Lynda La Plante: Twisted

‘Christ, you sound as if you are on his side,’ she snapped.

‘Absolutely not, Mrs Fulford, and I will endeavour to find the best solution to your predicament as is possible. I will in the interim require you to give me your own estimation of the value of your property and also the value of its contents.’

‘He’s not getting so much as a stick of furniture. I bought the lot. He never paid for anything.’

‘Nevertheless, I am afraid he is entitled to-’

She snatched up her handbag. ‘I don’t think you heard me, I used the inheritance from my grandparents to put the deposit on that house, and to help start up my business. None of it came from him and I am not giving him a cent, and he can drag me through whatever court he wants because I am not prepared to prop that loser up as I have done for the past seventeen years.’

Henshaw didn’t attempt to stop her as she swept out, banging the door behind her. He had seen it all before, though as Lyons had said it was usually the husband who screamed about being used and refusing to pay up. Lena Fulford had a sizable amount of wealth, albeit hard-earned, and from what he had learned her husband had not been very successful – in fact, to the contrary. However, seventeen years was a long marriage, they had a daughter together and somewhere at some point there had to have been positive times. He sighed and checked his watch. His next appointment was due in half an hour; in the meantime he would look through the copies of Mrs Fulford’s earnings left by Lyons in the hope that he might be able to persuade her to make a deal with her husband for a one-off payment, no strings attached. He would leave it for a few days for her to cool down. As he plucked a tissue from the box and picked up her empty glass left on the table, he reflected that people’s marriages never ceased to amaze him; she was such an attractive woman, beautifully dressed, very classy, unlike her husband. He had to admit Marcus Fulford was a good-looking man, but there was something seedy about him, and to have worn the dark sunglasses throughout the meeting proved to Henshaw that he was probably afraid to look his wife in the eyes. Maybe that was at the root of their marital problem – he was scared of her, or perhaps he had been in awe to begin with and it had gradually been chipped away by his own failures. At some point he had gained enough strength to walk out.

Henshaw, a wily old man, guessed there would be another woman at the root of it, but neither had brought up a third party as a reason for the divorce. A weak man like Marcus Fulford, he was certain, had someone, and it had to be someone very close to Lena to have passed on such personal details. Gone were the days of extramarital affairs affecting the results of divorce proceedings – they no longer had any bearing on the outcome. It was now immaterial whether one’s spouse had been unfaithful; all the court needed was evidence of the breakdown of the marriage. It had been so much easier in those days!

Agnes Moors had left a message that she was going to collect the dry-cleaning and then do the grocery shopping so would not be back until after lunch. She had made sure the kitchen was spotless and gleaming – in fact the whole house was always polished to within an inch of its life. She had a mild obsessive-compulsive disorder that Lena put up with, simply because she was such a methodical and good housekeeper. Irritating little things, such as her obsession with straight lines, the way she organized the cushions on the sofa, the bed, and even the decorative pillows were an anathema to Lena – everything had to be too neat and precisely lined up. The curtains had to be exactly symmetrical, each drawn across the same distance, no showing of the silk lining that Lena rather liked, so it was a ritual that Agnes would hang the curtains dead straight and Lena would flick them around and tie the coiled loops more loosely.

Agnes was about sixty, square-shouldered, thickset, with an oval-shaped and age-lined face, and small unblinking piercing brown eyes. She wore reading glasses when she worked so that she could see every speck of dust or finger mark. She used over-the-counter hair dye, and it was hard to detect her original colour, as her hair was now reddish brown with darker almost black streaks and a quarter inch of grey growth at her roots, which were very obvious as she had a prominent widow’s peak.

Lena, still seething, had uncorked a bottle of wine and sat fuming about the meeting. She opened a bag of Kettle Chips and munched one after the other, unable to think about anything other than the fact she felt as if she was being harassed and for no reason but Marcus’s greed. It took a while for her to eventually calm down; she had a shower and dressed in her towelling robe and then returned to the kitchen. She’d forgotten that she had switched off her mobile at the morning’s meeting and switching it on now she saw that there were now fifteen unanswered calls, and numerous text messages about a new delivery of fabric from India. Simply scrolling through them made her head ache. She realized that she had not heard from Amy, and there was no message or text from her. However, there were two from her school requesting Lena make contact regarding Amy’s attendance. She rang Amy but it went straight to voicemail, and checking the time was after three, she decided she’d wait until classes ended at four before calling the school matron. She was not unduly concerned – often, if Amy had been on a sleepover, she returned to school later than usual.

Lena replied to a few text messages that needed to be attended to directly, but then didn’t have the energy to return a couple of social calls. Instead she sat scrolling through her contacts, wondering if there was anyone who could have been passing over information to Marcus. She also wondered if one of her women friends might have been having a closer friendship with her husband than she knew about. No names jumped out, and in many instances she had not even been in recent contact with them. It started to really niggle her, as Henshaw had said whoever had passed on her business details would have to have had access to her accounts and it was more than possible it was someone very close to her. She tapped her fingers on the polished glass surface of the kitchen table. Who knew her password? Someone had to have gained entry into her computer, but she doubted anyone would know it; the only possibility was Amy, although she always hated anyone – even her daughter – using her computer.

Agnes arrived with the dry-cleaning and groceries, and began to unload the shopping, crossing backwards and forwards to the cupboards.

‘Everything go all right earlier today?’ she asked.

‘No, and I don’t want to talk about it.’ Lena picked up her half-filled glass of wine. ‘I’ll be in my office. See you in the morning.’ She paused in the doorway and cocked her head to one side. ’Agnes, have you ever used my computer?’

‘Good heavens, no. Is there a problem with it?’

‘No, I’m just concerned that somebody has been going through some personal files.’

‘You mean you’ve had some kind of virus?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t leave anything out for dinner – I’m not hungry.’

Agnes continued putting away the remaining groceries, then wiped around the sink, and gave a squirt of glass polish to the kitchen table that didn’t really need it. Deciding she’d take the dry-cleaning upstairs the following morning as Lena was clearly not in the best of moods, she turned off the lights, and since it was by now almost five she let herself out and went home.

Lena was in her Spartan immaculate high-tech office. Shelves and filing cabinets were the only furnishings apart from her desk, computer, printer and telephone. It was clear of any knick-knacks. Her filing system was brought up to date every Monday; mail to be checked over was in a drawer in her desk as she hated it piling up on the desktop. She paid bills promptly or by direct debit, and records of these and wages for domestic staff were in separate compartments. She had a small cash box with usually two or three hundred pounds for any emergency, and always kept receipts, which she collected regularly to be switched to her tax drawer. All her bank statements were clipped together in yet another drawer. Everything was neat and orderly with nothing out of place, and it really frustrated her to think that someone had to have had access to be able to give such details to Marcus and his solicitor. Question was, exactly who, and she sat wondering if it was Agnes, but somehow she didn’t think it could be, and then depressingly she began to return to the idea that it had to be Amy. Amy would be the only person that could possibly guess her password, and it made her feel so betrayed that she at first wanted to cry, but then became really angry.