Others, I could see, were frightened — afraid the investigation on that screen might follow the money into their own houses.

It was, in its way, the most honest moment of the whole evening.

The laughter had been a lie, a performance of contempt they put on because the powerful woman told them to.

But the shame was real, and so was the fear, and watching it move across four hundred expensive faces I understood how thin the whole glittering edifice had always been.

These were people who had built their sense of who mattered on money and appearance and proximity to power, and in the space of ten minutes they had watched all three of those things prove worthless — had watched the woman with the least money and the plainest dress and the ugliest scar turn out to be the only person in the room whose worth was real.

Some of them would go home and think about that.