It was a picture of a list of five handwritten numbers, all in the same format but with different letters. I glanced up at her.
“The top one is the Cayman account,” she said.
I held her gaze. “Did you find anything else with these numbers on it?” It looked very much like Mark was hiding more than one bank account from his wife.
She shook her head. “I didn’t have much time to look, but nothing so far.” She covered her eyes with her hands, swallowed and then took back her phone, clearly determined to try to keep herself from being upset. “I just can’t believe that I just signed those bloody papers,” she said.
Her signature on the papers transferring their house into an offshore trust was what the police had contacted her about. At least she wasn’t a trustee. It wasn’t exactly a smoking gun but a gun nevertheless. I knew she was a wife who trusted her husband and didn’t think to question him when she was given documents to sign, but the police didn’t know her like I did. “Can you remember what he said when he asked you to sign them?”
“Just that he was setting up a trust for the house because it was tax efficient.”
Why wouldn’t she trust him? He was her husband and a successful wealth manager.
“Do you think it was just that one time that he gave you something to sign?”
“I’m not sure. I trust my husband.” She paused. “I trusted my husband. Completely. Since we started dating, he’s never given me any reason to doubt him. Not until now.”
I let the silence rush in. She knew her husband better than that. She’d seen what had happened at university. At the time I thought he’d made a one-off bad decision that could have cost him his entire future. Now I realized that, far from being out of character, what had happened when Mark and I were roommates at Oxford was exactly the opposite. He was a liar and a cheat.
“You think he was planning to leave me? I checked and his passport is still in our safe.”
How was I supposed to answer a question like that? I didn’t like to say that a man with over a hundred million dollars stashed in the Cayman Islands—and very probably more than that—didn’t need his own passport. Enough money would guarantee safe passage to wherever he wanted to go. Audrey knew that. She wasn’t stupid.
I’d known Mark and Audrey a long time. Mark had grown incredibly successful over the years. He’d become one of those wealth managers people brag about at dinner parties, because to have Mark manage your money meant you had achieved a certain level of wealth. And everyone knew that Midas Mark, as he was known, made his clients a lot of money.
A couple of times on boozy nights out, I’d been tempted to ask him why he’d never asked me to invest with him, but something had stopped me. As if subconsciously, I didn’t want to know the answer. I glanced down the sheet of names. I was pretty sure these people were never going to see their money again.
“I think Mark loves you,” I told her, thinking about how money did weird things to people. I’d lost and gained friends over the years over money—whether it was from jealousy or people wanting something from me. The only thing that had remained consistent was my family. Because money wasn’t the currency they dealt in. To a family full of doctors, it was intellect, world impact, and number of saved lives that counted. My money, far from making my family proud, made me the black sheep.
“But he doesn’t love me enough to tell me about the Cayman account, does he?”
There was no answer to that.
“Did you find out when the account was opened?” I asked. I wondered if he’d gotten himself into trouble recently. Despite the sinking feeling in my gut, I was still trying to find a simple solution that proved Mark wasn’t doing anything too nefarious.
She pulled out a small, black notepad and flicked through some pages. “I made notes. I just wish I could have printed more off.”
“You can’t download it onto a USB?”
She shook her head. “There’s some kind of lock on it. Stops any kind of copying.”
“But not printing? That doesn’t make sense.”
“No, these are printouts from the photos I took.” She paused. “Here it is. Just over seven years ago. That was just after he started out by himself. Shit. You think it was all a lie? Do you think he ever invested a penny?”
“I don’t know, Audrey. Maybe we’ve got it all wrong and he’s not a thief and he’s just a shitty husband who’s trying to hide money from you.” Neither one of us really believed that. Given the list of his investors, there was no way he would have been able to make over a hundred million in honest commissions and live the opulent lifestyle he and Audrey were used to. If he wasn’t stealing everything people invested, he was skimming off a large chunk.