Private Player

“The police approached her about helping them but she didn’t know anything. She needed a bargaining tool. She had to find something to tell them.”

I’d asked Madison not to take notes while we were off the record, and she’d agreed, but I could see her brain whirring, trying to commit everything to memory. “What about you? You know what he did to you at Oxford. Didn’t you have your suspicions?”

It was a good question and one I’d thought about a lot. I still hadn’t come up with an answer. “I knew Mark well. I knew he was a risk taker. I knew he had a way of twisting the truth to make him look better and a way of rearranging the moral argument so nothing he ever did was wrong.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“If you just wait, I’m building up to it.”

She shot me a little grin that said, I know I’m being pushy and I think you like it. And she was right.

“When Audrey came to me with her suspicions, I immediately knew he’d done it. We just needed proof.”

“You’re saying you knew he had done it but hadn’t suspected him beforehand? How does that work?”

“I don’t think anyone goes around suspecting their friends of massive fraud. But when Audrey came to me, it made sense—he’d made them a lot of money very quickly, and wasn’t shy about enjoying it. I knew he didn’t come from money, so it seemed . . . strange to me that someone who’d had to work hard for the money would spend it so frivolously. Plus what had happened at Oxford showed he had a history of doing what it took to survive. Looking back, their life seemed too good to be true. At the same time, I was having success, building my business and floating it, so I knew it was possible he’d just been as lucky as I was.”

“You were one of the most successful businessmen in the country. Perhaps he felt he had to keep up with you.”

Mark was competitive. Jealous even. It hadn’t occurred to me that anything he had done had been about me, but maybe he didn’t like his friends doing better than him. That kind of thinking was certainly consistent with a pattern I could trace through our friendship. I’d never dated Audrey but she’d definitely been a woman who had caught my attention. She was beautiful. I’d always wondered if my interest had fueled Mark. In the same way, perhaps my success had created a jealousy in him that had encouraged his immoral tendencies. “I have no idea.”

“If this all comes out,” she said, a worried look ghosting her face, “you’re going to be . . .”

“Implicated?” I finished her sentence for her. “I know. But there’s nothing I can do about that. At least Mark and I never did any business together.”

“Are you invested with him?”

I shook my head.

“Interesting,” she said. “Did he ask you to invest?”

“No. Never. I didn’t like the idea of mixing our friendship and business. I assumed he felt the same way.”

She nodded. “And what about Audrey? You’re sure she didn’t know? Maybe when the police caught up with her, she decided to plead ignorance.”

I shook my head. “She’s not that person.”

Madison tried to give me a blank expression but she was way too easy to read. She thought I was fooling myself. “I’ve known her a long time.”

“You’ve known both of them a long time.”

“And I’ve accepted that Mark’s entirely capable of doing something criminal. Audrey isn’t. You’ll get it when you meet her.”

“You want me to meet her?”

“I want you to help her.” I would have thought it was obvious why I was telling her all this, but maybe not. “She’s concerned that everyone will think the same as you. That she’ll be guilty by association even though she had no idea who she was married to.”

“No idea? Even you admit he was morally ambiguous. With the benefit of hindsight, he was completely capable of fraud.”

“Love is blind.”

“Right,” she said. “Good to know.”

“I’m serious. She trusted her husband. That’s not such a radical concept, you know.”

She shrugged. “Okay, so she was completely blindsided,” she said as if she believed the exact opposite. It was good she was skeptical. No one wanted a sycophantic journalist—well, I wouldn’t have minded if Madison was a little less skeptical of me at the start. But when it came to Audrey, it was important that the writer who told her story had credibility.

“Will you at least talk to her?” I asked.

“What for?”

“To hear her out. She’s worried she’s going to be thrown to the wolves.”

“I thought you said she’s going to do a deal with the Serious Fraud Office. She’s going to give evidence for the prosecution. From what you’re saying, there’s no chance she’s going to prison.”