The Chosen One. Sam Bourne

With a reporter doing a stand-up. She could hear Stuart breathing heavily into the phone, waiting for her to speak. She turned up the volume on the TV.

      ‘. . . few details at this hour, Tom. What sources are telling this network unofficially is that the circumstances in which Mr Forbes was found were—’ and here the reporter made a great show of looking down and checking his notebook, ‘—bizarre.’

      ‘Bizarre?’ echoed Maggie.

      ‘Let me in and I’ll tell you.’

      ‘You’re here?’

      ‘Cab just pulled up.’

      Now she needed to absorb the strangeness both of what she had just heard on the television and the notion of Stuart Goldstein in her apartment building. Whatever affinity she felt for him as a colleague, she would never have described him as a friend. He hadn’t been to her place, she hadn’t been to his; that line had never been crossed.

      ‘You’re here,’ she said again, uselessly. ‘Can you give me five minutes?’

      ‘Two.’

      Under the duvet, she was wearing only a man’s T-shirt – white, large and bearing the name of an Israeli basketball team. It had belonged to Uri, though she had never worn it while they were together. But last night she had dug it out, smelling it before putting it on, even though she knew the scent of him had been washed away long ago.

      As she rushed to pull on a pair of jeans and to find a sweater, grateful that Stuart would take longer than most to get into her building, into the elevator and out again, she kept one ear on the intriguing tale tumbling out of the TV.

       ‘. . . we’re not able to disclose all the circumstances of Mr Forbes’s death at this time, Dan, and that’s not only because some of our sources are speaking only on background. It’s also because this is a family network and it’s still early on in the day.’

      What were they talking about? What on earth had happened to Vic Forbes that they couldn’t give the details? Last night she and the rest of the band of brothers who had got Stephen Baker elected President had sat there facing a series of brick walls. There had been no good options. Whichever path they took, Vic Forbes with his bald head and his thin, bland, smiling face had stood there blocking their escape.

      And now he was gone, helpfully magicked away and just in the nick of time.

      She heard the knock on the door and the unmistakable sound of Stuart Goldstein’s breathless panting outside. She did a last scope of the apartment, scanning for potential embarrassment. Now that she had closed the door to her bedroom, the place looked tidy enough. One of the advantages of Washington hours: you were barely home long enough to make the place a mess.

      But still, and even in just that brief glimpse, she had seen something that had made her not quite embarrassed – no dirty laundry on the floor – but ever so slightly ashamed. In that short, stabbing second she experienced the apartment as if through the eyes of another.

      She had seen that it was elegant, located in the much-admired art-deco grandeur of the Kennedy-Warren building, and stylishly furnished, with a sprinkling of items that hinted at her past life of constant and exotic travel. But she had also seen that it was, however subtly, empty. That it was, visible to the naked eye, the home of a person alone. And, her eye falling on the crisping leaves of a dying ficus, one without the nurturing ability even to keep a houseplant alive.