I took it off on the plane. Left it there when I got off. We’d agreed it was over, remember?’
Jordan hesitated. ‘Didn’t you want it to be?’
Alyce shrugged, awkwardly. ‘It was best that it was. Except that it wasn’t over, was it?’
‘Isn’t,’ insisted Jordan, correcting her tense.
Alyce shook her head, positively. ‘Let’s not walk this route any further. You’re still a defendant, possibly going to lose a lot of money.’
‘After showing up their medical reports as we did, Dan doesn’t think it’s going to be anything like as bad as it might have been.’ He was shortening the man’s name, he realized.
‘I don’t see the connection, but that isn’t what I want to talk to you about. I… I mean the family will pay back whatever’s awarded against you. As well as your costs. What’s happened to you is my fault
… nothing to do with you…’
The offer silenced Jordan for several moments, his reactions colliding between anger and gratitude and settling somewhere in between. ‘I don’t want that. Thank you, but no.’
‘It could be a lot of money.’
‘I know. I can afford it.’ How much he wished he could tell her that it would be her husband who paid and in a lot more ways than just money.
‘You’re offended,’ she accused.
‘I told you no. And mean it.’
They were both glad of the arrival of their food. The wine was better than Jordan had expected but Alyce limited herself to half a glass. Seizing the abstinence as a weak excuse to break the embarrassment that had come between them Jordan said, ‘Aren’t you supposed to drink with whatever medication the doctor’s given you?’
Alyce didn’t reply at once. ‘It was just a tranquillizer yesterday. And it’s not regular medication.’
‘You’re going to be under a lot of stress, a lot of pressure, next week.’
‘I know.’
‘Have you talked to the doctor about it?’
‘He says there are things but I don’t want to slow myself down, certainly not when I’m giving evidence. I don’t want to give the bastard the slightest advantage.’
‘Surely…’ started Jordan, his mind on the previous day’s after-court discussion. ‘I’ve forgotten his name…?’
‘Walter,’ she provided. ‘Walter Harding.’
‘Is there a guarantee that Walter will be able to be in court every day?’ persisted Jordan, not trusting Reid to be as thorough as he should be.
‘Bob says he’s going to try to get me excused some of the time.’
Jordan decided against referring to the conversation with the two lawyers. Instead he said, ‘What if Pullinger refuses?’
‘Maybe then I’ll have to take something.’
‘Dan seems to want me there most of the time.’
Alyce gave a half smile. That’ll be something, having you there.’
‘When are you going back down to Raleigh?’
‘Sunday, I guess. It’s not something I particularly want to think about.’
‘We could spend some time together here at the weekend.’
‘Maybe,’ Alyce said, doubtfully.
‘Why don’t I call? We could drive up into the Catskills.’
‘I don’t want to pick up where we left off in France, Harvey. Not
…’ She stopped. ‘I just don’t, OK?’
‘I’ll call,’ insisted Jordan.
Jordan went several times through virtually every word of their conversation, eagerly analyzing every inference and meaning, sure of his final conclusion. The most important of which was that Alyce hadn’t wanted their affair to end in France, which he’d been too stupid then not to realize. But now he did realize it. And decided it wasn’t too late for him to recover. She’d clearly reconciled herself to it being over, her only consideration now the impending turmoil of the coming weeks. But that’s all it would be, just weeks: days and weeks when he’d be with her, doing everything he could to help and support and protect her. And when it was all over… What about when it was all over? he demanded, halting the fantasy. All it could ever be, a fantasy. How could it be anything else, doing what he did, existing every day of his life as he did? Darling, there’s something I’ve got to tell you. I’m not a professional gambler, any more than I was an investment financier. I’m a crook. I steal people’s identities, rob them – never stripping them clean; just as much as I think they can afford to lose, apart from your ex-husband, who, by the way, is paying for everything it’s going to cost me – I’ve already got close to $140,000 of his money – but we can have a wonderful life together if you can overlook where the money comes from. Impossible, Jordan told himself. He lied to everyone else but never to himself, which was what he was doing – trying to do – now. It was time he woke up from the daydream: remembered who he was and what he did and accept France for what it had been, a nostalgically recalled but passing, thank-you-and-goodbye affair. Except that he didn’t want it to pass, not now. For the first time since Rebecca – unthinkingly, unintentionally – he had developed a feeling, an emotion, he’d never imagined himself capable of again. Still impossible. But not totally dismissable, not quite yet. There were still the next few weeks, a period during which he had no alternative but to stay where he was, with Alyce as much and as closely as possible. Looking after her.
The outstanding loan invitation was waiting for him at West 72nd Street, along with acceptances, with the money already deposited in his account, for each of his four earlier applications. There was still time for Jordan to complete it and personally deliver it before moving along Wall Street to draw upon those already agreed, swopping the amounts between the various safe-deposit boxes to keep the value in each below the legal reporting levels.
Back at the hotel he picked his way meticulously through the trading accounts and internal email stations of Appleton and Drake, the first task always to pick up the slightest indication of suspicion or discovery, before making further transfers to the banks he had so recently visited. Again he travelled further than the already plundered currency trades, moving that late afternoon through the company’s metal division, drawing predominantly from already agreed copper and aluminium futures.
Jordan was at his laptop, showered and with room-serviced coffee beside him, before eight the following day, trawling through his illegal computer emplacements roughly in his order of establishing them. He saw that Beckwith had written himself an aide memoir to bring to the attention of the jury, before whom the full divorce would now be heard, what he labelled ‘a determinedly attempted deception over the initially incomplete chlamydia findings’. On the systems of both Boston venerealogists, in email exchanges and in an already partially written defence to the Massachusetts medical licensing authority, Jordan found written confirmation that the inadequate reports had been prepared under pressure from Appleton as well as David Bartle. There was also a series of email’s between Appleton and Bartle in which the lawyer complained of having to defend Mark Chapman free of charge before any disciplinary body and of the difficulty he might have getting Chapman back into court for the full divorce hearing. One note contained the phrase: ‘your stupid interference that could get the whole lot of us in serious shit, which puts a lot of strain upon our friendship’. Jordan discovered, and saw them as a potential gold mine, some incomplete but hostile emails between Bartle and Wolfson from which the most obvious conjecture was of a falling out between Appleton and Leanne Jefferies. In one message Wolfson wrote of the chlamydia dispute: ‘seriously endangering the agreement our two clients have reached and led me to question my own professional position, as perhaps you should question yours’. That had caused Bartle to write back that: ‘I think any further consideration of this particular aspect should be very strictly restricted to one-to-one, unrecorded discussions between the two of us.’
It was mid-morning before Jordan returned to the communications between his own lawyer and Reid, which were intriguing but again frustratingly incomplete. Reid wrote of his enquiry agents’ investigation being ‘much better late than never’ and of it being couriered to Beckwith, who’d replied, obviously after reading whatever had been uncovered, that Reid might encounter difficulty introducing it into the forthcoming hearing on grounds of ‘applicable admissibility unless you can manage it during cross-examination’. Encouraged by the notes between the two lawyers Jordan broke off from accessing his already established sites to get into his newly established Trojan Horses in the computer system of Reid’s investigators. He was frustrated once more by what had passed between the two of them. There were apologies for delays and appreciation of Reid’s patience but it was obvious that the findings had been provided on hard, paper copy, not transmitted over an Internet link. Knowing that the master copy had to be somewhere on a hard disk, Jordan spent almost two hours – as he had earlier trying to locate the other obviously couriered documents saved on other hard disks – but failed to find it without the necessary in-house, dedicated file name.