddiness. ‘Look, it’s only a theory, let me emphasise that. But something happened that night, the night of the ball, that I never told anyone about.’

He took a deep breath, but didn’t seem to want to meet Amy’s eye.

‘I was dancing with Jules, out on the floor, you know.’

‘Shaking your stuff, huh?’ She didn’t know why, but Amy wanted to make light of the conversation. Pog, though, didn’t smile.

‘We were quite near the middle, right in the thick of it, and we saw, well, David and Karen. They were dancing, but, you know, getting pretty frisky.’

Amy could see why Pog didn’t want to tell her. Your husband and your best friend? No one wants to hear that.

‘Go on,’ she said.

‘They pushed past us, don’t think they actually saw us, and went out into the grounds. I wondered what the hell David was doing. He’d told me once how he felt about you, and so I thought it was madness behaving like that with your best friend.’

‘You followed him?’

Pog nodded.

Amy felt the air around her grow hot. ‘What did you see?’

He shrugged, embarrassed.

‘Pog, I have to know.’

His eyes flicked up to hers, then down again. ‘I didn’t see anything else. They were kissing, I can say that much. And they were oblivious to us . . . they were pretty into it. I felt like a perv watching, so I left them to it.’

‘So they had sex?’

Pog didn’t reply.

‘Pog, you have to tell me.’

‘It looked like that, yeah,’ he finally conceded. ‘You said Josie is twenty-one?’