by A. M. Castle
But, while that was a disaster and a betrayal of the worst order, a knife in my side, Patrick was mooning over her. Saying stuff he’d only said to me before. And spending actual serious money on her. That was yet another escalation. That was our money; mine and the kids’. It wasn’t to be frittered away on his floozies. And wait a minute, my own credit card had just been declined, while I’d been out shopping with Stacy. Had Patrick spent so much on her that my card had been blocked?
I was now getting a very bad feeling. How much, exactly, was he wasting on Stacy? What was he playing at? We were comfortable, yes, but that didn’t mean he could throw away our hard-earned cash like this. I had to find out what he was up to, how much he was spending. What other dirty secrets had he dragged along to our cleansing weekend? If he was capable of this, then what wouldn’t he stoop to?
I crawled back to the unlocked briefcase. I took out an unfamiliar laptop. It looked brand new, its sleek iron grey the colour of a shark’s back. He had a huge Mac at home, its twin at the office. He had an iPad, his smartphone and this burner. And now, a third laptop. Why did he need this?
Twenty minutes later, I knew all too well. The business was in trouble.
Chapter 44
Now
Becca
The evidence was stacking up so beautifully now. Becca couldn’t quite believe it herself, the way things had started to fall into place. Yes, she’d always known it had to be there, but she was amazed that Patrick Bridges hadn’t hidden things better, or got himself out of the godawful mess that had been threatening to engulf him.
What had he been playing at? It was as though, for years, he’d been riding high on a bubble of charm, of reputation. Then, from nowhere, that had burst. This wasn’t so new. Becca had seen it in her lifetime, with far bigger institutions – banks, investment houses, once bestriding the business world, then suddenly crumbling into ruins.
Everyone usually professed to be astonished. Then came the tales of incompetence, over-valuation. Patrick had failed on a smaller scale, but in a similar way, and the devastation he’d been about to wreak on his family would have been total.
Becca now knew his email folder far better, clearly, than he had himself. Once she’d done her initial delve into it, she’d come up with sheaves of correspondence from disgruntled companies that either weren’t getting paid or weren’t having their projects completed. She knew she shouldn’t be proud of how she’d wormed her way in. But yeah, she was, actually.
Motive. That was one of the sacred triumvirate. Like the pointy bit of an isosceles triangle, it stood proud of the other two elements. Means and opportunity, well, diligent police work would normally give you those. But without a proper motive, a really good reason for murder, no one was going to poke around in a posh bird like Louise’s life. Burke had made that plain enough.
But now they had cause.
Becca unwrapped a Wispa bar and sunk her teeth into the delicious first couple of centimetres, feeling the initial resistance and then that airy melting on her tongue. This time, there was no flicker of guilt. Smiling with sugar-coated teeth, she knew she deserved it.
Chapter 45
Then
It was the worst moment of my life, by far. Worse than the realisation of his first infidelity, worse than this new horror that he was fucking my best friend, worse even than several incidents in my childhood that I really didn’t want to revisit.
I sat there, in the quiet hotel room, shaking my head, trying to understand what my husband had become. What had Patrick been playing at? How had things got this bad?
Turns out, in his new career as a two-phones, two-mistress big shot, Patrick just hadn’t had the time or the inclination to cover the rest of his tracks properly. The laptop in this briefcase was password protected, yes, but it was the same tired old P@55w0rd! he’d always used. In a trice, I was in.
There was a higgledy-piggledy mess on his desktop. I quickly scanned the company’s accounts. It looked as though the firm was being propped up by huge wodges of cash, being deposited at irregular intervals. These weren’t payments from clients. They were transfers. Where from? I was getting a bad feeling about all this. The hairs were standing up on my arms.
Among the mess of folders I saw one of those finance apps which collects all your banking together in one place. It took me some time to get in but I knew all the data, his mother’s maiden name, his date of birth, and there was that stupid P@55w0rd! again. Once I had it open, I almost wished I hadn’t. Although I now had the evidence right before my eyes, I still couldn’t take it in.
All the accounts were low, lower than they should have been. That was why my credit card had been declined. Healthy balances, not long ago. Then the start of a gradual dwindling process, as money got funnelled into the company and disappeared. It was a one-way trip to a seemingly huge black hole. If I’d ever been looking for an illustration of how to throw good money after bad, this was it.
I went over to his email. A trail from his broker showed that the house had just been re-mortgaged. My house. The place where my children lived. Which I had assumed was debt-free years ago.
Then I saw another finance app. Why would he have two? But the idea that he did, and this would be the one where all the money was stashed away, safe and sound, stopped my heart pounding for a moment or two. In a flash I was in again. Then, in the jumble of accounts with negative balances, I saw two in the children’s names. My heart nearly stopped. I’d set these up, one for Giles, one for Em, when they were small. That’s where all their money had been safely tucked, over the years. Christmases, birthdays, chunks here and there for special milestones, starting at secondary school and doing well in exams. I’d even got serious, as the big money started to roll in for Patrick, and set up a feeder from the joint account. That dropped a few hundred a month into each as well, to top up. And every now and then I’d added a bit more for luck.
The idea was that we’d present this to them, with bows on top, at some point in the future. Whether it was for their eighteenth birthdays, or for uni, or even for when they were 21, that bit wasn’t clear. The thing that was absolutely definite and crystal in my mind was that they would be getting a proper start in life. They would have what I had not – a sure foundation, a nest egg, a deposit on a flat. You could call it what you liked, but I knew exactly what it meant. Security.
And now it was all gone.
There was not a penny left in Giles’s account. When I clicked feverishly on Em’s, it was the same. Empty.
I pressed my fingers into my temples as hard as I could. I needed to feel some physical, external pain, to escape from the turmoil within. Although I was sitting very still, my eyes were darting restlessly from side to side, like searchlights. When I closed my lids, trying to get some respite, I saw rows of zeros dancing mockingly. I forced myself to open my eyes again, and there was the screen, its desktop mess no doubt a reflection of its owner’s mind. What else was lurking here, in this tangle? What other surprises? But I knew that there just couldn’t be anything lower than this. Stealing from his own children. Snatching away their futures. Because the more I thought about it, the more I realised how much was about to disappear. Their expensive schools. Our holidays. Music lessons, tutoring, outings. All the things they wanted all the time – phones, clothes, parties, presents.
OK, many people manage without this stuff and maybe they are all the better for it. But I had made a deal with Patrick, and with myself, that things were going to be different for my kids, that they would have everything I’d lacked.
By raiding their accounts, trying to stem the haemorrhage caused by his own incompetence, he’d not only betrayed my hopes and dreams for them. He’d also made these sweet kids, our wonderful children, as vulnerable as I had been. I’d sworn they would never be on my tightrope with no safety net, afraid to look down. But now, at a stroke, there they were, up there, exactly where I had been.
I’d been so determined that they wouldn’t come from nothing,
have nothing, that they would always have something behind them – but instead, I had unwittingly given him a lovely pot to plunder. When it came down to it, when it was his skin or theirs, the coward had chosen himself. His selfishness took my breath away.
No. No, I wasn’t going to have it. After everything I’d worked for – that we had worked for – he couldn’t take a wrecking ball to their lives like this.
What if he couldn’t keep up these payments? We were going to be out on the street, and soon. It was where I’d started out, but I would be damned if it was where my kids would finish up.
I didn’t need to look through anything else. I’d got the picture. This had been a long time coming. Things had been slipping, it seemed, for years. But he hadn’t told me. He’d not so much as whispered to me, never asked me to stop spending, never mentioned the car crash that was hurtling towards us, not even a distant threat, but imminent now, round the next bend.
I rushed into the bathroom and threw up. In the loo, of course. Even in extremis, I was tidy. But this was the destruction of everything, of my life, of my children’s futures. And he’d said nothing. Nothing.
The smashed Nokia lay where it had fallen, unimportant now. What was Stacy, some stupid lay, compared with the ruin coming for us? It was like making a fuss about a peck on the cheek at a party, while an orgy raged next door.
I tottered to the mirror, wiped the hair off my sweaty face and looked deep into my own eyes. Could I have seen this coming?
There’d been the incident when my card had been declined. I’d had it out with him, and he’d waved it all off. He was so plausible, that was the trouble. You’d think I’d know better, now, but I fell for his guff every time. How stupid was I? How gullible?
It should have sounded alarm bells. Well, it had, but I hadn’t joined the dots. I’d assumed the serial girlfriends were the worst of it. He’d played me, leaving that stuff in plain sight to occupy me, while all this was going on behind the scenes.
The lying fucking bastard.
God, I hated him now. I wanted to hurl the laptop the way I’d thrown the phone, but this was bigger than just the type of row that leads to a divorce. The stakes had grown immeasurably higher. I had to think very hard, and quickly too. Curbing all my destructive instincts, I tucked the laptop back in the briefcase as gently as though I was putting one of my own babies back to bed. I scrabbled around under the dressing table and picked through the soft thick pile of the carpet – noting again with horror how much this weekend must be costing – and reassembled the cheap phone, before stuffing that away too. I replaced the briefcase behind the shoes, where the lying scum had half-hidden it. Then I trudged to the bathroom.
Tears had been running, unheeded, down my face and trickling down my chin. I rubbed them away irritably, wiped the steam off the mirror to see, in close-up, just what devastation really looked like. Yup, not a pretty sight. I put the loo seat down and tried to take deep breaths, regain some measure of calm, focus. It was so hard.
All I saw in front of me was the flat I’d come from, the place where I’d lived with my mother, all those unhappy, endless years, laid end on end without end. The grim stairwells, the concrete balconies, the leering neighbours, the black mould in the bathroom and kitchen, the paper peeling even after I’d tried to superglue it. The feeling of being trapped. In the wrong place.
I wasn’t going back there. Not with my children, I wouldn’t do it.
All the safety I’d felt, in my palace of a home, all the security I thought I’d bought for my children, the careful blind eye I’d turned to Patrick’s unfaithfulness, the unspoken bargain we had made – everything was whisked away from me that afternoon, as I sat in a five-star luxury bathroom, with Jo Malone’s basil tickling my nose. That smell still makes me want to throw up.
Chapter 46
Now
Becca
Becca sidled in through the police station door. Yes, it was a bad sign that she was having to go in sideways like a crab, she hissed back to her mother’s voice in her head.
Would her mother be shocked in real life, if she knew that she provided this constant negative commentary in her daughter’s mind, day after day, hour after hour? Or would she just be sorry that Becca seemed to take so little notice? What do you think you look like? Are you really going to buy/eat/wear that? Becca knew her mum thought of herself as kind and believed she was endlessly supportive. She didn’t realise that every pinching of her nostrils, every forced smile shouted disappointment louder than words ever could.
Becca didn’t blame her mother. Yes, she knew a lot of her decisions were questionable, but today, she finally felt she was doing the right thing. Even if the way she was doing it was a little, well, dodgy. First, she walked straight past the lift, and opted for the stairs. Virtue, already. But then she carried on, hefting herself upwards, past her own floor, to places where she had no business being. Up, up to the giddy heights where Johno worked.
She had a pretext – she wasn’t a fool. After all, as he’d pointed out, they were all detectives up there. Paid to have suspicious minds. Or, some would say, in this day and age, paid to fill quotas and cover their backs. Not enough money in the coffers to do a proper job, and always at the mercy of the politicians and their sharp little scissors, snipping budgets everywhere.
But the plain clothes lot would certainly look askance at some junior bod like her prowling in their exalted midst. So she had a sponsorship form she’d knocked up. Couch to 5k. People were always coming round with stuff like this. And sure, they’d have no trouble believing the couch part. The 5k would be more of a challenge – but of course she had absolutely no intention of going through with it.
She’d delved a little into the rotas last night. There was never high security on these – who cared about office hours, except those who had to slog through them? Johno was scheduled to be safely away from his desk this morning. The perfect opportunity. And, as she’d got here so early, she was willing to bet few of his colleagues would be putting in an appearance either. There wasn’t an active case on. Though the DCs all walked around with a swagger, each of them like Horatio Caine in their own private version of CSI: Miami, the truth was this was a quiet little backwater. The biggest thing for years should have been the suspicious death of Patrick Bridges. Except that they weren’t treating it as such.
These thoughts kept her occupied until she reached the final landing, hauling herself up by the iron bannister and stopping for a moment to catch her breath. Coming in this way, instead of via the lifts, she had a better view of the open-plan area where Johno worked. She peeped in through the safety glass panel. As she’d thought, the sea of desks, separated here and there by a half-dead pot plant or a battered hessian divider, was mostly empty. At the far end of the room were the few offices used by the high-ups, and a large meeting room for live ops, but the rank and file spent most of their time here in this dusty, godforsaken wasteland.
Only a few desks were filled, mostly women on shift work, heads down, nondescript, diligent. She might be reading too much into it, but she felt as though they were trudging through the hours before getting back to more important bits of their lives. If she could just channel that weariness. The last thing she wanted to do was breeze in, be remarkable.
She cracked open the double doors, hesitated, but it was too late, the head nearest to her had bobbed up, brown eyes questioning. She sidled again, trying to tread lightly, repel that steady attention, look purposeful but bored. Anything but nervous.
‘Yeah, where does Johno sit?’ she asked, going for a faintly irritated tone. It seemed to hit the right note. The woman’s mouth twisted slightly and she gave Becca a knowing look. ‘Just over there, the one by the window. Best seat in the house. Wouldn’t you know it. What’s he been up to?’
‘Oh, nothing much …’ Becca seemed to falter. Now she could look as nervous as she felt. ‘Just got to leave this here for him,’ Becca brandished her sheet of A4. It trembled slightly in her hand. Th
e woman raised her eyebrows, but she didn’t look unsympathetic. ‘Go for it. Want me to pass a message on?’
Becca didn’t have to act to look horrified at the very idea. She shook her head, probably too many times. ‘Nah, you’re all right. I’ll catch him later.’
‘Catch something, more like,’ the officer said, under her breath, but again she was amused rather than disapproving. It looked as though Becca wasn’t by any means the first fluttering moth drawn to Johno’s flame, though judging by that smile she might be the most unlikely.
She stepped forward more boldly, winding through the workstations until she got to Johno’s. Then she was brought up short. A framed picture of a woman was in pride of place, right by his phone. It could have been anyone, a sister, cousin, she thought wildly. But of course, it was his wife. She knew it with a heavy certainty. Bastard.
The officer was still watching, less benignly now. Becca was sure she must look gobsmacked. She thought quickly. Despite everything, she had no intention of messing up this opportunity. She refused to bottle out, drop her bogus sponsorship form and run. There was too much at stake. And discovering that Johno was hardly footloose and fancy-free, well, it made no difference. There’d been no chance anyway, she knew that really. She thought fast, then caught the edge of one of the untidy piles of folders stacked high on his desk – wouldn’t she have known he’d be a fellow slob? – and pushed it accidentally on purpose to the floor.
At the crash, several more heads bobbed up. She lifted her palms, looked gormless – didn’t have to try too hard, said her mother’s voice – and got to work, not before making sure the first woman was shaking her head in resignation, and signalling, ‘Nutter, what can you do?’ to her colleagues. Becca knelt down, killing her knees, and swished her hand in the pile of documents until she found what she was after. With her back to the room, she slid out her phone and took a quick series of photos.