The Victim Read online

Nick slid his mobile into his pocket. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The bank misspelt my name on my new card and I didn’t check it,’ said Georgie tightly.

  ‘But surely the bank is still responsible for covering the fraud?’ persisted Ellie, her smooth forehead now crinkly with indignation.

  Her father was studying her intently. ‘You would think so, wouldn’t you? You’d also think that the thief would have had the decency to hand the money back.’

  There was the scrape of a chair against the floor, leaving a mark on the reconstituted floorboards which Georgie had stained herself with linseed and antique wax. ‘You still think it’s me, don’t you?’ snapped Ellie, leaping up.

  Then she looked at Georgie and her lovely brown eyes watered. ‘I only came back to see you guys but if you’re going to talk to me like this, I’m going.’

  Georgie jumped to her feet. ‘Ellie …’

  Too late. Her stepdaughter had flounced out of the room.

  ‘Leave her,’ demanded Sam.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Nick quickly.

  Georgie stood hovering, unable to sit down at the same table as her husband yet at the same time, telling herself that her son might be able to sort this out better than her.

  ‘Why did you say that?’ she snapped.

  ‘Because it’s true. I’ve been looking into it after what you said. And it’s true. If it was a random thief, he or she would have used the card a couple of times. It’s how they work. But because Ellie was scared she’d be caught again, she didn’t do it.’

  ‘But she wasn’t in the place where the card was used.’

  Sam groaned. ‘Do I need to go over it again? She’d have given the number to a friend to copy. A dealer. I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know she’s doing drugs again.’

  Sam reached out for her hand. ‘Georgie. I know this is hard to take. But have you taken a good look at her recently? She’s gone very thin. She gets voraciously hungry. And her pupils are big at times …’

  He stopped as Nick came back into the kitchen. ‘She needs some time alone,’ he said, sliding back into his place.

  ‘So she’s in her room?’

  Georgie felt a sense of relief. She’d go up later and sort it out when everyone had calmed down.

  ‘No. She’s gone back to the flat. Said she’d call later.’

  Instantly, she was transported back into the old Georgie who used to flounce out too. Lyndsey’s house had been a haven until the gap year.

  No. Don’t think of that. Georgie didn’t exist. She couldn’t be allowed to.

  Another week passed. To her relief, there was no phone call from Lyndsey or her husband. Nor, however, were there any phone calls from new clients or existing ones. Georgie began to get a growing feeling of unease. Was this because it was summer and ‘everyone’ was going on holiday? Or could it be that word had spread about Jo’s hacked account and that awful video on YouTube?

  ‘If that is the case,’ declared Sam reassuringly, putting his arm around her as they watched a film together on the sofa one evening, ‘it will pass. Have you heard from Ellie, by the way?’

  That was another thing. Every time she tried to ring Ellie’s mobile, it went through to voicemail. If only there was a landline in the London flat her daughter shared with another student, but not many students seemed to have them nowadays.

  Usually when there was a family crisis, Georgie was able to blank it out with work. But without any, she was getting bored – and finding it difficult to sleep. Even when she did, her dreams were punctuated with dreams of Thailand and beaches and vans and ‘the gang’ …

  ‘I take it from your silence that you haven’t,’ said Sam quietly. ‘Frankly, I think it’s a sign of a guilty conscience. No. don’t get up. I’m sorry. What’s happened about Jo?’

  Georgie closed her eyes for a minute, allowing the wine to take her away from all this. ‘I paid her off.’

  Next to her on the sofa, she felt Sam stiffen. ‘You what?’

  ‘Her bank has been as slow as mine in chasing it up and she needed the money.’

  ‘All £10,000 of it?

  Georgie began to feel nervous. ‘It seemed the right thing to do.’

  ‘You could have asked me first.’

  ‘It came out of my business account.’

  ‘But you’ve got tax to pay shortly.’

  ‘I’ll sort it. The bank should have sorted it by then, and at least Jo’s speaking to me now.’

  Sam snorted. ‘I hope the price of friendship’s worth it.’

  ‘Did you really just say that?’ For a moment, Georgie looked at her husband as though for the first time. Did she know him as little as he did her?

  Sam had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘What I meant to say is that if you pay off the bank’s obligations, it lets them get away with it.’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I’m simply bridging the gap until my friend gets what she’s entitled to.’ Georgie stood up. ‘And if you don’t get that, there’s no point.’

  A look of uncertainty crossed Sam’s face. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  For a second, Georgie was taken back to those early days. To the time when, every time she walked down a street, she feared a touch on her shoulder.

  It was so tempting to tell her husband everything. To release the burden that had been weighing on her shoulders for all these years. But if she did, she might throw everything away …

  ‘I don’t know.’ She sank down on the sofa again, her head in her hands. ‘This is all so weird. I don’t know how to cope.’

  ‘It will be all right.’ Her husband’s arms were around her. ‘We’ll sort this out. I promise. Besides, you’ve still got one big client, haven’t you?’

  ‘The Hon. Mrs David R-R?’

  She tried to smile through her tears but instead it came out like a shiver. ‘Yes. I’ve still got her. But she’s not easy.’

  ‘Isn’t that half the challenge?’

  He was right. Only the old Georgie would have been afraid. The reminder gave her strength.

  For the next few days, Georgie threw herself into the new plans for Mrs R-R’s lovely home. Hyacinth blue would be perfect, she’d decided, for the morning room, with a touch of pink in the swag curtains to complement the striped chaise. As for the main sitting room, which needed to be ‘casual chic’, she decided on a colonial look with smart stripes. Hopefully her client would approve.

  Duly armed with her bag of plans and swatches – having run Beano along the beach so he would last until lunchtime – Georgie made for the front door. Just as she did so, a flurry of post fell through the letter box, accompanied by a furious barking from the kitchen. Beano always saw the postman as an intruder, even though he’d known him for years.

  Georgie gave the post a cursory glance. Mainly circulars plus an update from the charity which Georgie supported for families in Africa. Just as she was about to open it, the phone rang.

  ‘Mrs Hamilton?’

  To her surprise, it was from a bank which she rarely used. She’d opened a private savings account there years ago for emergencies only. No one knew about it …

  But now this voice – after taking her through security checks – was telling her that £4450 had been withdrawn and the bank wanted to check this as it was so rare for her to take anything from her account. How could this have happened?

  Dropping her bag, Georgie flew up to her office, searching frantically behind the books on the lower shelf for the small wooden box where she kept the card.

  There it was. Gratefully, her fingers closed round it, shaking as they opened the lid.

  Empty.

  Someone had taken it.

  THIRTEEN

  I had some bad news today. One of my mates – from a different team – got nicked. Even worse, he got a heavier sentence because they accused him of stealing three cards instead of two.

  That’s the thing about fraud. When someone gets their card nicked, they tell others. Their
mates. People they work with. Family.

  There’s usually someone who reckons they can jump on the bandwagon. Steal another card. Hope that the first person will be blamed.

  That’s what happened to my mate. He couldn’t prove he didn’t do it.

  Fraud is so complicated nowadays that it’s just as hard to show you didn’t do something as it is to show you did do it.

  Makes me shiver a bit, just to think about it.

  What makes it more complicated is that there are lots of us in it. We’re not one person. We’re many. We might work for the same master. Or we could be independent. Rarely do we know each other. But our aim is the same.

  To steal from you. To muddle your head. To make you wonder if you really put your purse where you thought you had.

  You can’t see us. You can’t smell us. You don’t know if I’m old or young. Whether I smell of sweat or aftershave or perfume.

  That’s the whole point. We’re the modern silent assassin. But instead of your life, we’re after your identity. And the money that comes with it.

  There’s something else too. Peace of mind.

  I’ve got to be honest here. You’re not the only one to lose that. Sometimes at night, I lie awake, thinking of all the people I’ve cheated. I wait for the knock at the door to say I’ve been caught. Every time I go down the street, I expect to find a hand on my shoulder. The other day, a police car pulled me over. I shat bricks until I realised I’d only been speeding.

  ‘Stop tossing and turning,’ the wife will say when I’m having one of my bad dreams.

  But I can’t help it. If I had my chance again, I wouldn’t do it. Yet I’m in too deep now. And I don’t know how to stop.

  FOURTEEN

  ‘When did you last put your card details online?’ asked the computer man tersely.

  It had taken ages to get through to him. No one seemed to answer their phones anymore, thought Georgie. You had to text and ask if they could ring. She hated texting. It was so easy to put your finger on the wrong letter and as for predictive text, it was downright rude or comical at times.

  Not that there was anything funny about this. Yet for some reason that Georgie couldn’t fathom, she wanted to laugh. What else was going to go wrong in her life?

  ‘I haven’t,’ she now said in reply to the computer man’s question. ‘That’s the whole point. I’ve never used this card. It’s … it’s a sort of emergency account.’

  ‘I know that. You’ve already told me.’ He spoke in a rush as if his time was worth more than the £25 an hour which he charged. Maybe it was if there were other people in this sort of mess. What kind of technical nightmare had the world let itself into? ‘My question is, when did you last use a card online? Any card?’

  She thought back over the last year. One of her strengths as an interior designer was that she liked to source local fabric manufacturers. Usually she went in person to view and buy. Yes, she used her card to pay but not online.

  ‘You’re sure? What about Amazon or supermarket shopping.’

  She always did the latter in person – so much nicer to choose your own food rather than risk someone else’s judgment. As for Amazon, she usually left that up to Sam or Nick – they were the experts. Wait. Ellie’s birthday. She’d wanted a particular skirt from a fashion site she hadn’t come across before and which was surprisingly addictive.

  ‘That might be it.’ The computer man sounded as though he’d discovered a clue in a treasure hunt. Optimistic but still slightly puzzled. ‘Do you use the same password on all your credit cards?’

  ‘Yes.’ Even as she spoke, Georgie was aware this was the wrong answer. This was confirmed by what sounded like a clucking of the tongue. ‘The first thing you’ve got to do is change all your passwords. Use a combination of letters and numbers. Instead of a ”c”, use the number three. That sort of thing.’

  ‘But what about the money that’s gone from my emergency account?’

  There was a tired sigh from the other end as though the computer man had heard all this before. ‘I’m afraid it’s a matter of contacting the building society concerned. Ring first and then follow it up with a letter. Put everything in writing.’

  He gave a world-weary laugh. ‘Just be grateful that the money was taken out in cash and not used to pay a bill. I had a client whose account was hacked to pay for a holiday. When it made her overdrawn, it damaged her credit rating. Then she was turned down for a mortgage.’

  That was awful!

  ‘Clever too, that your thief withdrew less than £5000. That’s the limit in most building societies. Usually you have to have paper identity for a withdrawal that large. That’s why they’ll have done it online. Even so, they’d have needed your password.’

  Georgie began to feel a mounting panic. ‘So how did they do it?’

  ‘Not sure yet. We might never know. Meanwhile, like I said, you need to cancel it.’

  She had to do so fast. Before Sam got home. After all, she could hardly tell her husband that she’d had a secret emergency account ‘just in case’ she’d needed it. He’d be rightly suspicious, and hurt too. Her heart lurched. Sam was a good man. He was hard on his daughter but he didn’t deserve to be hurt like this. He didn’t deserve a woman like her either. Wasn’t that why she’d tried so hard over the years to be a good wife?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ added the computer man. ‘I know it’s not the news you wanted to hear. If it helps, you’re not the only one in this situation.

  ‘Thanks.’ Georgie bit back her tears until she’d put the receiver down. Then she sat with her head in her hands and wept. What was going on? Questions whirled round her head as the clock in the hall struck. Was that really the time?

  Georgie began to sweat again. Just before the phone call, she’d rung the Hon. Mrs R-R and explained that she was going to be late because of an ‘unexpected event’. Her excuse had been met with a distinct coolness on the other end.

  There was late and there was late. Right now, she was on the furthest end of the spectrum. The least she could do was try to hang onto the one client she had left.

  ‘Madam is engaged at the moment,’ said the maid who answered the door. ‘She would like you to wait in the morning room.’

  Fair enough, thought Georgie, taking a seat by the French windows which looked out over the immaculate lawns. She was being punished. Well, she’d just use the time to lay out the sketches and arrange the fabric swatches. It would be a good exercise to exorcise the thoughts that were going round and round her mind.

  Nearly five thousand pounds … not to mention the other missing money. How could that have just vanished? And where was the card? Who could have taken it? Did she even have to ask that question? It had to be someone who lived in the house. For the first time since this nightmare had started, Georgie now began to wonder if her husband was right about Ellie. It couldn’t be Nick. He wasn’t materialistic. Sam was out of the question too. Or was she being stupidly naïve? Was the answer staring her straight in the face?

  Georgie took a seat on the chair by the fireplace and leaned back, her eyes closed. The action worsened the throbbing in her head so she opened them again. This time, her eyes were drawn to the green and black print above the mantelpiece. It was another of those Thai paintings she’d noticed earlier. This one depicted a beach and a couple of straw huts. It wasn’t a complicated painting yet the few artful strokes succeeded in drawing such a compelling eye-catching picture that Georgie felt she was back there.

  Back with the crowd.

  It had been so good to be accepted that at first, Georgie hadn’t realised what was going on. She was too caught up with the excitement of this new world and the novelty of being in the company of the equivalent of the ‘cool crowd’ at school: a sector which she and Lyndsey had been excluded from because they were ‘boring’.

  Georgina was particularly friendly, insisting that she ‘shared’ her clothes: wonderful, exotic garments that fluttered in the evening breeze and made her feel li
ke a mermaid. ‘You can borrow my make-up too,’ said her new friend, sitting her down in the shade under a tree. ‘Look, if you put a little eyeliner here, it brings out that lovely almond shape.’

  She worked deftly, her tongue showing slightly through those pearly teeth. Over the next few weeks, Georgie noticed that she did that when concentrating. Without meaning to, she began to adopt the same mannerism herself. She even found herself saying words like ‘yah’ and ‘sure’.

  They began to go on walks together. One day, they collected shells. Georgina was better than she was. ‘Have this,’ she said, pressing a dear little pink and white one into her hand.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Georgina nodded. ‘It’s for you. A sign of our friendship.’ Her hand closed over hers. ‘Don’t lose it, mind. Or it will be bad luck.’

  Then she laughed, throwing her head back, and Georgie wasn’t sure if she was teasing. Or not.

  She was so kind! But the worst thing was that she couldn’t help heating up inside every time Joly came near. ‘He’s Georgina’s boyfriend,’ she kept telling herself. Anyway, what was the point? A man like him – tall, blond, posh-spoken, charming – wouldn’t look twice at her.

  Yet he did. ‘You two could be twins, you know,’ he murmured one night after they’d roasted fish over the fire and laid down on the sand while the sound of a steel band floated down the beach.

  Georgie would have expected Georgina to have been offended. Although they looked surprisingly alike with their hair and turned up noses, their backgrounds were like chalk and cheese. Georgina had already casually mentioned a house in ‘the country’ where she had grown up and a ‘trust fund’.

  ‘I’ve always wanted a sister,’ she drawled, sucking at a cigarette that was being handed around. ‘It would be so nice to have someone to share secrets with.’

  A blue circle of smoke floated across the evening air.

  Then she gave a little girlish giggle which might have had something to do with the empty bottles around them. ‘Do you have any secrets, Georgie?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Those beautiful eyes were searching her. Georgie felt uncomfortable.