When Claire woke in the early morning in her new flat, it felt claustrophobic. She looked around the bedroom – it was not a place to linger. She dressed, and, in the kitchen, she made a breakfast of muesli and yoghurt. As she carried it into the small lounge, she wondered what she had done in renting this space. It was even tinier than when she had seen it on the first day.
But she had to deal with moving away from Rick, and the question of earning money would not go away. Claire stood in the small kitchen and methodically made a list of the basic things she needed to fit out her new place. And for the next hour, she sat uncomfortably on a wooden chair revising her CV. The last three years looked bare. And whichever way she worded it, even after adding some exciting times with Rick’s property deals in Valencia, Madrid and London, it remained a skeleton. She closed her laptop, uncertain any employment agencies would want to read it.
Late afternoon, Claire drove into the underground garage of Rick’s apartment and, even before she reached the seventeenth floor in the elevator, she sensed its coolness. Inside, Claire inspected that the cleaners had dusted the ledges and tables, and she was happy that she was going to leave the large rooms tidy.
From his letter box on the landing, Claire bundled up the post; she checked through it as Rick had asked her to and placed it tidily on a ledge by a wide window that overlooked the Thames. Claire then spent a short time packing the final few clothes still in the wardrobe and she removed personal items that were in the guest bathroom she had been using. There would not be space for everything in the small bedroom of her new flat, but from today, that was how it was going to be. She was moving on.
It would be very early morning where Rick was, but she held back. Claire was still angry from the last long-distance call. In her frustration, she shouted his name. But in the large space of his apartment, her call bounced off the vaulted ceiling. Sinister problems at Arrow Hall were growing; she was no longer sure of her own safety around the site; and Rick was ignoring her.
With a mug of strong coffee, and with her laptop, she sat at Rick’s large desk. Methodically, Claire spread papers across the wide area and started to scan through all the invoices from contractors and tradesmen right from the beginning of the rebuild. She turned the television on just to kill the total silence that pervaded the place. A dance show, with as much shouting as music and dancing, she kept on a low volume.
There were at least seven changes of banks from contractors giving new details for payment. As Claire studied them, she noticed that the changes were to three banks, and when she quickly checked, she found they were all within a short distance of each other in London’s Canary Wharf. That could be no coincidence; it was where James had his own apartment. So, what else had he lied to her about? It left her uncertain that she had paid any of the accounts to the right bank. Where that money had gone, she did not know. As she sipped her third cup of coffee, her suspicions were complete.
After a couple of hours finding more blatantly fake bits of paper with wrong spelling, wrong figures that just did not add up, Claire closed her laptop in frustration, her eyes aching. It now amounted to at least £100,000 lost through this scam, as easy as the tap being turned on and money flowing freely to waste down the drain. That was what had come from trusting James, and it left her riled by the underhand fraud running round the site, a colony of ants colluding together. It was right under her nose, devious, squalid, almost petty.
Alone in Rick’s large penthouse apartment, Claire changed for bed, her brain still buzzing. She turned off the light – she had purpose to sort this mess before it grew any bigger. It was that thought alone that would keep her determination alive to live in Arrow Hall again.
But tonight was the time to finally seal the end of living with Rick and all that would mean.
It was a long while before Claire went to sleep.