His controlling nature often extended to coming along on theweekly shop, making her pick cheap brands and reduced items on things shewanted to buy. He even made her buy the supermarket’s own-brand tampons, ratherthan the brand she preferred, claiming they were just as good. As if he wouldknow.
When they got to the booze aisle he would then proceed topick himself out a couple of £10 bottles of red wine, which he would claim wasa treat. This was of no benefit to Kay as she only drank white wine, and henever let her have a decent bottle of that, even at Christmas. She got a coupleof bottles of cheap German Riesling if she was lucky.
As she thought about all this now, a particularly offensiveword beginning with “c” came to mind which Kay despised and never uttered. Butif anyone ever deserved to be called one, it was Alan.
Going through the hotel bills, she discovered that less thana week after they had returned from Spain, he had spent £769 on two nights in ahotel in London. That was one she was definitely going to have to commit tomemory for future use. There were many similar bills.
For the next few minutes, she worked at memorising the datesand locations of several of these hotel stays. The information could come invery useful later on. But what she had was not enough. She needed more – muchmore.
Chapter Fourteen
February 2018
Alan’s regular bank statements did not yield anythinguntoward. It seemed that he kept his extravagant gestures purely on his creditcard, but she did notice something unusual. There were no signs of any paymentsto the credit card company coming out of his regular current account. But onthe credit card she could see that, despite him running up thousands everymonth, it was regularly being paid off in full.
The question was, where had he been getting the money fromto pay it? He earned a good salary from his high-flying retail job, but there wasno way it was enough to cover the sorts of sums he was splashing around, and hewasn’t using his wages for that anyway. The answer had to be here somewhere andKay was determined to find it.
She delved further into the folder, and soon found what shewas looking for. Tucked away at the back of his regular bank statements weresome additional statements from a bank, the name of which she was unfamiliarwith. The logo, however, did ring a bell in her head. It was a picture of atiger with a mountain in the background. Where had she seen that image before?
Two things leapt out at her from the statement. Firstly,that the address of the bank was in Switzerland. Banks in that country had areputation for being safe havens where people could salt away money they wantedto hide.
Secondly, the balance on the account was over €300,000.
She was astounded. How had he acquired such a sum? Shescanned through the statements. There were several credits over the past twoyears going through to the account, all from the same source and all forroughly the same amount, approximately €50,000 each time. She could also seethat it was from this account that he had been paying his credit card bills.
All of the payments into the account were from a name sherecognised. It was a major wine producer in France, one that she knew herhusband dealt with. In fact, he had negotiated a major multimillion pound dealwith the company only a year or two before.
Kay thought back to the rumours that had been circulatingaround her husband’s employers. A series of poor results had led to accusationsof financial mismanagement in the City as the share price had plummeted.
Could it be that the mismanagement stretched to fraud? Itwas pretty obvious to Kay what was going on here. He had negotiated afavourable deal for the supplier and they were giving him backhanders inreturn. What’s more, it seemed like he was getting away with it. With nothinggoing through his company’s books, there would be no trail of money leadingback to him.
It was only February now. A further ten months had passedsince then, and as far as she knew, he was still securely in his job, despitethe internal investigations going on. But then he was a senior manager. Sheknew that years before he was always pulling little stunts to fiddle onexpenses here and there. He had said at the time that, as he was a senior andrespected manager, no one would ever dare question him, and besides, it was allperks of the job.
It looked as if his dishonesty had now spread way beyond afew inflated mileage claims now. He was on the fiddle in a big way, without adoubt, and it wouldn’t surprise her if Lucy was in on it as well. She worked inthe accounts department, just as Kay had years ago, and she remembered how heused to get her to push things through that others might have red-flagged.
The bank statement contained both the sort code and theaccount number of his bank in Switzerland. Looking at the picture of the tigeragain, she suddenly remembered where she had seen it before. It had beenearlier this morning when she was rummaging through the mess in his drawer.
She crossed back over to the desk and opened the draweragain. Inside was a small, black, plastic device with an LCD strip on it, nobigger than a credit card. She had originally mistaken it for a calculator, butwhen she remembered that the logo on it matched the one on the bank statement,she realised what it must be.
Quickly she turned her attention back to the laptop andflicked through his bookmarks. Finding a link to the bank, she clicked on it,taking her straight to the login screen for online banking. She was pleased tosee that the online banking ID, different from the account
