Liv gave up on sleep and slid out of bed. It was cold in the room. She pulled on her dressing gown, grabbed one of Angus’s jumpers and slipped it on top. There was a pair of his socks on the floor, so she put them on, wrapping herself in his layers – protection against the chill. She took her laptop and went to sit in the chair in the alcove, with the passcodes and key card that Megan had finally given her.
If she was destined to be wide awake in the dark hours of the night, she might as well put her insomnia to good use. It was time to find out if Megan really was trying to hide something.
Liv chose the joint current account as her start point, not knowing what she was expecting to find, but on the lookout for anomalies. Megan’s resistance to Liv having access to the bank accounts could very well have been just her way of protesting at the vulnerable situation she found herself in. But it could be something else.
God, she was beginning to think like Noah!
The light from the screen seemed very bright in the dark room, but Liv knew it wouldn’t bother Angus. He could sleep, as he liked to boast – with or without a skinful – on a washing line. She set to work. The current account statements told an everyday story of mundane expenses: shopping, petrol, household bills, direct debits for two credit cards. A card each. Neither of them registered particularly high balances. There was also the regular payment to the care agency that supplied Lisa. Liv noted, but not with surprise, how expensive home-care was. On the evidence of the joint account, it would be hard to make a case for Megan being a big spender. Indeed, if anything, the statements tended to highlight how curtailed her life seemed to have been. There were very few bills for restaurants, no gym memberships, no extravagant purchases, certainly not in the past year. Liv began to feel churlish for having doubted her. If this was a reflection of Megan’s spending, why had she been so reluctant to give Liv access to the accounts? Liv sat back in the chair and listened to the snoring, drawing comfort from the presence of her family. A sleeping child was one of the best things in the world. A snoring husband less so. Thankfully, Angus sighed and rolled onto his side.
Liv closed down the joint current account, opened Jonathan’s personal account and began scrolling through. One name in particular stood out, but it was not Megan’s. On the first of every month there was a transfer of £150, to Chloe; 150 quid every month, without fail, going back months. Liv checked. No, not months – years. As she waded back through the transactions, another name cropped up that gave her reason to pause. Noah. Two lump-sum payments: £10,000 in January 2014 and another £7,000 in September 2017. What the hell had those been for? Liv racked her tired brain trying to recall what her brother had been doing around these times. Loans to tide him over when work was hard to come by? Help when he and Josie bought the house? Perhaps. She trawled through the deposit entries, but Noah had not paid any of the money back. It was interesting to note that he had opted not to mention these two very generous ‘donations’ when they had their cosy heart-to-heart in the café not ten hours ago. So much for coming clean about things!
The discovery that her siblings had, in their own ways, been gouging money out of her father shocked Liv. It was not so much the amounts, though the transfers constituted a sizeable chunk of change to both of them, but more that her dad had never offered Liv any similar financial support. Not a penny. Not since she’d been studying. He had supplemented her education, of course – very few people graduated in medicine without the support of their families – but from the moment Liv got her first job she had been financially independent. There had been small gifts, when she and Angus got married and when the boys were born, but nothing on this scale.
The knowledge that her siblings had been relying on her father financially angered her. That they hadn’t said a word about the handouts during all their conversations about fairness, when it came to apportioning the estate, infuriated her.
They must have known she would discover these ‘gifts’ from her father eventually. Liv reached for her phone and did a rough tally of what she’d found. Chloe was into her dad for, give or take, £9,000, Noah for £17,000 – and that was only what she’d discovered so far! She sat back and looked at the amounts. Oddly enough, it was the handouts to Chloe that bugged Liv the most. Chloe’s life was one long chain of unsatisfactory jobs and short-lived new starts. Each move must have incurred costs. The periods of rethinking, retraining, regrouping – or unemployment – had been frequent. That her father had financially supplemented it all shocked Liv. No, on reflection, that wasn’t true; it wasn’t really much of a surprise. Jonathan had always indulged Chloe: expected less of her, tolerated more. That’s what really ticked Liv off.
She knew why he did it – the affair! There was an established family belief that Chloe had been the one most badly affected by their parents’ split, because she was around for the fallout, living at home at the time, in between jobs and partners yet again. She was like a yo-yo, recoiling home at the first sign of trouble. And, let’s not forget, there was an extra layer of indulgence
