‘Racing is boring in real life,’ said Oliver quickly, as if now he’d started he couldn’t stop the words tumbling out. ‘All that standing around, and you only get to bet a few times. I mean, how many races are there at your average meet, but online games – that’s where it’s at. It’s so fast that there’s speed, the rush that comes from that ...’ He stopped, sitting up, his face flushed and guilty. ‘I’ve tried to give up, I really have. Eamonn plays this stupid bubble game on his phone – you have to burst bubbles. He’s always on his phone. Everyone is. Nobody notices ... and you can lose so much. The money’s hideous. You get sucked in ...’
‘Into popping bubbles?’
‘No. In poker, in online gambling. If only I’d stuck to bloody bubbles, but no, I play the casino games and poker. Or poker played me. I think that’s what happens.’
He wasn’t talking to her anymore. He was talking to himself, on some mantra he’d practised many times before. ‘You start playing and then you’re hooked, and it’s playing you. The sites have you hooked, the debts have you stuck. I mean, someone killed himself last week over his debts. He lost everything.’
Oliver got up and began to pace.
‘People talk about drugs and booze, but you can lose everything with gambling, you can lose your whole livelihood, you can die ...’
Toni let her oddly confused mind roam over these facts until she came to the important point.
He’d mentioned debt.
‘Money,’ she said finally. ‘If you gamble compulsively, then you lose money, right?’
Toni knew very little about gambling. She’d seen a documentary about casinos once. There was one simple rule to gambling: the house always won. The people playing kept coming back for more, desperate to win again, then desperate to win back some of their lost money. But the casino or the bookies or the poker professional won the money.
Money.
They had joint bank accounts. They both had access to their investments. Toni was a wonderful businesswoman, but she let those things slide. She paid her taxes, got an accountant to do it, but the money was all carefully put away and she only looked at it once or twice a year. She liked knowing it was there. The bills pinged out on direct debits and she had enough, always, for her needs.
Financial security was vital. Women needed it. She needed it. Had worked for it.
Oliver’s lower lip quivered in a way it had never quivered in his onstage or onscreen career.
‘I’m so sorry, Toni,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry—’
‘What is the part you’re sorry about?’ she demanded, even though she knew. The question was, how much?
‘I’ve lost money.’
‘How much?’ she rasped.
Then he began to cry. Not the tears that had won him a Golden Globe nomination in the affair with the French actress. No, these were broken real tears and Toni began to feel very afraid.
‘I don’t know. Hundreds of thousands, Toni. Investments all over the place. I didn’t want to look but lately, things got very bad. I was in trouble and I borrowed from someone and then I lost that too. Not just my money but yours too ...’
They’d been driving slowly for about fifteen minutes along busy roads. Toni turned left and stopped the car on a tiny road that led to a beach named Lacken, according to an old sign on the verge of the road. She got out of the car now and stood with the wind rippling around her, blowing her blade-like hair and whisking her coat against her slender legs in their black jeans. Her cashmere scarf blew in the wind. Close by, the beach was not precisely a beach but was more an inlet of sedimentary rock creating vast horizontal slabs of grey stone around which the sea crashed mercilessly.
Lou got out and stood beside her, put an arm around her sister.
‘How much has he lost?’ she asked.
Toni shrugged helplessly.
‘I don’t actually know. I went onto my online bank and that has been quite comprehensively cleaned out.’
Toni sounded matter-of-fact but she was horrified. There had been almost no money in the account. Just enough to cover the electricity bill, perhaps, and the dustbin removal. Not much else. It had been shocking to see her account so denuded.
‘Most of the money’s gone. I withdrew all the cash I could yesterday. A lot of my money goes into a long-term savings account. There’s some in the current account we share, but I have investment accounts and a pension. I can’t access those online. I made some phone calls on Friday morning to find out what’s gone on in those accounts, but nobody phoned me back before the weekend.’
One of them was looking for her, though, via email and it felt ominous.
‘I couldn’t say “I think Oliver’s lost all my money – so this is urgent and could you check?”’ Toni went on. ‘I know your banking details and investments are supposed to be secret but nothing’s secret, not really. Someone might hear and then where would my career be? Either I’m a moron for having a husband who’s gone through all our money, or else he’s up to his armpits in money-lender debt. Either way, that’s not a good look for a person who regularly grills politicians and business people on my TV show. I’ll be cancelled times two – once for saying what I think on tape and another time for being so stupid as to have my husband gamble away our life savings.’
‘He borrowed from money lenders?’ interrupted Lou.
