Mine: The hot new thriller of 2018 - sinister, gripping and dark with a breathtaking twist

Donna Joy, a thirty-four-year-old with a Chelsea address, had the typically heavy expenditure and low personal income that seemed standard for a woman in her position.

There were pages of it, although my eyes picked out the more remarkable details.

‘Annual expenditure on lunches: £24,000,’ I muttered out loud.

‘That’s a lot of sushi,’ said Martin.

I looked up and our eyes met. I’d been thinking exactly the same thing.

‘She claims she is unemployable. Mental fragility …’ I noted.

Martin gave a soft, quiet snort.

‘Has she ever worked?’

‘When we met, she was the manager of a clothes shop, but she handed her notice in once we got married. She said she wanted to educate herself, so I paid for a lot of courses. Art courses, mainly. I set her up in a studio. She works there, but she won’t call it work for divorce purposes.’

‘Does she sell her stuff?’

‘A little. Honestly, it’s more of a vanity project, but she enjoys it. Her paintings are quite good.’

His face softened and I found myself wondering what she was like. I could picture her now. Beautiful, a little bohemian … high maintenance, definitely. I felt I knew her without having met her.

‘And everything that’s listed here. That’s it?’

‘You mean, am I hiding anything?’

‘I need to know everything. Pensions, off-shore accounts, shareholdings, trusts. We don’t want any surprises. Besides, she’s asking for forensic accounting into your affairs.’

‘So what do you think?’ asked Martin finally. I noticed that his shirt was very white.

‘Your wife is young, but she enjoyed a very high standard of living during the marriage. You had what we call a mid-length marriage. Her claim would have been more concrete if you had been together over fifteen years, less so if you were married under six years.’

‘So we’re in a grey area that the law loves.’

‘Provision for the financially weaker spouse is generous in this country. The start point is generally one of equality. But we can argue that she didn’t really contribute to the accumulation of wealth, that the business is a non-matrimonial asset.’ I scanned the file, checking a detail. ‘You haven’t got children. That helps.’

I looked up at him, realizing I shouldn’t have said that. For all I knew, the relationship might have broken down because of an inability to have a family. It was one of those things I never found out as a divorce lawyer. I knew that people wanted to get divorced, and I advised them how to do it. But I never really knew why, beyond the broad strokes of infidelity or unreasonable behaviour. I never truly got to know what made two people who had once genuinely loved one another, in some cases, grow to hate each other.

‘We’re keen for a clean-break settlement,’ said David.

‘Absolutely.’ I nodded.

‘What sort of split do you think I can realistically expect?’

I didn’t like to be drawn on a number, but Martin Joy was the sort of client who expected answers.

‘We should start at a seventy–thirty split and go from there.’

I put my pen down, feeling exhausted, wrung out. I wished I hadn’t touched that wine and soda at lunchtime.

Martin shook his head, staring at the desk. I thought he might have been pleased at the suggestion that we could avoid a fifty–fifty asset split, but he looked absolutely shell-shocked.

‘What happens next?’

‘The First Directions meeting is in ten days’ time.’

‘Will any decisions be made then?’

He had seemed composed throughout the meeting, but hints of anxiety were beginning to show.

I shook my head.

‘The clue is in the name. All very preliminary stuff, I’m afraid.’

‘Fine,’ he said uncomfortably.

It was dark outside now. He stood up to leave and pulled his shirt cuffs down from under his jacket sleeves. One and then the other. Then he looked at me.

‘I’ll see you then, Miss Day. I look forward to it.’

I stretched out my hand and as he closed his fingers around mine, I realized I was looking forward to seeing him again too.

Chapter 3 (#u6c233fb2-285b-5114-9e41-849662fb051d)

I liked getting the bus home from work, not just because I was a little claustrophobic and hated the tube system. The number 19 took me from Bloomsbury all the way home to Islington. It was not the quickest way to get to and from my place of work, but it was my favourite way to commute. I liked the head-clearing walk down Fleet Street and Kingsway to the bus stop, past the red telephone boxes outside the Old Bailey, and the church of St Clement Danes, especially when its mournful bells rang out the tune to the old nursery rhyme, ‘Oranges and Lemons’. And once I had boarded the bus, I enjoyed observing the sights and sounds of the city. When I first came to the capital, I used to spend the whole day riding the number 19 route, face pressed to the glass, watching the city drift by: Sadler’s Wells, the twinkling lights of the Ritz, the exclusive stores of Sloane Street, then down to Cheyne Walk and Battersea Bridge. It was a distilled version of the best the city had to offer, all for the price of a Travelcard. It was the London of my childhood dreams.

As I sat down and wiped the condensation from the window with my fingertips, I wondered if I should have made more of an effort on my birthday. Even David Gilbert, a workaholic if ever I’ve met one, thought I was off out for birthday drinks. But I didn’t see why I should break my weekly routine just because I was another year older. One of the perils of my job has always been the lack of a social life. There were plenty of pubs around Temple, and people to have a drink with, but I had always taken the view that, if you wanted to get the job done properly, then you had to make sacrifices.

I pulled my mobile out of my bag and phoned my local Chinese takeaway. I couldn’t decide between the beef with fresh basil or the yellow bean chicken, so I ordered both, along with a side order of dumplings and chow mein. What the hell. It was my birthday.

Ending the call, I thought back to my conversation with Viv McKenzie about applying for silk, and wondered what becoming Francine Day QC might mean.

There had certainly been little other change in my life in the past five years. I’d lived in the same flat on the sketchy edges of Islington since my late twenties, settled into an ordered routine. I went to the gym the same two evenings every week, took a ten-day holiday to Italy every August. Two short-lived romances punctuated a long stretch of being single. I saw friends less regularly than I should. Even the small detail of my life had a satisfying familiarity. I bought the same Starbucks coffee on my way into work, my copy of the Big Issue from the same Romanian man outside Holborn tube. Part of me liked this reassuring familiarity, and saw no need to change the status quo.

Peering through the water droplets on the cold window, I realized we were on St Paul’s Road. I nudged the snoring commuter beside me and squeezed off the bus, walking the rest of the way to my flat on the road that descended into Dalston.

As I neared my flat I groaned as I saw the headlight of a delivery scooter pull up and stop. I started to run but the pavement was wet. Almost slipping, I hissed a curse and slowed to a halt, fishing around my bag for my purse, tickets and sweet wrappers falling to the floor like blossom blown from a tree. I bent down to pick up the litter, but already the scooter was setting off again into the dark.

By the time I reached my front door, I was out of breath. There was a figure in the doorway holding a white carrier bag stuffed with cartons.

‘You owe me twenty-three quid,’ said my neighbour Pete Carroll, a PhD student at Imperial who had been living in the downstairs apartment for the past eighteen months.

‘Did you give him a tip?’ I winced.

‘I’m a student,’ he said with mock disapproval.

I debated running after the delivery man. They were my regulars. They gave me free prawn crackers and I didn’t want to short-change them or have them think I was tight.