The Guilty Couple(16)

‘Why?’

Reece’s eyes flick from her face to her chest. ‘He’s probably discovered what you’ve been up to.’

She tenses. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It’s a joke.’ He smiles, his thin lips pulled tightly over coffee-stained teeth.





Chapter 11


OLIVIA


It’s pouring with rain as I exit Wood Green tube station and hurry down the street, hood up, head down. Nearly twenty-four hours have passed since I saw Grace but her words are still ringing in my ears: her dad said that if he goes down, so does she. I couldn’t get any more out of her and, after we left the butterfly enclosure, Esther and George stuck to us like glue.

What Grace said has confirmed my suspicion that Dominic and Dani were behind the plan to frame me. I thought it was a purely financial agreement but it looks like they’ve been sleeping together all along. It explains the long dark hair I found on our bed shortly after their PT sessions began. I plucked it from my cotton pillowcase, held it up to him and jokingly asked if he was having an affair. Dominic rolled his eyes. It was a hair, not an earring or a pair of knickers, he said. Either one of us could have brought it home with us, stuck to our clothes or our skin, after a long day at work. He’d taken my jokey accusation far more seriously than I’d expected him to. It was obviously guilt.

A man knocks into me and swears as I’m hit by a thought and stop walking. Dominic sleeping with Dani also explains what I found.

Two months before I was arrested I popped into Dom’s home office to get my passport. We kept all the family passports together, shoved between two books on one of the shelves. I was due to fly to Paris for the Salon du Dessin art fair. Lee had argued that he should be the one to go because he knew one of the artists and thought he could charm him into letting us show his work. I countered saying I hadn’t been to a fair for ages and he’d been to one recently in Madrid. He eventually agreed that I should go but there was a frosty atmosphere in the gallery for the rest of the day.

Dom’s office was as neat and tidy as usual but there was a new addition to his uncluttered desk: a book about nutrition and exercise, lying next to his mouse. I picked it up, curious. My husband had never been a big reader, films were more his thing. Dani’s name was scrawled on the inside cover. She must have lent it to him, it wasn’t the sort of thing he’d buy for himself. There was a piece of paper, peeking from between the pages, so I pulled it out. It was an A4 sheet from a notepad, folded in two. At the top someone had scrawled ‘£5,000’ and beneath it were three columns – dates, money, balance, all written by hand. The first entry was dated that day; £200 had been paid leaving a balance of £4,800. I initially thought it was something to do with his lock-up. We didn’t have a double garage and, when Dom had bought a motorbike a few years earlier, he’d insisted on forking out a small fortune for a private lock-up to keep it safe.

‘What are you doing?’ His barked question from the doorway made me jump.

I held up the piece of paper. ‘What’s this?’

He crossed the office and snatched it out of my hand. ‘Nothing important,’ he said after he’d looked at it. ‘I’ve set up a bank account for Grace.’

‘But we already pay into an ISA, I opened it on her first birthday.’

‘Yeah well,’ he tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket, ‘this is different.’

‘Different how?’ There was something about the tense set of his shoulders and the way his gaze kept shifting from me to the book, still lying on the corner of his desk, that wasn’t sitting right.

‘My parents are paying into it.’ He looked at me, steadily now, daring me to question him further. ‘When Uncle Bernie died and they cleared his house they found twenty grand in cash under his bed. They’re paying it into all the grandkids’ accounts, bit by bit to avoid death duty.’

Interesting, and unlikely. Esther and George were comfortably wealthy – they could have made double the rent we were paying them on our town house on the edge of Crouch Lane if they’d gone through an agent. So wealthy that they’d set up trust funds for Grace and the other grandchildren when they were born. So to start sneaking a windfall into the grandkids’ accounts seemed out of character. George used to work in the City and had been a magistrate for years. Esther was the deputy chairwoman of her local WI.

‘I’ll make sure I thank them,’ I said, ‘the next time I see them.’

Dominic’s steady gaze faltered and I saw a flash of fear. ‘I wouldn’t. You’re not supposed to know.’

That was more likely. Esther had always been coldly polite to me. I could have put it down to the fact she was a cold, reserved woman but she was smiley and demonstrative with the people she loved. She adored her daughter’s hedge fund manager husband. I’d always felt she thought I wasn’t good enough for her son.

‘She doesn’t think I’d steal it, does she?’ I stared at him, appalled. ‘I know the gallery is struggling but I wouldn’t steal from my own daughter for god’s sake!’

The conversation descended into an argument with Dominic accusing me of ostracising his parents and we didn’t talk for the rest of the day.

Dad said that if he goes down, so does she.