She perched on the edge of Ginger’s desk.
‘Listen, gossip central: I’ve been messaging around and I’ve got some amazing answers to who this Zac dude is. I don’t care what he does, but he’s in his thirties and wait till you see his pics! Or his pecs!’
Paula smirked at her own joke.
‘What about Keith?’ said Ginger, feeling a moment of protectiveness for Paula’s existing boyfriend.
‘Oh.’ Paula waved him away with a flick of a wrist. ‘Keith isn’t serious, I mean, he doesn’t really know what he wants to do with his life. Imagine if me and Zac hit it off . . . older men like bright young things like me.’ Paula was staring into space. ‘Go on, look him up,’ she said.
Ginger typed his name into her computer and a picture of an extremely attractive guy came up. Zac was richly tanned in a way that spoke of a lot of time spent outdoors. Dark hair coaxed into a short, controlled cut fell over eyes so shockingly blue both she and Paula peered closer to see if he was wearing coloured contacts. He was indeed fabulous.
As Ginger scrolled through the shots at speed, Paula sighed, ‘Man candy, ten out of ten. Actually, eleven out of ten.’
‘Absolutely,’ Ginger agreed. ‘He’s drop-dead gorgeous.’
‘I know,’ said Paula. ‘Imagine all that testosterone walking around Caraval. I hope he comes here first, because if they get their hands on him in the Sunday News, they’ll never let him go. That ho Carla Mattheson will get her gel nails into him and forget it, he’ll be another notch on her ornately carved bedpost.’
‘You can’t call another woman a ho,’ said Ginger, shocked. ‘It’s unsisterly.’
Paula fixed her with a knowing stare. ‘You haven’t met her, babes. Her arms are so long, she can smile at your face while she’s stabbing you in the back. Watch out for her.’
Callie
Brenda’s lawyer friend, a brilliant lawyer named Fiona McPharland, had got a lot of people out of a lot of sticky situations.
‘I’d like to think I’m not in a sticky situation,’ Callie said as they drove there.
‘I hope you’re not in a sticky situation either,’ said Brenda, ‘but it all depends on what Shithead has put in your name.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t keep calling him that,’ said Callie, ‘and how can you put something in my name. I mean I have to agree to that, right?’
‘Don’t be naïve,’ Brenda pleaded. ‘He could have used your name. You’ve got to look after yourself and Poppy now. It’s that simple. You’ve got to find out has Jason tied you up in any of it by forging signatures, do you own any part of the house, because who knows? How do you go about unfreezing the bank accounts, how do you get any money of your own. Can you take anything out of the house – all that sort of stuff. And if you can’t unfreeze a bank account, you’ll have to get social welfare, and that’s going to be fun – not. So the other way around it is to go to the courts and ask them to unfreeze some of the money and I’d say you’d not have a hope in hell of that happening.’
‘You’re a little ray of sunshine,’ said Callie.
‘Sorry. Too real?’
Callie managed to laugh. It was late in the afternoon and she’d had some of Brenda’s cheap wine instead of lunch. She’d also taken a Xanax: the days of the half a Xanax and no alcohol were now over. Callie was relying on the little pills quite a lot. They helped her at least push the pain to the back of her mind and she could be calmer and think straight. The only problem was that she didn’t have an awful lot of them left. Her own doctor had given her a one-off prescription months ago, but she could no longer afford to pay the sixty-five euros to see him.
‘How’s Poppy?’ asked Brenda.
‘I left her lying on the bed on the Wi-Fi looking at her phone.’
‘You need to keep her off social media,’ Brenda said. ‘They are saying some pretty vicious things.’
‘Oh, like what?’
‘Like Jason Reynolds defrauded friends and charities, and that he’s on the run from Interpol.’
‘He’s not on the run from Interpol,’ Callie said and then she thought about it because she didn’t really know if he was or not. She guessed she’d find that out.
Fiona McPharland’s office was big, airy and it had a huge table at one end of it. Fiona’s desk was covered with files and her assistant brought tea and coffee into them in takeaway cups.
Criminal law was a whole different arena, Callie thought, noting that there were no copies of the broadsheets lying around, nor glossy magazines.
Fiona, glamorous in a dark suit, sat at one end of the table and gestured for Callie to sit beside her.
‘OK,’ she said, ‘let’s go over exactly what happened.’
Callie went through everything the night of the raid and what she had done since.
‘And there has been no contact from your husband since?’
‘No,’ Callie said. ‘I’ve rung him but the number is now disconnected.’ Saying it out loud made her sound so pathetic.
‘Right,’ said Fiona, ‘we need to see what this detective superintendent has to say and we can figure out our strategy from there.’
‘I don’t want a strategy,’ said Callie. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘But you are going to need money to live on,’ said Fiona, ‘and these white-collar-crime cases take a very long time to come to fruition. You could be looking at years of trying to survive.’
‘But the house,’ said Callie. ‘There’s a law about it belonging to husband and wife together, right?’
Again, Fiona faced her straight on.
‘The house should belong to both you and your husband, but it’s highly likely that it’s in the company’s name and tied to the fraud. That is not uncommon in fraud cases. You should own half of it, but you possibly don’t. You may own absolutely nothing.’
Callie stared at her new lawyer, the one she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to pay unless she sold something taken from her old home, something she felt sure she wasn’t entitled to take. ‘Nothing,’ she repeated.
‘If your husband doesn’t come back with a bag of money and a very plausible story, what are you going to live on? Until they can bring him to trial, this is all up in the air and it will take a lot to unfreeze those bank accounts with him still on the run. Unless he comes back, you’re looking at years waiting for something to resolve this for you. Do you have any property you brought to the marriage? Any savings?’