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had to be in the right. His face habitually wore an expression of pained nobility, as if he were standing out singlehandedly against all the evil of the world. As perhaps he was. He seemed to have no self-doubt. He seemed sure that he was a thoroughly good person. Again, as perhaps he was. That, for Martagon, was the problem.
    Scree was so unpretentious in the way he dressed and presented himself – he never wore a business suit, in an office milieu where a suit was simply an anonymous uniform – that his very unpretentiousness, his rough Tibetan sweaters and scuffed trainers, constituted an act of pretension. Martagon had introduced him to Giles, who asked them both together to Fulham for dinner. Julie Harper had been there too. Scree made Giles – with his flashy clothes and his gold jewellery – seem vulgar. Scree made Martagon feel obscurely in the wrong, always – as perhaps he was, he thought miserably, tossing and turning in his bed.
    Scree’s private life was an enigma. All Martagon knew was that he had a wife called Ann, who lived in Lincolnshire. Amanda Harper had gleaned over dinner that Ann was some kind of psychotherapist. She never came to London, and no one knew how often or how seldom Scree went home to Lincolnshire. When he was not working overseas, he seemed generally to be in London. But although Martagon had Scree’s London co-ordinates – his telephone number, and his mobile number, and his e-mail address – he had no idea where he actually lived.
    Scree was a master of the international aid-culture discourse – a matter of mainstreaming gender issues, empowerment, pro-poor growth, sustainability, replicability, capacity-building, good governance – necessary to win funding from government agencies for projects in emerging countries. Martagon agreed with the principles and concepts, but hearing Scree spouting the jargon made him want to throw up.
    Western firms, including Cox & Co., working in emerging countries, had to factor into the budget invisible backhanders to middlemen and facilitators. In the campaign against this institutionalized corruption, ‘transparency’ was the buzzword. ‘Transparency in public and in private life,’ intoned Scree, seemingly the very personification of integrity. Again, Martagon was wildly irritated. He found himself perversely arguing with Scree that practices which seemed to ‘us’ to be corrupt were in fact an oblique and traditional form of welfare, milking the rich – in this case the rich West – of a few millions to trickle down among functionaries and clerks whose salaries were rarely paid and, in any case, grossly insufficient to feed a family. Scree just looked at him. Scree, the high priest of transparency, was himself the most opaque of men.
    At the office things went from bad to worse. Arthur Cox seemed to be losing his grip. Arthur was staying later and later at the office, night after night, surrounded by files and printouts, amassing facts and figures for his case against the merger. He was driving his devoted secretary, Dawn, insane with fatigue.
    When he attempted to present his findings, he got lost in a fog. He would shamble in to Martagon with sheaves of papers in his big, shaking hands, and try to locate points and positions on the main grid of his arguments, sinking ever deeper into incoherence.
    Martagon was witnessing the terminal decline of Arthur Cox, and it grieved him. Martagon himself could extract and remember the key points and concepts from any mass of data. He could fillet complex documents, and quickly. Who had taught him these skills? Arthur Cox. But Arthur had lost the plot.
    â€˜Arthur, we really don’t have to bother with most of this,’ Martagon said one afternoon, flipping through a stack of files that Arthur had dumped on his desk. ‘Look, this one, and this – they belong to the small print. And this one’s just brochure-speak. All we