The Other Wife by Claire McGowan

Author:Claire McGowan [McGowan, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

Elle

The money was gone.

She hadn’t taken it in at first. The lawyer was saying phrases, and she could see his large frog-like mouth moving, but nothing made sense. ‘. . . not as expected . . . significant withdrawals . . .’

She interrupted him. It was rude, and she imagined Mother scolding her, but she just didn’t understand. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t . . . What do you mean?’

He had looked at her with kind, dark eyes. ‘I’m so sorry, Elle. There’s no money left. I’ll keep checking for any hidden accounts or savings, but – so far, there’s nothing.’

Seconds ticked by. ‘But . . . there’s all the savings accounts. The trust documents.’ He had worked on her family business for years, he knew all this. He knew about the vast sums her father had left to her, the only surviving child, her parents’ life insurance, the insurance on the house too. The company had dithered over paying it, after all the rumours, but in the end it had come. ‘They can’t be empty.’

‘Elle . . . as you know, we maintain your funds. But they are yours, to do what you want with. We don’t interfere with withdrawals, so long as all the security checks are in line.’

He didn’t mean all the money. He must be misunderstanding. What about all her earnings, the thousands she had made from concerts, so much she simply stopped looking at her accounts, knowing she could buy whatever she wanted? ‘Yes, but . . .’

‘There were a lot of big withdrawals over the last ten years. Always just at the limit where we’d have to call you to double-check – which is, as you may recall, twenty thousand pounds. There was a lot in the accounts . . . but this is quickly used up by heavy spending.’

‘But . . . I didn’t take it.’ She was still clutching at hope. ‘Some mistake? Fraud, maybe?’ Didn’t the government protect you against that? ‘Identity theft?’

He looked wretched. ‘Elle, dear . . . your husband had full control over all the accounts too.’ Then, she finally understood.

Carefully, she said, ‘What was it spent on?’

He fumbled pages out in front of her, seeming grateful for the support of something concrete. She glanced over the tiny figures, crawling like ants. Holidays. The Jaguar, replaced every two years. Haircuts, clothes, massages. Meals out that she knew nothing about, bars, even hotel stays. He’d been spending money on her, perhaps. The woman. Elle’s money. ‘But . . . I don’t understand. He was a doctor, he earned a lot.’ That was her last straw to cling to. Even though he clearly spent more than she knew, much much more, he must have had his own money coming in too. She’d seen his payslips, though it had been for less than she thought. Maybe he got paid in different instalments, or it was weekly instead of monthly?

The lawyer hesitated. ‘I contacted his workplace, to ask about final pensions and so on.

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