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?’
‘No,’ breathed Callie. She’d never been good with money and since she’d been with Jason, he’d paid the bills. She’d stopped modelling when she met him and had never gone back. She’d thought she was safe. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘Brenda said you were good for cutting the legalese.’
‘Yes,’ said Fiona, ‘that’s me. I deal with people who are on the edge, Mrs Reynolds, so there’s no point in sugarcoating it. I’m not doing my job properly if I do. The bottom line is that you could sue your husband in a Civil Court, but if he doesn’t have anything to give you because it’s all been taken in the criminal case, you don’t really have a leg to stand on. There’s no point suing someone for money when it’s all gone.’
‘Good luck with getting any money out of a court,’ Brenda said grimly as they walked down the back steps of Fiona McPharland’s building. ‘I’ve heard of people trying to unfreeze assets before and if the assets are the proceeds of any sort of crime, you have no hope. You have no assets and you’re perceived as a wealthy woman, a member of the glitterati, who watched her husband rob people blind. That’s how it will look. The media will turn it into a witch hunt.Youwill be everything that is wrong with the world, you with your beauty and your nice clothes. Your only hope is to get away. Hide.’
Brenda stepped over a used condom.
‘Romantic spot,’ she said drily.
She began walking quickly away from the courts’ complex where so many of the criminal lawyers had their offices.
‘At least they won’t find anything with my name on it,’ Callie said, desperate to find something cheerful to cling to. ‘We can manage for a bit,’ she added, thinking of the jewellery, although they’d have to sell some of that to pay Fiona’s fee.The diamond earrings and the tennis bracelet, she thought.
She couldn’t subject her daughter to the hideous publicity Brenda had described if she tried to get the money from out of Jason’s estate. Poppy was a kid, nothing more. This would break her.
‘I should have watched Jason more, Cal, for your and Poppy’s sake,’ said Brenda as she drove home.
For the first time since it had all happened, Brenda looked like she might cry.
‘I can’t imagine a life without him, you know,’ said Callie, staring out the window.
‘Even now?’ Brenda reached around for a tissue.
‘When I’m with Jason, I feel so loved, so secure ...’ began Callie and then she wondered if it was the Xanax speaking.
Negotiating a tricky junction, Brenda didn’t look at her.
‘I’m going to say it now, love,’ she began. ‘Jason is not a fucking mirror. You don’t have to look at him to see your reflection. You have to be your own mirror and like what you see without anyone else’s help.’
‘We’ve been married so long, it’s not easy. How do I do that?’ said Callie
‘I don’t know. But he’s in it all for himself. Not for you, not even for Poppy, poor kid. She’ll learn that the hard way.’
‘He adores Poppy,’ protested Callie.
Brenda looked at Callie: a pitying look, the way people looked at commercials of abandoned dogs in dog homes. Callie flinched from it.
