She waited as he clambered inside and told the driver to head for a restaurant in the West End, before restarting their conversation. ‘You were in the station a long time,’ she said, knowing what that must mean, waiting for the final confirmation of how completely her life had been demolished.
‘Yes,’ the lawyer said, sounding more chipper now that he was safely ensconced in the back of a black cab. ‘More than eight hours, in fact.’
Simpson did the calculation in her head. Good God, she thought morosely, that’s more than six grand. She wondered how much money she had in her purse.?50? All of their bank accounts had been frozen. Would they find the money to pay the legal bills?
‘He’s confessed, Carole. He’s admitted to defrauding his investors.’
‘You told him to do that?’ she asked incredulously.
‘No, no,’ the lawyer said, shocked. ‘Of course not. I’m not even completely sure what exactly he’s confessing to, at this point. He was looking to wind the fund up, which isn’t really what you would expect of someone in these circumstances.’
‘What do you mean “ in these circumstances ”?’ she asked sharply.
‘Well…’ Lucas chose his words carefully, ‘in a so-called pyramid or ponzi scheme, things usually get to the point where the whole thing collapses as a result of too many people trying to take their money out at the same time. Here, it seems, Joshua was trying to give their money back to them — or at least part of it.’
‘Doesn’t that make him innocent?’ She used the word in the narrowest, legal sense.
‘By crystallising the losses,’ Lucas continued, not caring to answer the question, ‘he could have been hoping to share out the losses among everyone, rather than leaving the last ones left in holding the baby, and facing total financial ruin. If that was the thinking behind it, he would have known that there would still have been a big row about it, but the whole thing could have been represented as bad luck rather than actual fraud.’
That made his damn letter even more stupid, Simpson decided.
‘At the moment,’ Lucan continued, ‘all this has to be argued over. We certainly don’t know what the authorities have as yet, in terms of developing a case. Given where we are at this stage, I told him to say nothing. He chose to ignore me.’
‘Not much use then, were you?’ Simpson said bitterly.
The lawyer chose to ignore the barb. He’d been here many times before. One of his great strengths, so he liked to think, was an ability not to get wound up by clients who were, inevitably, having to operate under a great deal of pressure. ‘That is always the client’s prerogative,’ he said gently. ‘It may even be for the best, in the long run.’
‘How so?’ she asked, not prepared to believe it.
‘Well,’ the lawyer said, ‘this way we can avoid a trial and can negotiate a lesser sentence.’
‘So that’s it?’ she said, trying not to wail.
‘Goodness, no,’ said Lucas, trying to sound fatherly, even though he was at least five or six years younger than the woman struggling to hold it together on the other end of the line. ‘Not at all. Whatever Joshua has said, it is still very early days here.’
‘So what happens next?’
‘He’s going to be handed over to the City of London Police’s Economic Crime Directorate. In due course, they will probably look to charge him under the Fraud Act of 2006. I expect that they will claim he is guilty of either false representation, failing to disclose information and or abuse of position. However, there’s a long way to go yet. There are still various different possible outcomes, and we want to optimise the result for Joshua — and for you.’
‘Should I go and see him?’
‘Not yet,’ the lawyer said firmly. ‘Apart from anything else, they’ll probably move him about a bit, depending on cell availability. You know what it’s like.’
‘Yes,’ she said icily, ‘I do.’
‘You don’t want to be rushing off on a wild-goose chase across London, especially if the media are on your tail.’
‘No, you’re right.’ Simpson thought about taking a slug of wine, and decided against it. Putting the glass on the table, she cut to the chase. ‘Will he go to jail?’
Definitely, thought Lucas. And for quite some time. There had never been a worse time to be caught out as a financial crook. All it needed now was for the American authorities to get involved and the silly sod would have hit the jackpot. Those buggers would quite happily lock you up forever, with an extra hundred years on top, just to make them feel better. ‘That is a possibility,’ he replied cautiously, ‘maybe even a probability. But that is not what you should be worrying about now.’
‘No? What should I be worrying about?’
‘We need to have a meeting in the morning. In the meantime, you should start thinking about the practicalities.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, remember the good news here — the very good news — which is that there is no suggestion that you were party to any of this.’
‘I wasn’t.’ Simpson picked up the wine glass and this time drank about half of its contents.
‘No,’ the lawyer said hastily, ‘of course not. But you know what it’s like in these situations.’
Simpson drained the remaining wine in the glass, and resisted the urge to smash it against the wall. ‘No, I don’t actually,’ she bristled, all her desire to be rational, to be reasonable, slipping away.
‘Well,’ Lucas summoned up extra reserves of empathy and patience, ‘as his wife, you will find that there will always be gossip and speculation. But you are not under investigation and there is not, as things stand, any… direct threat to your job. In the first instance, however, you need to consider various aspects of your relationship with your husband and in particular the distribution of your respective assets.’
After a day of feeling numb, Simpson suddenly recoiled as if she had been slapped in the face. ‘Are you saying that I should divorce him?’
‘Not at all,’ Lucas said calmly. ‘It is not my place to give any such advice. And, remember, technically, I am Joshua’s lawyer, not yours. You should, of course, get your own representation. However, for the moment at least, there is a great commonality of interest here.’
‘For the moment?’
Lucas gritted his teeth. He was getting increasingly irritated by Simpson’s verbal tic of echoing what he said. But, once again, he ploughed on. ‘Let us assume, for the moment, that the authorities will want to try and recover as much of Joshua’s assets as possible. You will need to prove to them that anything you keep is not something that was gained as a result of his schemes.’
‘Christ!’ Simpson muttered as she grabbed the wine bottle and refilled her glass.
‘Stop here!’ Lucas told the cab driver. Before clambering out, he returned to his call: ‘Remember, Carole, that you are a very successful professional in your own right. What’s more, you have dedicated your entire career to public service. It should not be difficult to demonstrate that you have built up a reasonable portfolio of legitimately acquired assets over several decades. Draw up a list this evening, and we can discuss it in my office in the morning.’
‘Fine,’ Simpson sighed.
‘Shall we say eleven?’
‘I will see you there.’
‘Good,’ the lawyer replied. ‘Until tomorrow then.’
With a click, the line went dead. Simpson tossed the phone back on the table. For the next few minutes she sat in silence, going over their conversation in her head. Then she pulled some paper and a pen from her bag, and began jotting down numbers.
Carlyle dropped his biography of the football manager Brian Clough on the coffee-table and glanced over at Helen, who was sitting on the other end of the sofa. A dispiriting sense of deja vu overwhelmed him. His wife was still engrossed in her celebrities-in-the-jungle television show that seemed to have been running for months already. Carlyle was even more amazed to note that former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Luke Osgood was still hanging in there with a chance of winning. Osgood had made it down to the last three of the competition, along with a stripper (or, rather, ‘burlesque performer’) called Tizzy McDee and a nondescript-looking soap actor called Kevin.
