‘I might just swap it out now,’ he said. ‘It’s been driving me mad.’
‘No. Not electrics, Gabe, it’s too dangerous. I’ll call the electrician.’
‘We don’t need an electrician to change out a light, Pip!’ he said, kissing my forehead. ‘It won’t take me a minute to sort it out.’
His confidence was persuasive. Maybe he was right and it was no big deal. After all, what did I know about changing lights? Besides, I had two toddlers at my heels who wanted lunch.
‘All right, if you’re sure.’
There were worse things than having a husband who was handy, I told myself as I made toasted sandwiches. Some women would kill to have a husband who did things around the house.
The sandwiches were nearly done when the electricity cut out. From the kitchen at the back of the house, I heard the unmistakable thud of a body hitting the ground.
I’d never run so fast in my life.
When I reached the front porch, the ladder was on its side and so was Gabe, several metres away. He blinked at me dumbly for several seconds. Then he began to laugh.
I didn’t understand it. He’d had the ADHD diagnosis. He was taking his medication. But Gabe was spiralling again. I could feel it in my bones.
50
AMANDA
BEFORE
I came home one night from dinner with some girlfriends to find the gates open and several cars parked in our driveway. They were not the prestige cars owned by most of our friends. There was a Mazda, a Subaru and a hotted-up 1975 Ford Falcon with tinted windows – this last I recognised as belonging to Baz. It was unusual for our security guard to park in the driveway. Even though it had been years since Arthur Spriggs’s men had invaded our home, unexpected guests still made me nervous. I called Max from my car.
‘I’m in the driveway,’ I said, when he picked up. ‘Everything okay?’
‘Fine. I’ve just got a few colleagues here for a meeting.’
Max sounded distracted, though not alarmed. It reassured me, even though Max rarely held business meetings at home after hours. Then again, things had been busy now that NewZ was trying to enter the streaming sphere. It was a big undertaking which had been the focus of the past couple of years and had involved some late nights at work. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that Max might need to bring work home – but, still, it seemed odd.
The house was quiet when I let myself inside and I assumed Max and his colleagues were in Max’s office. By this time, I’d become quite good at snooping, so I slipped into my study which abutted the office and put my ear to the wall.
‘How the hell did you even develop a relationship with this contact?’ I heard Max bellow, so loud that I could hear him quite clearly.
‘The usual ways,’ came the softer, but not feeble, response. I recognised the voice as belonging to Gabe Gerard. ‘I know it was unorthodox, but you said to find the money wherever we could.’
‘Great. Did you look in dumpsters too?’
‘Max, could we just focus on –’
But Max wasn’t listening. ‘How did this get through compliance, Mei?’
‘I red-flagged it when I vetted it.’ It was a young woman’s voice now. ‘I couldn’t verify the funds; they came from multiple holding companies on the Cayman Islands. I said it was suspicious.’
‘So how did it get through? Who signed off on it?’
‘You did.’ Gabe’s voice is smaller now.
Infuriatingly, the landline chose this moment to ring, and I hurried down the hall to answer it. It was a phone survey, which I declined to take part in. I got off the phone as fast as I could then stood by the hall table thinking about what I’d overheard. They’d been talking about business, clearly; nothing out of the ordinary there. Yet the conversation had felt strangely charged. I hadn’t heard Max sound so upset since . . . since the business with Arthur Spriggs, I realised.
I was still standing there when the door to Max’s office opened.
‘Thanks, Mei,’ I heard Max say, his tone polite but brisk. ‘Baz will show you out.’
I’d almost forgotten Baz was in there. That was strange. Baz was responsible for our personal security; why would he be invited to a business meeting? I pretended to rifle through a drawer in the hallstand while Baz walked a young woman to the foyer. He gave me a brief nod of acknowledgement on his way back to the office. When he closed the door, I returned to my study, but the voices were faint now, and I couldn’t make out much of what they were saying. Eventually, I gave up and went to bed.
‘That was a late one,’ I said when Max joined me later. I was sitting up under the covers with a novel in my lap. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I’m not sure you want to know,’ he said, as he got undressed.
I raised my eyebrows to indicate that I did.
‘All right.’ He finished unbuttoning his shirt and sat on the bed. ‘You know the streaming service we acquired a few months back?’
‘Of course.’
‘It was very expensive. Getting the finance was tricky. For a while we thought it wasn’t going to fly.’
‘I remember.’
‘Gabe Gerard managed to pull it off, though. At the eleventh hour he found an investor who came forward with fifty million dollars.’
‘That’s right,’ I said, remembering how relieved Max had been. ‘It was a huge coup.’
Max sighed. ‘Yes, well . . . It turns out the investor wasn’t exactly the saviour we were looking for.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s a group called A.S. Holdings.’
‘And?’ I prompted, but Max didn’t continue. ‘So, what’s the problem?’
‘The problem is’ – Max hung his head – ‘A.S. stands for Arthur Spriggs.’
51
AMANDA
AFTER
Max has a leather satchel over his shoulder and is walking with purpose. To the Gerards’ house, I assume, but then he takes the steps down to the beach and heads to the rock groyne that sticks straight out to sea, like a pier.
He removes his shoes. It’s a romantic sight, Max walking barefoot on the rocks. In another life, I would have photographed it. The beach is quiet, apart from a few dog walkers several hundred metres away. When he reaches the end of the groyne, he opens his satchel and removes the secret laptop.
Suddenly I understand what he’s doing. All his secrets are on that computer: falsified paperwork, documents linking him to Arthur Spriggs. It needs to be destroyed.
He lifts the laptop and brings it down hard against the rocks. It’s shocking how quickly it falls to pieces. No one on the beach pays him the slightest attention as he bashes it again and again, his face contorting with the effort. I imagine it feels cathartic.
Max had another call from the cops this morning, this time to ask if Gabriel Gerard was a former employee of his. Max replied that he had thousands of employees; he couldn’t possibly be expected to remember every single one. That was interesting. It made me wonder what kind of game he was playing.
Still, the cops are smarter than either Max or I gave them credit for. They didn’t simply accept that my death was a suicide, as I presumed they would – they were doing their due diligence. They’d already been keeping an eye on Max and his business dealings, but my death gave them a reason to poke into his affairs. Now, while supposedly investigating my death, they’d stumbled across another crime.