The Liberation of Alice Love - Abby McDonald [28]
Alice tugged her cardigan sleeves down over her hands. “I don’t know if you could call her that…”
“Really?” Cassie seemed dubious. “She preyed on your vulnerabilities, wheedled her way into your life, and then took everything. Sounds like a con artist to me.”
“But I couldn’t have known,” Alice said quietly, almost to herself. “Julian agrees. She had everyone fooled.”
Fooled was the right word. She couldn’t even begin to understand what had happened, but the one thing she did know too well was the slow flush of shame that descended whenever she was reminded of her naïveté. It was one thing to be defrauded by professional criminals—some nameless band of mastermind thieves—but her own friend?
“So have the police been able to make any progress?” Cassie asked. “Now that they know who it was.”
“No, nothing.” When she looked up, Cassie was staring at her expectantly. “She’s gone,” Alice explained dully. “I mean, really vanished. Her flat was packed up, and the references she gave her landlord are disconnected numbers now.” The speed and thoroughness with which Ella had erased herself was chilling. A whole life disappeared, within days.
Alice curled deeper in her chair. “I told them the names of some people we’d seen out,” she continued, her voice resigned, “‘work friends,’ Ella called them, but they all said the same thing: they’d met her at a party, or launch, and believed what she told them.”
“See?” Cassie gave a comforting smile. “You weren’t the only one.”
“I was the only one she ripped off, to the tune of about a hundred thousand pounds.” Alice exhaled. It still hurt to say it, to even think it, but she couldn’t escape from the truth: Ella—whoever she really was—had been lying all along. Everything she’d ever said, and all those anecdotes she’d dropped so casually into conversation—“My family was Italian, way back,” and “My first boyfriend had an awful little goatee,” and “I want to go and open a little bakery one day”—had all been untruths, spun out in the bigger fiction of their friendship.
And Alice had believed them all.
“She took my passport,” Alice added, forlorn. “My birth certificate, too. I checked my important papers file once I found out…Once I found it was her. I suppose that’s how she got all my bank details.”
“You labeled the box ‘important papers’?” Cassie raised one perfect eyebrow.
Alice flushed. “No, of course not.”
But it had been a special file, an elegant gray folder she’d bought especially to store all those vital pieces of information; not just passport and bank codes, but her National Insurance card, rental agreement. She hadn’t wanted to risk losing anything, but in the end, she’d offered up her entire identity, gift-wrapped with a smart cream ribbon.
“You know, I read last week about a woman who had her identity stolen.” Cassie’s forehead creased in a frown. “The thief didn’t just run up huge debts, she got a criminal record too—just gave the other person’s details every time she got caught. The poor victim couldn’t get a job and kept getting arrested. She lost her house and ended up on the streets. I think she’s still trying to clear her name!”
“Not that it will happen to you,” she added hurriedly, finally noticing Alice’s distress. “And see? There’s a silver lining. It could have been so much worse!”
***
That was little consolation. Despite her friends’ glass-is-half-full encouragement, Alice couldn’t see past the wreckage of what Ella had taken: her flat, her savings, her trust. Once she’d made the obligatory explanations to friends, family, and the police, Alice called into work sick and retreated to her tiny, makeshift bedroom at Cassie’s to despair. Slipping deeper into a melancholy haze, she couldn’t stop herself from poring over those few, awful questions.
Why had Ella done this to her? How could she have been so blind?
“Snap out