Never Apologise, Never Explain - James Craig [99]
‘We need to have a meeting in the morning. In the meantime, you should start thinking about the practicalities.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, remember the good news here – the very good news – which is that there is no suggestion that you were party to any of this.’
‘I wasn’t.’ Simpson picked up the wine glass and this time drank about half of its contents.
‘No,’ the lawyer said hastily, ‘of course not. But you know what it’s like in these situations.’
Simpson drained the remaining wine in the glass, and resisted the urge to smash it against the wall. ‘No, I don’t actually,’ she bristled, all her desire to be rational, to be reasonable, slipping away.
‘Well,’ Lucas summoned up extra reserves of empathy and patience, ‘as his wife, you will find that there will always be gossip and speculation. But you are not under investigation and there is not, as things stand, any . . . direct threat to your job. In the first instance, however, you need to consider various aspects of your relationship with your husband and in particular the distribution of your respective assets.’
After a day of feeling numb, Simpson suddenly recoiled as if she had been slapped in the face. ‘Are you saying that I should divorce him?’
‘Not at all,’ Lucas said calmly. ‘It is not my place to give any such advice. And, remember, technically, I am Joshua’s lawyer, not yours. You should, of course, get your own representation. However, for the moment at least, there is a great commonality of interest here.’
‘For the moment?’
Lucas gritted his teeth. He was getting increasingly irritated by Simpson’s verbal tic of echoing what he said. But, once again, he ploughed on. ‘Let us assume, for the moment, that the authorities will want to try and recover as much of Joshua’s assets as possible. You will need to prove to them that anything you keep is not something that was gained as a result of his schemes.’
‘Christ!’ Simpson muttered as she grabbed the wine bottle and refilled her glass.
‘Stop here!’ Lucas told the cab driver. Before clambering out, he returned to his call: ‘Remember, Carole, that you are a very successful professional in your own right. What’s more, you have dedicated your entire career to public service. It should not be difficult to demonstrate that you have built up a reasonable portfolio of legitimately acquired assets over several decades. Draw up a list this evening, and we can discuss it in my office in the morning.’
‘Fine,’ Simpson sighed.
‘Shall we say eleven?’
‘I will see you there.’
‘Good,’ the lawyer replied. ‘Until tomorrow then.’
With a click, the line went dead. Simpson tossed the phone back on the table. For the next few minutes she sat in silence, going over their conversation in her head. Then she pulled some paper and a pen from her bag, and began jotting down numbers.
Carlyle dropped his biography of the football manager Brian Clough on the coffee-table and glanced over at Helen, who was sitting on the other end of the sofa. A dispiriting sense of déjà vu overwhelmed him. His wife was still engrossed in her celebrities-in-the-jungle television show that seemed to have been running for months already. Carlyle was even more amazed to note that former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Luke Osgood was still hanging in there with a chance of winning. Osgood had made it down to the last three of the competition, along with a stripper (or, rather, ‘burlesque performer’) called Tizzy McDee and a nondescript-looking soap actor called Kevin. Carlyle tried to avert his eyes from the screen, particularly when Osgood appeared, but the sight of the pneumatic Tizzy, wearing a bikini that would have been too small even for young Alice, was predictably hypnotic.
Mercifully, a commercial break arrived. Helen pulled the remote out from under a cushion and muted the sound. ‘Osgood’s done well to get this far,’ she said, ‘but he’s not going to win.’
‘So it’s between the soap star and the stripper?’ Carlyle remarked, curious despite himself.
‘Yes,’ his wife replied, with all the seriousness appropriate to a discussion about a general election,