Brenda’s lawyer friend, a brilliant lawyer named Fiona McPharland, had got a lot of people out of a lot of sticky situations.
‘I’d like to think I’m not in a sticky situation,’ Callie said as they drove there.
‘I hope you’re not in a sticky situation either,’ said Brenda, ‘but it all depends on what Shithead has put in your name.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t keep calling him that,’ said Callie, ‘and how can you put something in my name. I mean I have to agree to that, right?’
‘Don’t be naïve,’ Brenda pleaded. ‘He could have used your name. You’ve got to look after yourself and Poppy now. It’s that simple. You’ve got to find out has Jason tied you up in any of it by forging signatures, do you own any part of the house, because who knows? How do you go about unfreezing the bank accounts, how do you get any money of your own. Can you take anything out of the house – all that sort of stuff. And if you can’t unfreeze a bank account, you’ll have to get social welfare, and that’s going to be fun – not. So the other way around it is to go to the courts and ask them to unfreeze some of the money and I’d say you’d not have a hope in hell of that happening.’
‘You’re a little ray of sunshine,’ said Callie.
‘Sorry. Too real?’
Callie managed to laugh. It was late in the afternoon and she’d had some of Brenda’s cheap wine instead of lunch. She’d also taken a Xanax: the days of the half a Xanax and no alcohol were now over. Callie was relying on the little pills quite a lot. They helped her at least push the pain to the back of her mind and she could be calmer and think straight. The only problem was that she didn’t have an awful lot of them left. Her own doctor had given her a one-off prescription months ago, but she could no longer afford to pay the sixty-five euros to see him.
‘How’s Poppy?’ asked Brenda.
‘I left her lying on the bed on the Wi-Fi looking at her phone.’
‘You need to keep her off social media,’ Brenda said. ‘They are saying some pretty vicious things.’
‘Oh, like what?’
‘Like Jason Reynolds defrauded friends and charities, and that he’s on the run from Interpol.’
‘He’s not on the run from Interpol,’ Callie said and then she thought about it because she didn’t really know if he was or not. She guessed she’d find that out.
Fiona McPharland’s office was big, airy and it had a huge table at one end of it. Fiona’s desk was covered with files and her assistant brought tea and coffee into them in takeaway cups.
Criminal law was a whole different arena, Callie thought, noting that there were no copies of the broadsheets lying around, nor glossy magazines.
Fiona, glamorous in a dark suit, sat at one end of the table and gestured for Callie to sit beside her.
‘OK,’ she said, ‘let’s go over exactly what happened.’
Callie went through everything the night of the raid and what she had done since.
‘And there has been no contact from your husband since?’
‘No,’ Callie said. ‘I’ve rung him but the number is now disconnected.’ Saying it out loud made her sound so pathetic.
‘Right,’ said Fiona, ‘we need to see what this detective superintendent has to say and we can figure out our strategy from there.’
‘I don’t want a strategy,’ said Callie. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘But you are going to need money to live on,’ said Fiona, ‘and these white-collar-crime cases take a very long time to come to fruition. You could be looking at years of trying to survive.’
‘But the house,’ said Callie. ‘There’s a law about it belonging to husband and wife together, right?’
Again, Fiona faced her straight on.
‘The house should belong to both you and your husband, but it’s highly likely that it’s in the company’s name and tied to the fraud. That is not uncommon in fraud cases. You should own half of it, but you possibly don’t. You may own absolutely nothing.’
Callie stared at her new lawyer, the one she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to pay unless she sold something taken from her old home, something she felt sure she wasn’t entitled to take. ‘Nothing,’ she repeated.
‘If your husband doesn’t come back with a bag of money and a very plausible story, what are you going to live on? Until they can bring him to trial, this is all up in the air and it will take a lot to unfreeze those bank accounts with him still on the run. Unless he comes back, you’re looking at years waiting for something to resolve this for you. Do you have any property you brought to the marriage? Any savings?’
‘No,’ breathed Callie. She’d never been good with money and since she’d been with Jason, he’d paid the bills. She’d stopped modelling when she met him and had never gone back. She’d thought she was safe. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘Brenda said you were good for cutting the legalese.’
‘Yes,’ said Fiona, ‘that’s me. I deal with people who are on the edge, Mrs Reynolds, so there’s no point in sugarcoating it. I’m not doing my job properly if I do. The bottom line is that you could sue your husband in a Civil Court, but if he doesn’t have anything to give you because it’s all been taken in the criminal case, you don’t really have a leg to stand on. There’s no point suing someone for money when it’s all gone.’
‘Good luck with getting any money out of a court,’ Brenda said grimly as they walked down the back steps of Fiona McPharland’s building. ‘I’ve heard of people trying to unfreeze assets before and if the assets are the proceeds of any sort of crime, you have no hope. You have no assets and you’re perceived as a wealthy woman, a member of the glitterati, who watched her husband rob people blind. That’s how it will look. The media will turn it into a witch hunt. You will be everything that is wrong with the world, you with your beauty and your nice clothes. Your only hope is to get away. Hide.’
Brenda stepped over a used condom.
‘Romantic spot,’ she said drily.
She began walking quickly away from the courts’ complex where so many of the criminal lawyers had their offices.
‘At least they won’t find anything with my name on it,’ Callie said, desperate to find something cheerful to cling to. ‘We can manage for a bit,’ she added, thinking of the jewellery, although they’d have to sell some of that to pay Fiona’s fee. The diamond earrings and the tennis bracelet, she thought.
She couldn’t subject her daughter to the hideous publicity Brenda had described if she tried to get the money from out of Jason’s estate. Poppy was a kid, nothing more. This would break her.
‘I should have watched Jason more, Cal, for your and Poppy’s sake,’ said Brenda as she drove home.
For the first time since it had all happened, Brenda looked like she might cry.
‘I can’t imagine a life without him, you know,’ said Callie, staring out the window.
‘Even now?’ Brenda reached around for a tissue.
‘When I’m with Jason, I feel so loved, so secure . . .’ began Callie and then she wondered if it was the Xanax speaking.
Negotiating a tricky junction, Brenda didn’t look at her.
‘I’m going to say it now, love,’ she began. ‘Jason is not a fucking mirror. You don’t have to look at him to see your reflection. You have to be your own mirror and like what you see without anyone else’s help.’
‘We’ve been married so long, it’s not easy. How do I do that?’ said Callie
‘I don’t know. But he’s in it all for himself. Not for you, not even for Poppy, poor kid. She’ll learn that the hard way.’
‘He adores Poppy,’ protested Callie.
Brenda looked at Callie: a pitying look, the way people looked at commercials of abandoned dogs in dog homes. Callie flinched from it.
‘He adores himself, first and foremost.’
‘He’ll phone, it’ll be fine,’ said Callie, urgently, as if saying it made it true, as if they hadn’t spent hours with a lawyer where it was very much not fine.
The other woman held a hand up.
‘Stick on a CD. Better if we don’t talk till we get home.’
As soon as they turned into Brenda’s road, they saw them: a great crowd of people standing outside the gate of Brenda’s tiny house. There were news photographers, people with TV cameras, sound booms, all talking, idling and yet watching all at the same time. Journalists. People who wanted to write about the big financial case of the week, people who wanted to write about the only person left to answer any questions about the big property investment scheme which had been the subject of the most outrageous fraud.
Brenda’s road was one-way only so there was no backing out. Callie could feel her heartbeat race and the pain in her chest increase. There was nothing for it, short of abandoning the car in the middle of the road and getting out and running, they would have to drive past. Callie grabbed her sunglasses and stuck them on as they passed the house, but it was no good. They were waiting for her, guys leaning forward with cameras, snapping almost dangerously as they drove by – anything to get a picture. It was horrendous, so frightening. How had they found out where she was?
‘What the hell are we going to do now?’ Callie had never seen anything like this, even in the early years with Ricky and Tanner when the band were on the up.
‘Let me think about it,’ said Brenda, easing the car through the path of photographers towards the garage, where at least they’d be secure.
If she ran the gamut of the press now, maybe they’d leave her alone.
‘I’m going in the front door,’ Callie said. ‘It might stop them.’
‘You sure—’ began Brenda, but Callie cut her off.
‘I’m sure – you get inside and check that Poppy is OK.’
Callie stared up into the sky as if looking for something magical to come and fix it all.
But there was no fixing this. She and Poppy had to leave Brenda’s house – that was the only option, she had to go somewhere else. Somewhere they couldn’t find her.
Somewhere like home. As she pushed past the reporters and photographers, all shoving tiny recorders or cameras in her face, she barely breathed and said nothing.
Nothing she could say would help. Only Jason could fix this and he had run away.
Home, her real home, suddenly felt the like only place she could run to.