It was a pity in a way, Max mused after Charlotte had gone. He had worked hard for those tickets, damned hard, far too hard to have wasted a ticket on someone like Charlotte under normal circumstances, but then these were not normal circumstances, and in view of what he ultimately stood to gain, some sacrifices had to be made.
The practice’s cases might not involve the huge sums of money she was used to dealing with but they were certainly far more interesting, Olivia decided after she had finished reading through the tangled history of one of them. A land dispute had sprung up between two brothers, both of whom claimed to have rights over a piece of land left by their uncle. Both men were already relatively wealthy local farmers but this piece of fiercely disputed land also contained a stream, and it was access to the stream that was the real cause of the dispute. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that at some stage the course of the stream had been altered, diverted, as one brother claimed, so that it now ran through the other brother’s land instead of running in its original course on his land.
Olivia had spent most of the morning poring over old maps and deeds, which in itself was an unfamiliar enough task to her to be intensely absorbing, but trying to read the fine old-fashioned writing was beginning to make her eyes ache. Then she remembered seeing a small magnifying glass on her uncle’s desk.
He had already left for his first appointment, but his office door was open and she could see the magnifying glass beside some papers. She went inside and walked over to get it. As she reached out to pick the glass up, her attention was caught by the open wallet of bank statements on the desk. They were her father’s, she realised, and her uncle had presumably been going through them because they were folded back to show the month of February. One item on the statement was ringed in red, and without intending to do so, Olivia found she was studying it, her heartbeat registering her shock when she discovered that the circled item related to a credit to her father’s account of almost a quarter of a million pounds.
Her father was not the kind of man who had ever managed to accumulate large sums of money. As a family they lived well, very well in fact, but both her parents in different ways tended to be financially extravagant; they were not savers or investors, which meant that her father either must have been given the money or …
Her heart thumping heavily, Olivia sat down in her uncle’s chair and pulled the statements towards her. The money had been deposited by credit transfer. From her grandfather perhaps? Olivia knew that there had been occasions in the past when her father had had to apply to Ben for a ‘loan’ but she, perhaps naïvely, had always assumed that the sums her father had borrowed had been for much smaller amounts.
She flicked forward through the statements and then stopped abruptly as she came to another credit entry—easy enough to find since the bulk of the statement entries were for withdrawals, withdrawals that ran to sums far in excess of her father’s drawings from the practice.
This time the credit was smaller, one hundred thousand pounds, and it was dated very recently, only days before her father’s heart attack, in fact. More slowly this time, Olivia turned back to the first statement and started to go carefully through them all.
By the time she had finished, she felt ice-cold and her hands were shaking so much she could hardly turn the statements. By her rough calculations, in the past five years her father’s account had been credited with close on two million pounds. Where had he got such a vast sum of money? What had he spent it on? So far as she could see, it had been absorbed by her parents’ day-to-day living expenses, by extravagance and overspending to a catastrophic degree. Yes, she could see where the money had gone, but where had it come from?
She had a nauseous feeling that she already knew, if not the exact source of the money, then at least the type of source it was most likely to have come from. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to steady herself.
‘Oh, Dad, how could you …?’ she whispered shakily.
Her glance fell on a file that had been tucked underneath the statements. It looked very like the one Olivia had seen her uncle holding in her father’s study the previous evening. Reluctantly she picked it up and glanced at the name. JEMIMA HARDING—TRUST FUND.
Her fingers were trembling so much she could hardly open it. She knew the Harding family, who lived in Haslewich. They had originally been local landowners; some of their land had been sequestered for use as an American army base during the war, and more recently the same land had been sold off along with the land the Hardings still owned close to a huge multinational chemical and drug conglomerate, which had its British headquarters several miles outside town.
That sale had made Jemima Harding a millionairess. It had also enabled her only son to buy the fast sports car in which he had met his death and, so local rumour said, brought about the split between her and her husband that had ultimately led to their very acrimonious divorce and her reverting to her maiden name of Harding.
She was an old woman now, in her late eighties, Olivia reckoned, living in a residential home.
She was also one of her father’s clients; he was her sole executor and held power of attorney over her financial affairs. Was that where the money had come from? Olivia wondered bleakly. Had her father used those powers to transfer money from Jemima’s account into his own? It would have been easy enough for him to do and easy enough to keep hidden—just so long as Jemima remained alive and no one questioned what was happening to her estate.
The cold, icy calm of deep shock had fallen over her. She was distantly aware of neatly placing the file where she had found it along with the statements, of getting up and even remembering to collect the magnifying glass she had originally come for before walking back to her father’s office. But once there she felt her legs starting to buckle beneath her and her whole body starting to shake so much that she was forced to cling to the back of a chair, unable to move, unable to do anything other than stand there shivering violently and trying to force her emotions to accept what her brain insisted they had to know.
Her father had stolen money from someone else. Her father had defrauded someone who trusted him. Her father was no different from the thief who broke in during the night, the con man who deceived vulnerable old folk out of their savings and pensions. Her father …
She swallowed uneasily. Uncle Jon … had he known …? Had he guessed? Was that why …? Her head started to pound. The temptation to run back to Jon’s office and go through the statements again, to convince herself that she was wrong, that she had misread the evidence, misunderstood what she had seen, was so strong she had to forcibly prevent herself from moving.
Her father …
‘Has he been under any unusual stress?’ the specialist had asked them and she had wondered guiltily then if she ought to mention her mother’s ‘problem’ but had decided not to do so since she was not sure whether her father was aware of it. The stress caused by that knowledge would have been bad enough, but this …
How on earth had he managed to live with himself, knowing what he had done not once, but regularly, consistently, over a period of five years? How could he have done it?
Abruptly, achingly, Olivia longed for Caspar. And not just for him, but the means of escape he could have provided from the appalling dilemma she now faced. If only she had never seen those statements, opened that file. If only she was now safely on her way to London with Caspar.
It shocked her that she, who had always privately thought of herself as strong and independent, should, the moment she was tested, become so mortally afraid and vulnerable, and even worse than that, a moral coward who, instead of facing up to what she had discovered, simply wanted to run and hide herself away from it, preferably in the safe sanctuary of Caspar’s arms.
Caspar. She looked at her watch. It still wasn’t too late for her to catch him before he left, she decided feverishly. If she drove straight to the airport, there was still time before his flight took off for London.
She couldn’t tell him about her father, of course. Caspar would never, never understand that kind of deceit and dishonesty—a