by Jason Ayres
It made her sick to the stomach to think that it was now Lucy who got to wake up in this room every day. It was Lucy who got to bounce up and down on top of her mattress on top of her husband. It was Lucy who had taken over her room, her territory and her man, like some foreign power mercilessly marching its army across her borders to annex her territory.
Well, Lucy was in for a surprise, just as much as Alan was. Legally, Kay still owned half of this house, despite Alan’s best attempts to screw it out of her in the divorce. Yes, he may have earned far more than she had during the years they had been together, but there was more than a marriage to that.
Kay had kept house for him, raised their daughter practically single-handedly, and done pretty much everything else for him since the day they had moved in together. In her eyes, that had just as much value as actual money being put on the table. His ducking and diving to get out of giving her any money in the divorce was unforgiveable. She was simply not going to let him get away with it.
She dressed, freshened up, and went downstairs for breakfast. She noticed in the bathroom that the laundry basket was full and almost instinctively went to put a wash load on before remembering that she didn’t have to. She didn’t have to concern herself with any of that today. By 10am, she was ready to get started with what she had come here to do.
Her focus would be entirely on one room on the middle floor of the house. With only three of them living there, four bedrooms had been a luxury. Alan had quickly suggested that one of them become his office for when he worked from home. This had seemed a perfectly reasonable suggestion at the time. They certainly didn’t need two guest bedrooms. The only time they ever had anyone to stay was when one of Maddie’s friends would come for a sleepover.
It hadn’t taken him long to become extremely protective over his office. He moved in a desk, computer, filing cabinet and even a safe. When she questioned what he needed a safe for, he spun her some yarn about company policy when handling confidential documents.
Not long after that he informed her that she didn’t need to clean the room: he would do it himself. It was the first time in his life he had ever offered to help with the housework. If that hadn’t been enough to make it crystal-clear he didn’t want her in there, a few weeks later he installed a lock on the door. She had never seen the key. He justified this as being in the interests of security. He said he couldn’t rule out rival firms breaking into the house and trying to steal company secrets.
What utter rot, thought Kay now, as she stood in front of the locked door. Well, whatever secrets he was keeping in there, they were not going to remain secret much longer.
The only way she was going to get in was by giving the door a good kicking. She hoped that, as it was only an internal door, it wouldn’t put up too much resistance. It always looked so easy when people did it on the telly. To make sure, she headed into Maddie’s bedroom and borrowed a big, heavy pair of boots that she insisted were all the fashion, though Kay thought they looked hideous.
The boots proved to be very useful. They had steel toecaps and two good kicks at the lock got the door open. Although it was a pretty solid lock, he hadn’t installed it particularly well and it splintered easily.
DIY was one of many things Alan wasn’t much good at. His argument was that he was a professional businessman who didn’t need to learn manual skills, as people like him paid other people to do those sorts of jobs. In reality, due to his incredible stinginess when it came to parting with cash, it had been Kay who had ended up doing most of the maintenance around the house.
With the door open, Kay ventured forward eagerly into his man cave, wondering what she would find. At first glance, the room was nothing out of the ordinary. It was pretty much as it had looked when she had last seen it, which had been a good couple of years ago. He had been very meticulous in keeping her out of the office, even locking the door when he was working.
She noticed right away how dusty all the surfaces were, including the laptop keyboard which was also covered in crumbs and flakes of what looked like dead skin. There were also several dead flies on the windowsill. So much for cleaning the room himself, she thought.
Where should she start? She went for the laptop first. It was switched off so before she booted it up, she grabbed a couple of wipes and gave it a quick clean. There was no way she was touching that in its current state. Then she turned it on and waited, expecting to face some sort of password protection.
Sure enough, the welcome screen was soon replaced by another asking for a PIN number. That was potentially easier than a password. She could have a reasonable stab at guessing it. What would he use?
He had been born on the 25th October 1964, so she tentatively typed in 2510. To her amazement, the screen changed to the standard Windows opening screen. She had guessed correctly at the first attempt!
She couldn’t believe it. What an absolute muppet! Why go to all this effort to secure the room and then use his birthday as his PIN? Even Kay, who wasn’t that tech-savvy, knew that you never used your date of birth as a PIN or a password. It was one of the first things that hackers would try.
Cracking his code was going to make her job a whole lot easier. The laptop must be full of clues, especially if he had been labouring under the false premise that it was secure. So, what should she look for first?
Her primary goal was to find out more about his financial affairs, in particular if he was hiding any money from her. However, she couldn’t resist checking out his Facebook first. He had left it logged in so she didn’t have to worry about a password.
She went straight to his messages and found what she was looking for right away – a stash of private messages between him and Lucy. She steeled herself for what she might find as she opened it up. It was everything she was expecting: declarations of love, oodles of kisses, hearts and other emojis, mostly from her to him.
As she scrolled up there was also a lot of dirty talk, describing what they were planning to do to each other. She didn’t bother reading all of it. There was too much for a start, an additional 1,384 messages above. Clearly the affair had been going on a long time. She decided to just skim through the last few, most of which related to their Paris plans.
One phrase in his last message read:
Haha, don’t worry, the stupid cow doesn’t suspect a thing. See you in the morning x x
She had replied with a graphic of two champagne glasses clinking and lots of hearts.
Kay was pleased that she didn’t feel in the remotest bit upset by reading any of this. That was good: it meant that she must be over him. She was also amused to see that Lucy’s messages were full of spelling mistakes and bad grammar. She was obviously not the brightest tool in the box.
“Enjoy your champagne while you can,” she murmured. “This stupid cow is about to come back and bite you on the arse big time.”
What else could she find? She opened up his emails and scrolled through them. Nothing sprang out at her. It was mainly marketing stuff from various companies he had dealt with.
It was time to look around the rest of the office. She turned her attention to his filing cabinet next. It was one of those big, grey, metal ones with four drawers, just like you would find in the average office. She tried to open the top drawer, only to discover it was locked. So where might be the key? Would he keep it on him? She hoped not, otherwise she was going to have to try and break into it and it was made of pretty solid metal. Hopefully the key would be somewhere in the room.
There was a drawer in his desk which she was pleased to discover was not locked. It was full of stationery and other assorted crap such as loose batteries, random cables, and half-eaten packets of sweets. There was also a small, old-fashioned toffee tin which she had seen him with before. She remembered that he used to keep his golf tees in it. She picked it up and shook it, making it rattle.
She took the lid off, and nestling in amongst the golf tees was a small metal key. He hadn’t been very imaginative in hiding tha
t. She took the key and tried it in the cabinet. She felt a real sense of satisfaction as she felt it turn with ease. His security measures were no match for a wife who knew him inside out.
The cabinet was full of files, none of them labelled. She would just have to go through each in turn until she found what she was looking for. She didn’t really know exactly what that was, just that she would know when she found it.
Over the next hour or so, she pulled out each file in turn and went through the contents. A lot of it was very boring stuff to do with work: store design plans and sales data for various products. There was also a lot of documentation relating to the house. This mainly consisted of stacks of old utility bills and endless instruction manuals for various kettles, toasters and other domestic appliances that they had bought over the years.
There was even one for a VHS player they had bought in the 1990s, which they must have got rid of well over a decade ago when DVDs had rendered it obsolete.
Just as she was beginning to despair she might not find anything useful, she found a folder full of recent credit card and bank statements. This was a lot more promising.
The credit card statements proved to be extremely interesting reading. They were full of sizeable payments to hotel companies stretching back over the past couple of years.
She also found several of the accompanying hotel bills. One glance at them with their itemised details of room service and champagne was more than enough evidence that his affair with Lucy the illiterate had been going on for a good, long while. They stretched back at least two years.
Kay couldn’t care less about the affair now, but she could see that there had been no expense spared on these hotel trips. That was something that did annoy her. It was out of character with his skinflint nature that she had grown to despise over the years.
Only the previous summer, she remembered how tight he had been over money on their holiday. It was the first time they had been away together for a proper break without Maddie since she had been born, but it hadn’t been a lot of fun.
During their week in Marbella he had been moody and miserable throughout, doubtless because he was missing his whore of a girlfriend. No wonder he had spent so much of that week pissing about on his phone – he was probably messaging her the whole time.
He had pleaded poverty throughout that week in Marbella, constantly moaning about the crap exchange rate since Brexit. On the first night he had informed her that he was setting them a budget for their main evening meal of thirty euros per night.
He was incredibly mean about how he enforced it, too. One night they had dined at a nice little restaurant by the harbour. Perusing the menu, he had decided he wanted to treat himself to a fillet steak, the most expensive item on the menu at twenty-two euros. He then informed her that in order to stay within their budget, she was not allowed to spend more than eight euros on her main. So she had ended up having an omelette.
That was just one example of his tightness. He was forever badgering her about saving money on the shopping and wouldn’t let her shop in any supermarket other than the chain he worked at, even though she much preferred Sainsbury’s. He said it was financial madness to shop anyone else when they could take advantage of his staff discount.
His controlling nature often extended to coming along on the weekly shop, making her pick cheap brands and reduced items on things she wanted to buy. He even made her buy the supermarket’s own-brand tampons, rather than the brand she preferred, claiming they were just as good. As if he would know.
When they got to the booze aisle he would then proceed to pick himself out a couple of £10 bottles of red wine, which he would claim was a treat. This was of no benefit to Kay as she only drank white wine, and he never let her have a decent bottle of that, even at Christmas. She got a couple of bottles of cheap German Riesling if she was lucky.
As she thought about all this now, a particularly offensive word beginning with “c” came to mind which Kay despised and never uttered. But if anyone ever deserved to be called one, it was Alan.
Going through the hotel bills, she discovered that less than a week after they had returned from Spain, he had spent £769 on two nights in a hotel in London. That was one she was definitely going to have to commit to memory for future use. There were many similar bills.
For the next few minutes, she worked at memorising the dates and locations of several of these hotel stays. The information could come in very useful later on. But what she had was not enough. She needed more – much more.
Chapter Fourteen
February 2018
Alan’s regular bank statements did not yield anything untoward. It seemed that he kept his extravagant gestures purely on his credit card, but she did notice something unusual. There were no signs of any payments to the credit card company coming out of his regular current account. But on the credit card she could see that, despite him running up thousands every month, it was regularly being paid off in full.
The question was, where had he been getting the money from to pay it? He earned a good salary from his high-flying retail job, but there was no way it was enough to cover the sorts of sums he was splashing around, and he wasn’t using his wages for that anyway. The answer had to be here somewhere and Kay was determined to find it.
She delved further into the folder, and soon found what she was looking for. Tucked away at the back of his regular bank statements were some additional statements from a bank, the name of which she was unfamiliar with. The logo, however, did ring a bell in her head. It was a picture of a tiger with a mountain in the background. Where had she seen that image before?
Two things leapt out at her from the statement. Firstly, that the address of the bank was in Switzerland. Banks in that country had a reputation for being safe havens where people could salt away money they wanted to hide.
Secondly, the balance on the account was over €300,000.
She was astounded. How had he acquired such a sum? She scanned through the statements. There were several credits over the past two years going through to the account, all from the same source and all for roughly the same amount, approximately €50,000 each time. She could also see that it was from this account that he had been paying his credit card bills.
All of the payments into the account were from a name she recognised. It was a major wine producer in France, one that she knew her husband dealt with. In fact, he had negotiated a major multimillion pound deal with the company only a year or two before.
Kay thought back to the rumours that had been circulating around her husband’s employers. A series of poor results had led to accusations of financial mismanagement in the City as the share price had plummeted.
Could it be that the mismanagement stretched to fraud? It was pretty obvious to Kay what was going on here. He had negotiated a favourable deal for the supplier and they were giving him backhanders in return. What’s more, it seemed like he was getting away with it. With nothing going through his company’s books, there would be no trail of money leading back to him.
It was only February now. A further ten months had passed since then, and as far as she knew, he was still securely in his job, despite the internal investigations going on. But then he was a senior manager. She knew that years before he was always pulling little stunts to fiddle on expenses here and there. He had said at the time that, as he was a senior and respected manager, no one would ever dare question him, and besides, it was all perks of the job.
It looked as if his dishonesty had now spread way beyond a few inflated mileage claims now. He was on the fiddle in a big way, without a doubt, and it wouldn’t surprise her if Lucy was in on it as well. She worked in the accounts department, just as Kay had years ago, and she remembered how he used to get her to push things through that others might have red-flagged.
The bank statement contained both the sort code and the account number of his bank in Switzerland. Looking at the picture of the tiger again, she suddenly remembered where she had seen
it before. It had been earlier this morning when she was rummaging through the mess in his drawer.
She crossed back over to the desk and opened the drawer again. Inside was a small, black, plastic device with an LCD strip on it, no bigger than a credit card. She had originally mistaken it for a calculator, but when she remembered that the logo on it matched the one on the bank statement, she realised what it must be.
Quickly she turned her attention back to the laptop and flicked through his bookmarks. Finding a link to the bank, she clicked on it, taking her straight to the login screen for online banking. She was pleased to see that the online banking ID, different from the account number on the statement, was already waiting in the login box for her.
Allowing his web browser to remember all his IDs and passwords so he didn’t have to fill them in each time was yet another example of lax security. He really was handing all of this to her on a plate.
She clicked logon, wondering if she could get through security as she had before. Two security questions came up. The first asked for the name of his favourite sports team. That was easy. He was always banging on about Chelsea which all went straight over Kay’s head. She was not remotely interested in football, preferring motor sports, something that Alan had dismissed as “sad tossers driving around in circles”.
The second was that old favourite, his mother’s maiden name. She knew that, too, because his parents had got divorced not long after Kay and Alan had got married. At the time, his mother had made a big thing of going back to her maiden name, insisting it be prefixed with ‘Ms’.
The final hurdle was using the security key. She had something similar for her own bank and knew she would have to put a passcode into it. She switched it on and found it was asking her for a six-digit code. He couldn’t have been stupid enough to use his date of birth again, could he? She typed in 251064.